PALISADES PARK — They were abducted as teenagers, taken from their country and forced into sexual slavery by Japanese military during World War II.

Ok-seon Yi, 84, and Yongsoo Lee, 83, survived the daily abuse and torture, but kept quiet about the pain and suffering they endured after they returned to Korea years later.

They remained silent, ashamed, for decades, but now many women who were raped daily during the war are telling their stories.

This week, Yi and Lee are in the United States and say they hope to raise awareness about their brutal past and the attempts by victims — known as “comfort women” — to get the Japanese government to apologize and take responsibility for establishing the military brothels and forcing thousands of Asian women, many from Korea, to serve them.

“The Japanese government is waiting for us to die, one by one, because all the victims are so old and there aren’t many victims in Korea,” said Lee earlier this week through an interpreter. “They call us ‘comfort women,’ but the term ‘comfort women’ is such a bad word. I’m not a ‘comfort woman.’ I am Yongsoo Lee. ‘Comfort women’ is a term that the Japanese government gave us, and they say that we voluntarily became comfort women to make money … and that’s not true.”

On Thursday, the women and two Holocaust survivors were at the Palisades Park library, where they lunched with local officials and viewed a monument dedicated to the thousands of women who were victimized by the Japanese. The monument was erected last year outside the library. The borough is the first town in the U.S. to have a memorial for victims.

Steve Cavallo, the arts coordinator at the library, said it was important to bring the women to the borough — where a majority of its residents are Korean — and to see the monument.

The women’s trip is being sponsored by the Korean American Voters’ Council, a non-profit with offices in Hackensack and Flushing, N.Y.

Chejin Park, program director and staff attorney for the KAVC, said he hopes that bringing together the Korean women with survivors of the Holocaust will bring awareness to both their suffering.

“By connecting these two war crimes against humanity, we want to have supporters from [the] international community,” said Park.