Grit, Needlework Save Alum's Family in Nazi Camp

Guest Blogger: Debbie Levey, CEE technical writer

Thanks to the  steely determination, sewing skill, and sheer luck of his mother, Michael Gruenbaum ’53 numbered among the few child survivors of Terezin, the concentration camp near Prague. To convince the Red Cross and other international observers that the Jewish prisoners received good treatment, Nazi officials created a sham city at the camp where residents ostensibly lived a regular life. From time to time, the officials also deported prisoners to extermination camps.

Gruenbaum, his mother Margaret, and sister were sent to Terezin after the Gestapo murdered his father. On several occasions they were scheduled to be transported to Auschwitz, but Margaret “somehow always in the last minute managed to have us excluded,” wrote Michael.

The last threat of transport occurred in October 1944, “when the three of us were already in the assembly area. My mother’s job in Terezin at that time was sewing teddy bears for the children of German soldiers. She managed to get hold of her boss, who told the German officer in charge of her work unit that if she was sent away, he would not get those bears. The officer gave the orders to pull her and her children out of the transport,” he recalled.

All those who were removed from the transport were sent to three rooms elsewhere in the assembly area. However, more prisoners were needed to fill the quota, and soldiers rounded up everyone initially spared in the first two rooms and put them on the death train. “By coincidence we were waiting in the third room, so thanks to my mother’s perseverance and sheer luck we were saved,” he said.

In 2004, his wife Thelma published a book, “Nesarim: Child Survivors of Terezin,” about Gruenbaum and nine other boys from the original 40 in his barracks. After the war they dispersed throughout the world. When Czechoslovakia overthrew the Communist regime in 1989, they organized their first reunion in Prague and continue to meet periodically with their growing number of descendents. The next reunion will be in December in Las Vegas, to ease travel for their 88-year-old barracks leader who lives in Los Angeles.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington highlighted the Gruenbaum family’s survival story on the November page of its 2010 calendar.

Update: Hear U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum photo archivist Judith Cohen explain how a memory book from the Michael Gruenbaum Collection provides a rare view into life in Theresienstadt, the Nazis’ “model” camp-ghetto.