Holocaust survivor left at train station as baby meets family at 80

When Alice Grusová was a baby, her parents left her on a train station bench, with no idea what would happen to her. It was June 1942. It was the last desperate act of Martha and Alexander Knapp to save his daughter and try to escape the disaster that was looming in what was then Czechoslovakia.

After dropping off the girl at the station, the couple fled Prague. But when the train arrived in Pardubice, East Bohemia, Nazi soldiers boarded it in search of fleeing Jews.

Grusová (the surname he adopted when he got married) never saw his parents again. They were arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, from where they were later deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Her older half-brother, René, from her father’s previous marriage, also died there.

The baby’s fate could have been the same, had it not been for a high-risk bet by the couple to leave her there and rely on luck. And she got it right. In 2022, Alice Grusová celebrated her 81st birthday – and also her 60th wedding anniversary with her husband Miroslav 🇧🇷 Living in Prague, the couple has three children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

The woman always felt that this was the sum total of her family. However, earlier this year the retired pediatric nurse traveled to Israel, where she reconnected with her Jewish heritage and found her only surviving cousin – as well as a wider family she was unaware of.

“I was very shocked when I found out, at 80 years old, that I had such a big family,” Alice said in an emotional video call with the CNN 🇧🇷 “I’m sad I didn’t go sooner,” added the retiree, who has survived cancer, hepatitis and spinal surgery.

The meeting took place thanks to the efforts of a curious woman 8,000 kilometers away, in South Africa, who decided to investigate the family’s genealogy during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The incredible story was later shared by the online genealogy website MyHeritage.

With life on hold due to the pandemic, the South African Michalya Schonwald Moss delved into her family history on the MyHeritage website. She had always known that her family had been decimated in the Holocaust, but nothing prepared her for the discovery that 120 of her relatives had been murdered in Auschwitz.

However, out of the unimaginable darkness came a small and unexpected ray of hope. With the help of professional genealogists in both the Czech Republic and Israel, she discovered the incredible story of one survivor: Alice Grusová and her connections to another relative.

Going back in time, in 1942, after being found on the station bench, the one-year-old girl was initially placed in an orphanage. Grusová, who has no memory of her parents, was later transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the same one her parents had been taken to before (but she never found them).

She said: “There was a nice woman who took care of us. I only remember glimpses of that time. And after when I got sick with typhoid and the workers there had to protect me from the Germans. I remember being told to keep quiet or the bad Germans would kill us.”

Surprisingly, she survived and, after the war, was taken to her mother’s younger sister Edith (or Editka, as she calls her), who survived Auschwitz after being transferred to a labor camp.

The pensioner’s voice chokes with emotion as she remembers her aunt, who, like many survivors of the Nazi camps, had her ID number tattooed on her arm. “She was so pretty, skinny, with that tattoo. But I didn’t notice it at the time.”

At first, the two lived together in Czechoslovakia. In 1947, the aunt emigrated to what was then Palestine. For reasons that remain unclear, the niece was abandoned in Czechoslovakia and put up for adoption.

“I was 6 years old when my aunt left Czechoslovakia and I met my new parents,” he explained. “As a child, I was very sad when my aunt left me. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t go with her,” she said. “I kept in touch with her for a while, she got married and had a son, who I last saw in a photo when he was two,” he said. But correspondence with Edith dwindled, and in 1966, “we disconnected.”

Grusová never knew what happened to his aunt – until his English-speaking son Jan translated a surprising email his parents received from the then-unknown. Schonwald Moss sent from South Africa in 2021. The surprise came at just the right time: Jan and his wife spent years trying to track down their mother’s cousin, who she last heard about when he was two, to no avail.

With the help of professional investigators, Schonwald Moss had not only discovered Grusová’s incredible story, he had also found his cousin: Edith’s son Yossi Weiss was now 67 years old and living in the Israeli city of Haifa. Weiss and Grusová “met” online last year, along with other members of the newly discovered family tree.

Weiss knew nothing of her cousin and her own life had been rocked by tragedies – having lost both her mother (Edith) and her son to suicide. Over the summer, Grusová flew to Israel with her husband, son Jan and daughter-in-law Petra to meet with Weiss and members of his wider family, including Schonwald Moss, who had made the connection between them and traveled from South Africa to the occasion.

Grusová told the CNN : “They wanted to meet and visit me, but my cousin has cancer and cannot travel. Already I dreaded a long trip at my age, but I’m so glad I did. Too bad this discovery didn’t happen sooner. At the same time, if it wasn’t for Covid, I would never have discovered that I have such a big family.”

The Czech pensioner – who speaks neither Hebrew nor English – communicated with her “new” relatives through an interpreter. Together they visited her late aunt Edith’s grave, the Theresienstadt museum and the World Holocaust Remembrance Center at Yad Vashem, where she recorded her personal testimony and was also filmed for an Israeli news channel.

simmy Allen , head of international media at Yad Vashem, was there on the day. To the CNN he said it was a “very emotional reunion”, adding: “The family came together and the different sides were discovering their roots and visiting Yad Vashem to solidify that, so that their ancestors have a place that they will forever remember.”

The retired nurse said: “My family has greatly increased in size. And Michalya keeps finding more and more relatives.”

Israeli Weiss said he knew little about his mother’s previous life and did not know why she had left her cousin when she moved to what was then Palestine.

“From what little she told me, I knew that she had worked in a factory and that she had returned to the city after the war because she was lucky to survive,” he said. “I knew she had been married before and her husband had died on the Russian front, but I didn’t know about the Alice meeting chapter.”

About their meeting, the Israeli said: “I tried to have time alone with Alice. We talked about the issue of my mother coming to Israel and Alice being abandoned and agreeing that things were complicated.”

The question will forever remain unanswered, although Weiss has rationalized the issue. “My mother was a Holocaust survivor who came back from the camps at age 25 and had just lost her husband. Alice was 5 years old. My mother couldn’t give her house, school, food and everything that was needed,” she explained.

Perhaps she judged the girl to be better off with adoptive parents, he added. “It hurts me on a personal level because sometimes I have ‘what if’ fantasies,” she confessed.

Grusová felt the same way: “Of course I thought about how my life would have been [com a tia]🇧🇷 As a child, I was very sad when she left. I didn’t understand why she didn’t take me along.” “My cousin tried to explain. She was young, her life was saved by a miracle. I don’t blame her for anything.”

Of meeting cousin Alice Grusová, Weiss said: “She really wanted to see my mother’s grave. It was very important to her and it was like closing a chapter.”

The cousin was at Yad Vashem with Grusová when she recorded her saddened testimony. “It was very moving and not easy for anyone.”

South African Schonwald Moss agreed. “It was one of the most extraordinary, intimate and emotionally therapeutic experiences of my life,” she told CNN 🇧🇷

The family is now in talks with Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation, which plans to videotape Alice’s testimony next year.

“Finding out that a family member had survived without us ever knowing and was still alive and living in Prague was like meeting a living ghost. And then finding out about his story was especially heartbreaking,” Schonwald Moss reported.

“Having her back in our lives showed us what it’s like to live. Every day we experience a reparation in our family. And thanks to Alice and the sparkle in her eyes and the love she exudes, we became family again.”

Roi Mandel director of research at MyHeritage, was happy with the result for Alice Grusová and your family. “Alice’s story is the story of many who survived the war and assumed they were alone in the world, not knowing that there was another branch that had survived,” she explained.

“Decades of disconnection as a result of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe have come to an end thanks to technology that makes it possible to link together parts of a previously unsolved puzzle,” he compared.