Holocaust survivor to be reunited with rescuers’ family
Published: November 23, 2005
Ruth Gruener removed a decades-old photo of her kindergarten class from between two plastic sheets, pointing to herself, a cherub with short brown hair in the top row, sixth from the left.
Three years after the black-and-white picture was taken at the private Jewish Day School in her native Lvov, a city in eastern Poland, the Nazis invaded and occupied the country, shooting and deporting to concentration camps as many Jews as they could find, starting with the children. Gruener’s entire kindergarten class was wiped out. [What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History]
All of them, that is, except one.
“My story, it should probably be called `Destined To Live,’” Gruener, now in her early 70s, said late last week.
As painful as looking back at the Holocaust can be, Gruener rarely shrinks from recounting her survivor’s story, particularly to children, “just so it shouldn’t happen again.”
Wednesday she will span the years with more than words and photos. She is to be reunited at Kennedy Airport with a daughter of the Christian family who sheltered her from the Nazis and their Ukrainian nationalist supporters for eight long, lonely and harrowing months of her childhood. [The Hiding Place]
Gruener and Joanna Zalucka, who is in her 80s, will embrace for the first time since Gruener was 8 and Zalucka 18, a time when 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered outright by the Nazis or deported to concentration camps, where they died of illness or hunger.
Zalucka is traveling from her home in Wroclaw, Poland, as a guest of Manhattan-based Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a charitable organization begun by a California rabbi in 1986 to sponsor one such reunion a year. It also supports 1,600 aging non-Jewish rescuers known as “righteous Gentiles” in 28 countries with stipends amounting to $1.3 million a year.
Zalucka will spend two weeks in the Brooklyn home Gruener shares with her husband, Jack, a survivor of 10 Nazi concentration camps.
What will Gruener say when the only surviving member of her rescuers’ family arrives? “I don’t know — what can I say?” Gruener said.
But she soon returned to the question: “Only that I wish my parents and her parents could be here to share in the pleasure of seeing us together, that we survived that horror,” she said.
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