On Saturday night, at the Brooklyn intersection she crossed on her way home every evening after twilight, Rachel Neufeld went down under the right front wheel of a city bus and was crushed to death. She was 70 years old, and a woman unknown in a city where fame and riches are the ordinary measure of a life.

The details of the accident at Avenue J and Bay Parkway in Midwood were hazy and under investigation, the police and the Transit Authority said, though the driver was on probation for reasons that were unclear yesterday, so no one was able to say precisely how or why Mrs. Neufeld had been killed.

But after her funeral at a Jewish chapel in Borough Park yesterday, as her family sat shiva at her apartment at 1134 East Second Street, two blocks from the accident scene, her sister, Anna Klein, choked back tears and said some of the things that needed to be said about a small graceful woman of the 20th Century.

She was an intelligent, courageous woman, Mrs. Klein said, and had come halfway around the world since the 1920's from their village in Czechoslovakia.

It was a journey that had taken her to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, where she lost everyone but her sister, to Bremerhaven where she made German bombs in a cavern while Allied bombs shook the earth, to a Saxony woods where she ate grass and leaves and waited for liberation, to postwar transit camps in Budapest and Vienna, to Jerusalem and finally to New York.

She had survived the Holocaust, married, given birth to a son and daughter. She had worked at job after job -- sweatshops, day care centers, kitchens and offices -- to send her children to college, to see them settled, one as a banker and the other as a school principal. And she had somehow retained her faith and an appreciation for the world at her fingertips.

"We walked together on Ocean Parkway -- it was Shabbat," Mrs. Klein said of her last day with her sister. "It was cloudy. I like this kind of day. But she said, 'Oh, what a lot of lovely flowers.' I am very cynical about flowers. None of them are related to me. She was angry with me. 'You don't have a sense of beauty,' she said. She enjoyed every leaf, every blade of grass.

"And now," she added, the accents of her East European childhood still husky in her throat, "I am devastated. I don't know where to put myself, or how I will get up in the morning."

She was born Rachel Zhwartz on Feb. 3, 1925, in what was then known as Sevlus, a town of 14,000 -- including 4,000 Jews -- in southwest Czechoslovakia. She had an older sister, Gabriella, who had been born in 1922. Her younger sister, Anna, was born in 1926. Their family had been in the wine business for many years and the three sisters lived in a big house on the main street with their mother, Ilona, and father, Martin, who was secretary to the Jewish community.

Mrs. Klein remembered the day the Nazis arrived: March 19, 1944.

"There was no time to hide," she said. "They came in with their tanks. There was no time. They had guns and we were taken away. They took all the Jews in town and put us into a ghetto in the poorest part of town. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs. We were in a room with 32 people packed on the floor, and we were kept there for two months until May.

"Then they took us to Auschwitz -- in a railroad train, in cattle cars. It was horrible: it was the three of us and our parents and, by then, my sister, Gabriella, had a baby 13 months old."

When they arrived at the infamous arch, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes You Free), Rachel and Anna were separated from the other members of the family. "We, the two of us, were sent to the shaving of the hair, and then to the barracks," Mrs. Klein said. "We never saw our family again."

She remembered the torments in the barracks -- the terrible conditions, the forced labor and the waiting; the only consolation was that the sisters, Anna and Rachel, were together. "We were waiting for our turn," she said, "but our time didn't come. They demanded labor and we were chosen."

In August, in an extraordinary reprieve apparently made possible by the Nazis' need for slave labor in the production of war materiel, Mrs. Klein said she and Rachel were sent to northern Germany, to a cavernous underground plant near Bremerhaven, where they helped construct bombs for the Luftwaffe. She told of terrifying days and nights working on bombs while the earth shook from explosions as Allied bombers roared overhead.

"But we were together," she said. "Rachel and I kept together like two fallen birds."

Through autumn, winter and into the spring of 1945, the Allied bombing grew heavier. Then April arrived. "Two days before the end, there were 40 percent casualties," she said. "The Germans took us out then from where we worked. They wanted us as security when the liberators came. But it never worked out. They got scared and ran. We were left in the middle of the woods. We ate grass and finally the Britsh came and took us out."

After the war, they wanted to go to Israel, but found themselves in the limbo of a transit camp in Budapest, where they both stayed for four years and were married -- Rachel in 1946 to Zev Neufeld, a Hungarian 20 years her senior, who had lost his first wife and a daughter at Auschwitz, and Anna in 1948 to Samuel Klein. The two couples were inseparable and in 1949 they went to live in the newly independent State of Israel, settling in Jerusalem.

Mrs. Neufeld's first child, Chaya, was born that year, and her son, Shimshon, was born in 1955, Mrs. Klein said. A decade later, she said, they all agreed to move to America, but there were immigration quotas and it could not be done quickly or easily.

"Sam and I came first in 1959 through a transit camp in Vienna," she said. "We were on the quota. Rachel and her family came in 1960. We arranged it through a friend who vouched for them. There were immigration restrictions, and these friends had property and a business and said they would not be a burden on the state."

Mr. Neufeld did "manual work, hard work, anything he could find" and later became a bookkeeper and a rabbi who sometimes helped supervise the production of kosher food, she said. Meanwhile, her sister, too, went to work to help raise the family, laboring in what she called sweatshops and taking jobs in day care, cooking and office work.

"She always worked," Mrs. Klein said. "They saved and saved to raise their children and send them to college." Chaya and Shimshon both attended Brooklyn College, and Chaya went to graduate school at Hofstra University, receiving two master's degrees.

Shimshon became a foreign exchange broker for Chemical Bank and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Olivia Gross-Neufeld, a lawyer, and their two children, she said. Chaya became the principal of an elementary school in New Jersey. She lives in Morganville, N.J., with her husband, Thomas Friedman, a writer and professor of English who commutes to Syracuse University, and their two children.

"She was so proud of her children," Mrs. Klein said of her sister. "Children -- if everybody would be like them, it would be a good world."

Mrs. Neufeld stopped working five years ago, when she was 65, but never gave up her daily 20-minute walks to the home of her sister at 1233 East Ninth Street. After Mrs. Klein's husband died two years ago, her sister's love and quiet courage were crucial, she said. They often strolled in the neighborhood in the late afternoon or early evening, talking quitely in the dusk.

"She could look into my heart," Mrs. Klein said. She recalled her sister as small, 5 feet 2 inches tall, with dark brown eyes and a good sense of humor, an intelligence and wit that a hard tragic life had not trampled.

The police said the accident occurred at 9:30 P.M. Saturday as Mrs. Neufeld was crossing Avenue J from north to south. They said a city bus driven by James Greene, 28, struck and killed her instantly as it turned south onto Bay Parkway. While the incident was under investigation, the police called it an apparent accident.

"After all we had been through, we held onto each other for dear life," Mrs. Klein said. "I come from a family -- my father, mother, Gabriella, Marta her baby -- they all died the most awful violent deaths. I am the only survivor of that family. The tragedy is indescribable. And I don't know why, but I can't cry."