Holocaust survivors share their remarkable stories with city schoolchildren on Holocaust Remembrance Day. NY1's Michael Scotto has the story.
When Ruth Gruener was in kindergarten, the Nazis invaded Poland. Gruener, her family, and more than two million other Polish Jews were forced to live in ghettos.
She believes she would have been sent to a concentration camp if a Christian family had not told her father this:
"'I assume that you and your wife will be killed, but I would like to save your child,'" Gruener recalled. "'Tomorrow, bring her out of the ghetto, take her to where you work, and I will come and pick her up.'"
Gruener, an only child, said that family agreed to hide her because her father, who owned a chocolate shop, used to give them sweets they couldn't afford to buy.
"You never know when you do a good deed in life how you get rewarded," the Holocaust survivor said. "And I and my parents got rewarded with life."
Gruener's parents survived as well; they were taken in by another family.
Now 82 years old, Gruener and other Holocaust survivors shared their stories at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Through photos and artifacts, the museum vividly depicts the horrors of concentration camps.
But for students at Ramaz, a Jewish day school on the Upper East Side, the first-hand accounts had a more powerful impact.
"It really puts a face to the story," Ramaz School student Samuel Iofel said. "These people who are telling what they went through. It's just amazing, it's incomparable to anything else."
After eight months, Gruener moved in with the family sheltering her parents, and they all survived the Nazis and the war.
More than 70 years later, Gruener said she shares her story, in part, to tell children about the importance of embracing tolerance.
"As much as I can, I feel that maybe I survived to bring the word to young people," Gruener said.