Saturday, June 21, 2025
Wearing a jacket adorned with the Star of David with the word “Jude,” meaning Jew, on it — just like the ones the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear — Cedarhurst resident Paul Gross stood in Congregation Beth Sholom and recounted his Holocaust story.
“Unfortunately, not many Holocaust survivors are alive anymore,” Gross said at the April 23 Yom Hashoah program. “Therefore, I feel even more obligated to tell my story.”
The program commemorated the 80 years since the beginning of the Holocaust, during which the Nazi regime murdered 13 million people, including 6 million Jews.
Both the United States and Israel mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom Hashoah. Established in 1959, it takes place on the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, and marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This year the commemoration began at sundown on April 23 and continued the following day.
Gross, 87, was born on Nov. 3, 1937, in Hungary, and was 7 when the Holocaust began.
He transported the audience back to Hungary in 1944 to share his story of survival.
“We were not aware that the world was at war — the Germans were marching on and exterminating our brothers and sisters in Germany, Poland and other places,” Gross said. “The Germans entered Hungary in 1944, and our normal lives ended.”
The Germans instituted laws forbidding Jewish people from owning businesses or going to school. When they were told they were to be sent to labor camps, Gross was shaken up, he said, and had a feeling that his life was going to change.
“The Germans decided to take us out of our town in the middle of the night because they were afraid that the goyim” — non-Jews — “who (had) lived there for hundreds of years (were) going to say something about their Jewish neighbors being taken away,” he recounted.
Of the three trains that left the town, two made it to Auschwitz, but Gross’s did not. After it stopped in Poland for two days, he ultimately wound up in Vienna, Austria, days later.
“They put us into an empty school building, which became our camp,” Gross recalled. “Every classroom had 50 to 60 people that slept in cots. Bombs were dropping every day, and obliterated the whole neighborhood.”
He knew that the war was ending when a plane circled the school but never dropped a bomb, and an 8-foot-tall American flag appeared on the school grounds.
“It took 75 years for his family to rebuild the numbers of the people in his family that were lost in the Holocaust,” Rabbi Ya’akov Trump, Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst, said of Gross. “We celebrate every one of their lives.”
The program was a collaboration involving Congregation Beis Tefilah, of Woodmere; Irving Place Minyan; the Jewish Center of Atlantic Beach; Young Israel of Hewlett; Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst; Young Israel of Long Beach; and Young Israel of Woodmere.
The program also featured a performance by the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach’s fifth-grade choir. The attendees included high school ambassadors from Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway High School, Davis Renov Stahler Yeshiva High School for Boys, and Stella K. Abraham High School for Girls.
“Many of us in this room grew up hearing Holocaust stories that most people in the world can’t even imagine,” said Dana Frenkel, co-chair of the program. “We are the last generation to meet a survivor face to face. As the last ones to hear their voices, we are charged with the responsibility to ensure that the pain and suffering they endured is not forgotten.”
Frenkel expressed the need for strong young Jewish heroes and heroines to protect the Jewish people amid the threats from those who oppose them.
“May we continue to walk in the light of the survivors,” she said, “with the same strength and resilience that our ancestors carried with them through every trial, and may we never forget the lessons they left behind.”
Gross and his family moved to Israel in 1950, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces 70 years ago. At 22, he emigrated to the United States, where he was a diamond cutter for 45 years. Paul and his wife, Miriam, who is also a Holocaust survivor, have been married for 64 years.
“In the end, the German soldiers were defeated and the Nazis are in the darkness of history . . .,” Gross said. “Am Yisrael Chai — the people of Israel live forever!”
