PTA Honor Milestone for Omahan
The Omaha Council of Parent Teacher Associations Monday presented Mrs. Miriam Grossman, 1702 Sahler Street, with a state life membership for her committee work.
For Mrs. Grossman, it was more than a reward for PTA work. She compared it to a milestone on a road that once seemed impassable.
Mrs. Grossman's road stretches all the way back to the days when Nazis were murdering Jews, to a slave labor camp at Lodz, Poland, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and mass starvation.
It began 29 years ago when Mrs. Grossman, her parents, five brothers and three sisters were herded from their home in Lodz to the city's outskirts where the Nazis were creating a ghetto for Jews.
Mrs. Grossman's parents died in the ghetto.
Mrs. Grossman . . . with history collection.
She and her brothers and sisters stayed almost five years. Then were shipped to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.
Mrs. Grossman survived because, she said, the Germans suddenly needed more slave labor in their munitions plants. She was moved to a camp on the Polish-Czechoslovakian border.
The Russians liberated the camp in 1945. Two of her brothers survived the war. The others went out on work details and never returned.
Mrs. Grossman said she spent the next three years in hospitals and camps for displaced persons. She met and married her husband, Ignac, in a displaced persons camp.
The Grossmans came to Omaha in 1949. For a long time, she said, she distrusted people and resented society.
Then, she said, she joined the Parent Teacher Association at Saratoga School as a housemother. The Grossmans became American citizens. They filled two bookcases with volumes on American government and history.
The Omaha Council of Parent Teacher Associations appointed her to its Juvenile Protection Committee and her work earned her the life membership.
Receiving a similar honor was Keith Sinclair, safety supervisor for the Omaha Transit Company, for his contribution to the PTA's traffic safety program.
