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    Flight for Life
    Flight for Life
    Flight for Life
    Ebook141 pages1 hour

    Flight for Life

    By Louis Gross

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The Journey of a Child Holocaust Survivor


    The enormity of the destruction of six million Jews in a span of less than a decade is a challenge for most to conceptualize. As a young boy born into a privileged life in Europe, Lou Gross had a rich quality of life. With the onset of World War II though, all Slovakian Jews found themselves equally at risk of losing their lives.


    Lou's young, carefree life was torn apart forever as he stood in his doorway and watched as soldiers prodded and poked the town elders as they were paraded en masse to trains that would take them to Auschwitz.


    This book follows the journey of a six year old boy and his family, fleeing the threat of daily annihilation, his ultimate survival of the holocaust, and its impact on his life's journey. Lou's is a story of survival, of the human spirit, and of a childhood lost.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLouis Gross
    Release dateOct 26, 2012
    ISBN9781301676743
    Flight for Life
    Author

    Louis Gross

    Upon first meeting Lou Gross you would never guess what an extraordinary life he has experienced or what insurmountable tragedy he has overcome. Born in Czechoslovakia, Lou was just a boy when the Nazis invaded his town. His young carefree life was torn apart forever as he stood in his doorway and watched soldiers prod and poke the town elders as they were paraded enmasse to trains to take them to Auschwitz. "Wait," he cried out, as he spotted his friend's grandmother limping under the strain of her suitcase. He ran inside to fetch his favorite cane and darted out the door, past the gun-toting soldier, to deliver it to his friend's grandmother. Although he did not know why, he understood that his life as he knew it had changed forever. Lou's is a story of survival of the human spirit. After witnessing unthinkable daily horror, he and his family survived the war. He and his sister were able to immigrate to Israel with a child transport and eventually settled on a collective farm, hoping his parents would be able to follow. After three years, Lou and his family were reunited in Canada and eventually settled in Chicago. After graduating from Hyde Park High School, Lou went on to earn his Masters in Social Work from the University of Chicago and later completed post graduate training in child therapy. Lou headed the Chicago Commons Association Outreach Program where he worked with delinquent gang members and also at the Evanston Children's Home where he treated emotionally disturbed children. In addition to his private practice, he served as a consultant to the Special Education Staff for Glenbrook High School. As a result of Lou's lost boyhood, he devoted his life to helping other "lost children." Today Lou is married with three grown children, two step sons, and seven grandchildren. He divides his time between Oceanside, CA and Surprise, AZ., where he is very active in community service. It was his ardent wish to write and publish his unique story of survival.

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      Book preview

      Flight for Life - Louis Gross

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      In loving memory of my dear parents,

      I dedicate this book

      with the deepest of gratitude

      for saving my life.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Reliving difficult events of the past could not be accomplished without the ongoing love and support of my dear wife, Joan. She was always there to critique my writing, check and question contradictions or reflect a reader’s response. She consistently coaxed my work with love and affection, and helped me to persevere with seemingly unending tasks.

      To my dear neighbor, friend, and editor, Denise, a special thanks. I appreciate her volunteering to help at a time when her own commitments would be overwhelming to most. Her intelligence, a keen capacity to identify central flaws and suggest practical revisions are just some of the redeeming virtues as they applied to our task. For all your attributes, and the ease of working with you, I thank you for being you.

      Thanks to Mel Kline for his patient diligence in the reformatting of my manuscript. His emphathy and support far exceeded my expectations.

      Special thanks to Ann Fener for significantly improving the ease of readability of the entire manifest.

      PROLOGUE

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      Panoramic view overlooking the town of Humenne, Slovakia.

      My return to my place of birth in Humenne, Slovakia some fifty years after I immigrated in 1949 was wrought with mixed emotions. My son Daniel, the youngest of my three children, and my oldest daughter Robyn were with me. I desperately needed them to connect in some way to my past as well as to the past of my extended family. At one time, Humenne was a thriving Jewish community of some 2,300 people. My paternal grandfather, R. Chaim Gross, his eleven children, and most of their families lived in close proximity to each other on Shtefanikova Street.

