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COY WIRE: Hello, everyone.
I'm Coy Wire.
Thankful to be back with you this Monday,
April 17, with a special edition of "CNN 10," one that reminds
us that, no matter our differences,
we have to respect and show love for one another,
and we must denounce hate in all its forms whenever we see it.
On the Jewish calendar, tonight at sundown,
is the start of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The event commemorates the 6 million Jews who were murdered
in the Holocaust by the Nazis during World War II
and celebrates the lives of those who survived.
The Nazi party, led by Adolf Hitler,
came to power In Germany in 1933.
And a core element of their ideology
was anti-Semitism, or hostility and prejudice
against Jewish people.
Under Nazi rule, Jews were deprived of nearly all
of their rights.
They were forced from their homes, sent to areas known
as ghettos with substandard conditions and then,
ultimately, to facilities all across Europe
known as concentration camps.
This drone video is of Auschwitz, the largest
of those concentration camps, which still stands
today as a memorial and museum.
The conditions in these camps were brutal and horrific.
Jewish prisoners were given little food and water,
were forced to work day and night.
Some were deemed unfit to work and were
killed immediately in facilities intentionally made for murder.
By the end of the war, nearly two
out of every three European Jews were
killed as part of what Nazi Germany
called The Final Solution.
After the concentration camps were liberated in 1945,
the world vowed to never forget.
We'll hear now from one Holocaust survivor,
Edith Gross, who shares her incredible story of survival
with CNN.
- Edith Gross is a survivor.
She beat unimaginable odds, endured
the horrors of the Holocaust, and lived to tell her story.
- Edith was 15 years old, living in occupied Czechoslovakia
with her older sister and brothers.
Her mother had died and father had left
for America when she was two.
- As the Nazi grip on the country tightened,
Jews were forced into ghettos and not
allowed to run businesses.
- Then they were taken to concentration camps.
- Many did not even survive the journey to the camps.
- Edith managed to follow her sister to the line.
She never saw her brother again.
After Auschwitz, Edith and her sister
were moved to a forced labor camp.
- As the Russians began to close in on their location,
the Nazis moved them again, this time
to Stutthof concentration camp.
- Edith's sister became very ill.
Her condition deteriorated rapidly.
- The Nazis, becoming desperate amidst Russian advances,
started forcing the Jews on so-called death marches.
- They marched from Stutthof to Danzig,
finally reaching Konigsberg, now known as Kaliningrad,
in Russia, where they were liberated by Russian troops.
- Edith slowly made her way back to Czechoslovakia.
- With nothing left for her in her hometown,
Edith made the journey over many months to try to leave Europe.
- So she enrolled in school and learned English.
Now Edith has seven grandchildren
and eight great grandchildren.
Today, as more and more Holocaust survivors pass away,
Edith makes it her mission to continue to tell her story.
SHIMON STILLERMAN: Since she started speaking,
she must have reached, directly, a few students and community
members, residents, and probably indirectly,
a lot more than that.
She was someone who experience the worst evil in the world,
yet she works to bring light to other people
in her surroundings.
That's what Judaism is all about.
- She says if she only changes one mind,
she's accomplished something.
[APPLAUSE]
- Through the Chabad organization
in the town of Islip, Long Island,
a community center was dedicated in Edith's honor.
She recently took a trip to Israel,
where she visited the Western Wall and Yad
Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial.
Though it has been 80 years since that horrible time,
all that she has lost will always remain.