COOPER CITY, Fla. -- Thousands of Holocaust survivors call South Florida home, and on Tuesday, 600 gathered to swap stories and memories.

"I went through Auschwitz and I lost my entire family," holocaust survivor Jack Beigelman said.

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"It's a miracle that we survived," said another survivor.

Holocaust survivors came by the busload to the Eurocafe, a semi-regular luncheon for survivors. They wore tags identifying names and countries and sat at tables labeled for those countries overrun by the Nazis. On Tuesday, 600 survivors gathered in one room, brought together by a fellow survivor.

"This is just a happy occasion to get together, especially after all the troubles that we went through in ghettos and concentration camps," Beigelman said.

Luncheons such as Tuesday's are perhaps the only time the survivors can share their experiences with people who really understand what they went through.

Roman Sampolinski is typical of many survivors, bringing pictures from the war years and telling horrible tales of life and death in the concentration camps.

"They killed my family and my wife's family, so I am the only survivor from around 280 people," Sampolinski said.

"I was 16 years old and they tattooed me and they put it on my arm. And what they did, they burned it into my hand, but they burned it into my heart, too, so I'll never forget," another survivor said.

For a group with so much shared agony, there were almost no tears at the gathering. They are all too busy living -- a final rebuke to Adolf Hitler.

"We are all survivors. We have to carry on as long as we can," one woman said.