When Alice Grusová was a baby, her parents left her on a train station bench, having no idea what would happen to her.
It was June 1942 and this was the last desperate act by Marta and Alexander Knapp to save their daughter as their attempt to escape what was then Czechoslovakia ended in disaster.
The couple had left Prague, but when their train reached Pardubice, in eastern Bohemia, Nazi soldiers boarded in search of escaped Jews.
Grusová – her married name – never saw her parents again. They were arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, from where they were later deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Her brother from her father’s previous marriage was also killed there.
It could have been the fate of their young daughter too, if not for their gamble. This year, Grusová celebrated her 81st birthday – as well as her 60th wedding anniversary with her husband Miroslav. Living in Prague, they have three sons, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
That, she always felt, was the sum of her family, but earlier this year the retired pediatric nurse traveled to Israel where she reconnected with her Jewish heritage and met her only surviving first cousin – as well as an extended family that did.” I don’t know it existed.
“I was very shocked to find out, when I was 80 years old, that I have such a big family,” he said in an emotional video call with CNN.
“I’m sorry it didn’t happen sooner,” added Grusová, who has battled cancer, hepatitis and a spinal surgery.
The reunion was thanks to the efforts of a curious woman 5,000 miles away in South Africa during the early stages of the pandemic. The incredible story has now been shared by the online genealogy website MyHeritage.
With so much life waiting, Michalya Schonwald Moss delved into her family history at MyHeritage. She always knew her family was decimated in the Holocaust, but nothing prepared her for the discovery that 120 of her relatives were murdered in Auschwitz.
However, through the unimaginable darkness, a tiny and most unexpected glimmer of hope emerged. With the help of professional genealogists in both Slovakia and Israel, he discovered the incredible story of a survivor: Grusová.
Having been found on the station bench, the one-year-old girl was initially placed in an orphanage. Grusová, who does not remember her parents, was later transferred to Theresienstadt. She recalled: “There was a nice woman who looked after us. I only remember glimpses of that time.
“And then I remember when I got typhus and the workers there had to protect me from the Germans.
“I remember being told to shut up or the bad Germans would come and kill us.”
Amazingly, she survived and after the war was reunited with her mother’s younger sister, Edith – or Edika as she calls her – who survived Auschwitz by being taken to a labor camp.
Her voice cracking with emotion, Grusová recalled her aunt, who, like many Nazi camp survivors, had her ID number tattooed on her arm. He said: “She was so beautiful, she was thin, she had the tattoo. But I didn’t understand it at the time.”
At first, the couple lived together in Czechoslovakia, but in 1947 her aunt immigrated to what was then Palestine. For reasons that remain unclear, Grusová was left behind and put up for adoption.
“I was six years old 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 touch with her for a while. He married and had a son, whom I last saw in a photograph when he was two years old.’ But correspondence with Edith stopped and in 1966 “we lost each other,” he said.
Grusová never knew what happened to her aunt – until her son Jan, who speaks English, translated a surprising email his parents received from Schonwald Moss in 2021. He and his wife had spent years trying to track down his mother’s cousin, without success.
But with the help of professional investigators, Schonwald Moss had not only uncovered the incredible story of Grusová, but had also found this cousin of his – Edith’s son, Yossi Weiss, 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 his cousin, and his own life had been struck by tragedy – having lost both his mother and son to suicide.
In the summer, Grusová flew to Israel with her husband, their son Jan and his wife Petra to meet Weiss and members of his extended family, including Schonwald Moss, who had traveled from South Africa for the occasion .
Grusová told CNN: “They wanted to meet me and come visit me, but my cousin has cancer and can’t travel.
“I was afraid of the long journey at my age,” he said. “Now I’m so glad I went. I’m just sorry it didn’t come sooner.
“If it wasn’t for Covid, I would never have known that I have such a big family.”
Grusová – who speaks neither Hebrew nor English – contacted her newfound relatives through an interpreter. Together they visited her late aunt’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 at the time. He told CNN it was a “very emotional gathering,” adding: “The idea that the family was coming together and the different sides of the family were really discovering their roots and coming to Yad Vashem to establish it so that their ancestors would have a place who will remember them forever.”
Grusová said: “My family has grown a lot in size. And Michalya is finding more and more relatives.”
Weiss told CNN he knew little about his mother’s past life and was unable to explain why she left her cousin behind when she moved to what was then Palestine.
“After a while she told me I knew she worked in a factory and came back to town after the war and was lucky to survive,” she said. “I knew she was married before and her husband was killed on the Russian front, but I didn’t know the chapter of finding Alice.”
Of their reunion, he said: “I made sure I had some private time with Alice.
“We broached the subject of my mother coming to Israel and Alice being left behind and agreed that things were complicated.”
The question would forever remain unanswered, though Weiss tried to understand it. “My mother was a Holocaust survivor returning from the camps at the age of 25 and had just lost her husband. Alice was five. My mother could not provide her house, school, food and everything,” he said.
Perhaps she thought her niece would be better off with foster parents, she added.
“It hurts me on a personal level because sometimes I fantasize about ‘what if,'” she said.
Grusová felt similarly: “Of course I thought about what my life would be like. As a child I was very sad when my aunt left. I didn’t understand why she didn’t take me with her.”
“My cousin tried to explain,” he added. “She was young, her life was miraculously saved. I don’t blame her for anything.”
Of the reunion with Grusov, Weiss said, “He really wanted to see my mother’s grave. It was very important to her and part of the closure.”
Being at Yad Vashem with Grusová when she recorded her testimony was particularly poignant, she said. “It was very emotional and it wasn’t easy for anyone.”
Schonwald Moss agreed. “It was one of the most extraordinary, intimate, emotionally healing experiences of my life,” he told CNN.
The family is now in talks with Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation, which plans to record Alice’s video testimony in the new year.
“Finding out that a family member we never knew about had survived, and that she was still alive and living in Prague, was like finding a living ghost. And then finding out her story was especially heartbreaking,” said Schonwald Moss.
“By rejoining our lives, she taught us what it’s like to live. Every day is repair for our family. And thanks to Alice and the sparkle in her eyes and the love she radiates, we became a family again.”
Roi Mandel, MyHeritage’s director of research, welcomed the outcome for Grusová and her family. “Alice’s story is the story of many who survived the war and assumed they were alone in the world, not knowing there was another branch that survived,” he said.
“Decades of disconnection as a result of the Iron Curtain erected in Eastern Europe have ended thanks to technology that makes it possible to connect pieces of a puzzle that seemed never to come together.”
Clarification: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Schonwald Moss worked with a Czech genealogist. The genealogist is based in…
