Holocaust Survivors Talk to Regional Pupils

ERMA – Jay Kuperman and Ernie Gross lived through events that would have destroyed weaker men. On the 70th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion of Europe, the two met a group of Lower Cape May Regional High School students.
Both were survivors of the Holocaust visited upon European Jewry by the Nazis. Social studies teacher Ryan Slaney teaches a course on genocide and when he learned that fellow teacher Tom Higgins knew someone with contacts to actual witnesses he leapt at the chance to have the students hear them.
Former Philadelphia firefighter and Villas resident Richard Sambenedetto was the middleman who worked out the details. The men, now in their 80s, were both teenagers when World War II broke out.
Ernie Gross was one of seven children born to a poor family in Romania. He described growing up in a three-room house with no electricity, water or indoor plumbing. They also had little communication outside of their immediate community.
One day soldiers from Hungary knocked on the door and told the family to leave everything and go to the synagogue. Three days later the 15-year-old and his family were in a ghetto in Hungary and three weeks later on “cattle cars” to a concentration camp.
He remembered the sights, the sounds and most vividly the smells of blood, sweat and urine. He compared the assessment of the guard as they alighted the train to the Jewish Holy day of Yom Kippur. “In our religion Yom Kippur reminds us of the judgment at the end of life,” he said. Back then the guard with the Alsatian shepherd decided if the passenger went to the right or to the left.
Another guard told him to say he was 17 and not 15. It saved his life, but not his parents, who held two younger siblings. Their lives ended that day in the gas chambers.
Gross continued. During the question period a student asked “Did you ever think of giving up?” The answer was quick and unhesitating. “No. I was never ready to give up.”
Never ready to give up in a life that meant laboring from dawn until dusk, whose sustenance consisted of black coffee in the morning and soup at night. A loaf of bread was to be shared among eight.
Some comments came as a surprise. In the camps he said, “You had to be selfish or you won’t survive.” He also noted a stark difference among his captors. He said it was best to avoid the young German, the teenagers for example, and if you needed something seek out middle-aged German guards who “had some compassion.”
Gross also stressed “Nobody stole from anybody in the camps because you didn’t want them to steal from you.” He also recalled that often when he awoke the person asleep next to him had died in the night.
Gross said it was important to believe in God and that he goes to synagogue daily but he did not rely on God while in the camps. He was on his last legs when Americans liberated his camp.
After the war, he searched for any surviving family members and found that two brothers and a sister had made it through. One of the saddest moments of his life was when he learned that his favorite brother David did not make it. David starved to death.
Two of the surviving siblings went to Israel and one settled in Belgium. Gross went to Philadelphia where he married, has children and grandchildren.
Next to speak was Kuperman, his physical appearance belied his almost 90 years. His childhood differed greatly from that of Gross. He was born in the German-speaking part of Poland to a middle-class family. “We had a comfortable life,” he recalled. Then the war came in 1939.
“At first my father took us to escape into the forest,” he recalled. “He thought we would be safe there.” But after a few week they went back home. In time they were picked up by the Nazis and sent to a camp. Kuperman spent six months there in 1942 and then was sent to a factory which manufactured artificial wool from paper and wood. It was dangerous, nasty work and if one lost a limb in the heavy machinery his life was over – literally.
Then in February 1945, with the Russians advancing from the east, the Nazi force marched all the workers for two days then loaded them onto a train to the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp where 70,000 were held.
He recalled with sadness that three days before the war’s end the SS executed his father.
Kuperman was 21 years old and free. He weighed 80 pounds.
Living in the United States in 1956 he married. He has three daughters, 10 grandchildren and five great grandchildren, living monuments to his victory over those who sought to destroy him.
A student asked if either man felt bitterness or hatred. Both responded with an emphatic “no.”
Kuperman said, “Once we were liberated we did not live in fear. Some held on to hate but it is not in my character to do that.”
Gross also had some life advice for the young.
His four rules for happiness:
1. Get a life partner while you are in college.
2. After you have found a partner get a hobby and do it.
3. Get a job that you like and look forward to doing.
4. Believe there’s a God and that He takes care of everything.
Kuperman said at the end of the war, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower ordered German civilians living near the camps to witness the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. He also made a photographic record. “That was a good thing,” emphasized Kuperman,”because there are those who say ‘it didn’t happen.’ Well, I know it did happen and I am a witness to it.”
The two witnesses stood before Slaney’s students and gave testimony as to the truth of the events that they survived in their youth many decades ago.
To contact Helen McCaffrey, email hmccaffrey@cmcherald.com.