English teacher Denise D’Onofrio says her students survive a tough neighborhood and a harrowing life every day. She wanted them to meet someone who had survived the Holocaust. They were not disappointed.
D’Onofrio traveled up from Bridgeport with Dalma Abreau (right) and 14 other kids from The Bridge Academy to meet Fred Gross at the New Haven’s Ethnic Heritage Center on Fitch Street.
They were a riveted part of an audience of 40 people Thursday who heard the 72-year-old former New Haven Journal-Courier reporter read from his newly published memoir: One Step Ahead of Hitler: A Jewish Child’s Journey Through France.
D’Onofrio said her students were reading Gross’s book as part of their school work. “They connect to being a survivor because these kids are survivors in general.”
The charter school students competed on a test for the chance to come up to New Haven to meet Gross. The whole 7th and 8th grade wanted to come. The van had room for only 15.
In his presentation Gross told the students that he was only 3 years old in early 1940 when the German juggernaut invaded his native Antwerp, Belgium. That propelled the family into six years of flight. Locales of refuge and hiding included castles, barns, nunneries, displaced persons camps, and, for Gross and an older brother Leo, adopted Swiss families before their emigration to the United States in 1946.
When Gross concluded, Dalma wanted to know why people took risks to save him and his family. Answer: “They had a moral conscience.”
And the one message he’d like to convey from his Holocaust experience: “Many more Jewish lives would have been saved if [more] people had had the courage to stand up.”
Julius McCord wanted to know of the whole range of people who helped him and his family who was his “Holocaust” hero.
That answer was easy for Gross: His oldest brother Sammy who escaped the internment camp at Gurs in southern France. He could have fled himself but returned with papers that enabled the whole family to go into hiding; most of the Gurs internees were later sent to Auschwitz.
Joshua Nieves wanted to know which memory was most vivid. Gross answered it was his mother throwing him into a ditch to avoid strafing by German fighters as the refugees fled Belgium to France. “I saw the ground coming up and then there was darkness as she threw her body on mine.”
Destiny Colorado (on the far right) asked Gross, “When you hear the name Adolph Hitler, what do you feel?”
He said he gets so furious when he sees Hitler in documentaries, that his wife often suggests he not watch.
Julius McCord said he found something very personal in Gross’s answer to his question. His older sibling keeps him from doing crazy things, he said. “I look up to my older brother the way he [Gross] looked to his.”
D’Onofrio bought a book for herself with Gross’s autograph that she promised to share with the kids.
The moving session drew to a close on two notes, one humorous, one that gives pause. In answer to a question of what he’d like to see if his memoir became a film, Gross said he wasn’t’ sure but he preferred that he be played by Brad Pitt.
The more disturbing exchange occurred as Kieana Stennett asked Gross, “Do you think the Holocaust can happen again?”
“It is — Darfur.”
When a reporter followed up with Kieana, she said she didn’t know what Darfur is, let alone that a genocide is unfolding.
When told of the exchange, the kids’ teacher D’Onofrio sighed slightly. “It’s common. Unless it’s in front of them [they don’t know]. They have to worry about getting home safely, getting fed, returning to school the next day with clean clothes. They’re fighting to survive every day. As they mature, they learn about other people’s struggles.”
She said the chief lesson she hoped her kids would take away from Gross’s story was that they must speak up for themselves and also others. “Don’t just watch as bad things happen.”
The kids next assignment is to report on and to be teachers of their encounter with Fred Gross to the 85 kids back at The Bridge Academy who wanted to come, but didn’t.