Holocaust survivor left as baby on bench finds new family at 80

• Alice Grusová’s parents abandoned her on a bench at a train station in 1942.
• Marta and Alexandr Knapp had failed in their attempt to flee what was then Czechoslovakia.
• They were detained and transported to Theresienstadt concentration camp, later murdered.

When  Alice Grusová , a holocaust survivor was a young child, her parents abandoned her on a bench at a train station without knowing what would happen to her.

It was June 1942, and Marta and Alexandr Knapp had taken this last desperate step to preserve their daughter after their failed attempt to flee what was then Czechoslovakia.

The couple had left Prague, but when their train pulled into Pardubice, eastern Bohemia, Nazi soldiers boarded in search of escaping Jews.

Her married name is Grusová, and she never ran into her parents again. They were detained and transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where they were later murdered after being transported there. There were also fatalities involving her father’s ex-brother.

If not for their risky bet, their little daughter would have suffered the same fate. Grusová celebrated her 81st birthday as well as her and her husband Miroslav’s 60th wedding anniversary this year. They have three sons, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, all of whom live in Prague.

She always believed that this represented the entirety of her family, but early this year the retired pediatric nurse flew to Israel where she reconnected with her Jewish history and met her lone surviving first cousin as well as a larger family she was unaware of.

“I was most shocked when I found out, when I was 80, that I have such a large family,” she said in an emotional video call with media.

“I am just sad this didn’t come earlier,” added Grusová, who has battled cancer, hepatitis and a spinal surgery.

During the early phases of the epidemic, an inquisitive woman in South Africa who lived 5,000 kilometres away made it possible for the reunion to take place. Online ancestry resource MyHeritage has finally published the amazing tale.

Michalya Schonwald Moss investigated her family history on MyHeritage while her entire life was put on hold. Although she had always known that the Holocaust had destroyed her family, nothing could have prepared her for learning that 120 of her kin had perished in Auschwitz.

However, a little and utterly unexpected glimmer of hope appeared out of the unfathomable blackness. She discovered the remarkable story of one survivor, Grusová, with the assistance of expert genealogists in the Czech Republic and Israel.

Having been 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 moved to Theresienstadt. She recalled: “There was a nice woman who was taking care of us. I only remember glimpses from that time.

“And then I remember when I got sick with typhoid and the workers there had to protect me from the Germans.

“I remember they were telling me to be silent or the bad Germans would come and kill us.”

Amazingly, she made it through the war and was later reunited with her mother’s younger sister Edith, or Editka as she prefers to call her, who had escaped Auschwitz by being sent to a labour camp.

Her voice cracking with emotion, Grusová recalled her aunt, who like many Nazi camp survivors had her identity number tattooed on her arm. She said: “She was so beautiful, she was slim, she had the tattoo. But I didn’t understand that at the time.”

At first, the pair lived together in Czechoslovakia, but in 1947 her aunt emigrated to what was then Palestine. For reasons that remain unclear, Grusová was left behind and put up for adoption.

“I was six when my aunt left Czechoslovakia and I came to my new parents,” she said. “As a child, I was very sad that my aunt left. I didn’t understand why she didn’t take me with her.

“I was in contact with her for a while. She got married and had a son, whom I last saw in a picture when he was two years old.” But the correspondence with Edith petered out, and in 1966 “we lost each other,” she said.

Before her son Jan, who can speak English, translated a startling email Schonwald Moss’s parents received in 2021, Grusová was unaware of what had happened to her aunt. He and his wife had been unsuccessful in their years-long search for his mother’s cousin.

However, Schonwald Moss had discovered Grusová’s extraordinary story as well as the location of that cousin, Edith’s son Yossi Weiss, who was now 67 and residing in the Israeli city of Haifa, with the aid of qualified researchers.

Along with some of the other members of the recently discovered family tree, Weiss and Grusová “met” online last year. Weiss had little knowledge of his cousin, and tragedy had struck his own life when he lost both his mother and son to suicide.

Grusová travelled to Israel over the summer to meet Weiss and his extended family, including Schonwald Moss, who had flown in from South Africa, as well as her husband, their son Jan, and Jan’s wife Petra.

Grusová told media: “They wanted to meet me and come to visit me, but my cousin has cancer and he can’t travel.

“I was scared of the long journey at my age,” she said. “Now I am so pleased I went. I am just sad this didn’t come earlier.

“If it wasn’t for Covid, I would have never found out I have such a big family.”

With her newly discovered ancestors, Grusová—who doesn’t understand Hebrew or English—conversed through an interpreter. Her late aunt’s tomb, the Theresienstadt museum, and the World Holocaust Remembrance Center at Yad Vashem were all visited by the two of them. It was there that she recorded her personal testimony and was also filmed for an Israeli television station.

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