Gross, Kathy

Kathy Gross, born June 5, 1938 as Katalin Steiner, originally comes from Budapest, Hungary. Her father, Ernos, was born in Budapest  in 1931: he owned a textile factory in the city. Her mother, Magdolina Bleier, was a beauty queen. Her parents were upper middle class and religious, though not kosher, but they did observe the Jewish holidays with family. Kathy had an older sister, Livia, who died from polio in 1945 when she was just 13 years old. As Hungary was part of the Axis alliance, the Holocaust unfolded differently there. In 1941-1942 Jewish men were sent to labour camps in Hungary, including Kathy’s father, though he did come home on a furlough. 1944 was the really the year when the Holocaust in Hungary began in full force; the Germans invaded in that year, and Eichmann implemented the plans to deport Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz Birkenau. Kathy’s grandparents were murdered on arrival there, and her father was sent to other camps in the Nazi system. Those included Flossenburg, where he was sent in late 1944; Kathy was able to track down his records many years later, and they confirmed that he died on November 20, 1944. In Budapest, the Germans were on the trail of Kathy’s mother and fearing that she was about to be arrested, she feigned being poisoned and was taken by an ambulance driver to the hospital. A Jewish aid organization was able to move the abandoned children – including Kathy – to a villa on the other side of the river, and they were there until the liberation. The conditions were very poor, but Kathy survived – to be liberated by the Russians in February and soon after retrieved by her mother. They made their way to the countryside, where her grandparents lived; they found food that had been hidden for them. Liberated at the end of the war, the family reunited, and life started to return to a new normal. The postwar regime in Hungary was communist, so Kathy was raised in that system, and when the revolution took place in 1956 she managed to leave, later joined by her family in England. They stayed there for a number of years, until Kathy visited New York, reconnecting with a man she had earlier met. They married and started a family, and Kathy became an American citizen, employed at the Good Housekeeping Institute and Macy’s as the 60s went on. In her later years Kathy relocated to Phoenix: she shares her life story with students at the Phoenix Holocaust Association to fight antisemitism and to raise awareness about the Holocaust and genocide.  Kathy Gross was interviewed over zoom by Crestwood students in March 2026; we thank the Phoenix Holocaust Association for their help in facilitating this.