      Sadly, the only anchors to the past that remained were my grandfather’s home, now occupied by some important government official. His second son’s, Uncle Itzik’s home, was now occupied by an order of nuns. All of the other family homes, including my parents’ home, were torn down to make room for new housing. The population of Humenne had grown to forty thousand, and a chemical plant built by the Russians was central to the town’s economic growth. The Jewish population, which had at once thrived, now consisted of a single family, an old man and his adult son.

      The main street of town went through considerable changes since I left Humenne in 1949. The single structure that remained in my memory bank was an old castle now a museum. A beautiful synagogue was torn down and a new city hall was standing in its place. The only tribute to the Jews who lived in Humenne for more than three centuries was a commemorative plaque attached to a wall in the new city hall.

      Feelings of sadness, anger and a growing sense of unease began to occupy my mood. Seeing old men sitting and relaxing on park benches stirred my earliest childhood memories. Any one of them could have been the ones who deported members of my extended family, and the Jewish population at large, to death camps. More than ninety percent of the Jewish population of Humenne died in various concentration camps. My children and I were heading to the cemetery that was the final resting place of my grandfather. This was the last place that we would see before we departed from Humenne, probably for the last time. The cemetery was situated on a sprawling hilltop. The oldest graves, dating back to the 1700s, were at the bottom of the hill, and the latest graves were at the top. My grandfather and one of my uncles, both of whom survived the war, were situated at the top of the cemetery. My cousin’s mom, who died in 1941, was buried nearby. Since the register of burial locations of other descendants was destroyed during the war, we were unable to locate other family members’graves. Most of the over three thousand graves were in some disrepair or toppled over completely. Some of the grave’s granite headstones were stolen, and others were willfully desecrated in what I considered the ultimate act of hatred.

      What took centuries to build was now the resting place of over two thousand Jews who lay underfoot bearing witness to what Hitler destroyed in less than a decade. I made a silent pledge to Grandpa at that moment that I would bear witness to the Holocaust atrocities by recording my childhood memories of our family’s survival.

      With this new purpose in mind, I filed silently down the hill with my two children.

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      HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

      The year was 1939. Those were turbulent times. All of Europe was in a grip of fear, political turmoil, and throes of uncertainty. The Munich agreement between the European powers opened the gate for the German onslaught. First Hitler broke up Czechoslovakia. Germany occupied the Czech and Moravia regions. Slovakia, while attaining independence, which they coveted so strongly, really became a puppet state to Germany.

      The Slovaks became intoxicated with their new statehood. They followed and imitated the German system in every walk of life. Nationalism reigned supreme. Minorities that did not adhere to or show strict obedience and loyalty to the new order were considered enemies of the state. The Jews would be categorized as such.

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      The Slovak Fascist government became obsessed with the Jewish problem.

      They wanted to rid the country of the Jews in the worst way. First, they began adopting anti-Jewish laws, using the Nuremberg racial laws as a model. They enacted laws and regulations, which they called the Jewish codex. These laws restricted the rights of Jews and eventually deprived them of any means of livelihood. In 1941 at a joint conference in Salzburg, Germany, the Slovak ministers raised the question of how to deport young Jews out of Slovakia to Germany ostensibly to provide a labor force for the German Reich. In the course of the next year, planning and negotiations between the government and the German hierarchy were conducted to effect a total deportation of all Jews in Slovakia into Poland.

      The galling aspect of the deal was that the Slovak government committed itself to pay Germany 500 Reichsmark for each Jew who was deported.

      The irony of this was that the government first robbed the Jews of their properties and other assets, and so they were made to pay for their own annihilation. When the deportation to the extermination camps finally came, the total number of Jews expelled between 1942 through 1944 was about 65,000 out of which

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