Holocaust horrors recalled
Survivor shares story at Jewish Center
For 12-year- old Frank Grunwald, the margin between life and death at Auschwitz extermination camp was no greater than the nod of a Nazi soldier pointing him to the right or to the left.
Unfortunately for young Grunwald and his older brother, the guard nodded left, directing them to a large group of children who seemed much younger or more ill than their counterparts on the right.
As the two children stood among the nervous crowd, Grunwald was suddenly plucked up by the arm and shoved over to the right by a high-ranking prisoner for whom he’d sometimes worked as an errand boy.
“I knew in that moment (he’d) saved my life. And he had,” said Grunwald.
Grunwald, a native Czechoslovakian who now lives in Indianapolis, spoke to a packed auditorium Sunday at the Memphis Jewish Community
Center in observance of Yom Ha’Shoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
His address followed the ceremonial lighting of six candles by other Holocaust survivors — one for each million of the six million Jews who perished during World War II in what is considered the largest genocide in history.
Grunwald’s mother had been watching the selec- tion that day in July 1944, he said, and she knew in that moment that her elder son was on his way to the gas chamber. So she made a choice that Grunwald, now 82, still considers the bravest he has ever seen.
She decided to go with him.
“My mother, she could not imagine him being by himself and going into the gas chamber,” he said. He ended up losing his mother, his brother and his grandmother on the same day.
“We saw the chimneys going 24 hours a day,” he said of the death camp crematorium.
“And we could smell the burning of human flesh. When the wind was blowing, we were covered in human ash. Everything was covered with human ash.”
For Dorothy Goldwin, who co-chaired Sunday’s event with her brother Marty Kelman, bringing speakers like Grunwald to Memphis is a critical part of helping ensure that Ho- locaust stories live on — as is sharing the stories of her parents, whose left arms were tattooed with numbers when they were taken by Nazi soldiers.
“I will never forget the anguish of what that number makes me feel,” Goldwin said.
Asked what he hoped others would take away from his story Sunday night, Grunwald said, “I hope they will always defend the downtrodden, the people who are being treated unfairly.”