Holocaust survivor: 'Hate ... never leads to anything good'

Edith Gross survived a Nazi “death march.” Before that she was held at the Stutthof concentration camp. And before that Auschwitz. She spoke little over the decades about the hate and brutality she endured, but now is telling all who will listen to avoid spreading and tolerating hatred.

On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Gross brought her audience in a small room in Islip Town Hall to tears as she described how she survived the horrors she faced and her ultimate journey to the United States.

“I think it’s very, very important and people should know, as many as possible,” said Gross, 93, who was joined at the Thursday event by Islip Town Supervisor Angie Carpenter and Chabad of Islip Rabbi Shimon Stillerman. “Maybe I’ve reached some people and they will not have that hate anymore in their hearts. Even if I’ve changed one person, I am satisfied, because hate, it never leads to anything good.” 

Gross, who lives in Oakdale, hadn’t even talked to her children about the Holocaust until they were adults. Her son, Steven Rabinovici, 70, of Plainview, said his mom didn’t broach the subject until he was in his 30s. Thursday was the first time he had seen her publicly discuss her survival. 

Gross was 15 when she was forced from her home in Czechoslovakia and sent to the infamous Auschwitz camp and later Stutthof in 1944. None of her three siblings survived the Holocaust.

Before the Nazis invaded, Gross said, life was peaceful. That bliss was shattered by Adolf Hitler, and Gross was forced to wear a yellow star identifying her as a Jew, leading her classmates to hiss insults at her. Eventually, the cattle cars came, which Nazis crammed the Jews into. Gross recalled her grandmother’s refusal to go. A soldier threw her in anyway. 

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, she lied about her age, telling officers she was 16 since children were especially vulnerable during the Holocaust. Gross recalled seeing a cart filled with women, who appeared elderly but whom Gross suspects were aged by their suffering. The women were alive but were being carried toward the gas chambers.

“My whole faith fell apart,” she recalled. 

It wasn’t long before Gross was uprooted again and sent on what would become known as a “death march,” a forced evacuation when Soviet soldiers began to close in on the Nazis. She was soon liberated by those troops, and Gross slowly made her way back to Czechoslovakia, where she discovered that her family’s home had been demolished “brick by brick.” 

Gross arrived in the United States on Sept. 7, 1946, and joined her father in New York City. Her mother died during the Nazi occupation before Gross was sent to Auschwitz. Despite surviving one of the world’s most horrifying events, Gross quickly assimilated, learned English and how to navigate the subway, and enrolled in her local high school. She met her future husband at 19. They later married and had children, which came as a pleasant surprise to Gross, who feared that her body couldn’t carry children after the abuse she suffered years before. 

“It’s important to know that they were alive,” she said of the Jews who were murdered in the camps. “I’m sharing so that people will know that it should not happen again.”

By Brinley Hineman

brinley.hineman@newsday.com

Brinley Hineman covers the Town of Hempstead and the City of Long Beach for Newsday. She previously was a reporter in Nashville, Tennessee, and is a West Virginia native.