Daisy Gross

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Daisy Gross, née Leier, was born on 20 April 1939 in Nitra, Slovakia, the only child of Alexander Leier and Olga Deutsch. Her father managed a sugar refinery, a position that initially provided the family with protection from anti-Jewish persecution. As conditions worsened, her parents entrusted four-year-old Daisy to their longtime housekeeper, Antonia “Tonka” Nikodemova, in 1943.

Tonka took Daisy to Solčany, her native village, where the little girl lived under a false Christian identity, posing as a relative. When a neighbour’s son nearly discovered that she was Jewish, Tonka fled with her to Šoporna, where her fiancé’s family lived. They remained there until liberation. Throughout her time in hiding, Daisy kept a doll named Tonicska, made by Tonka and her mother. It became a source of comfort during her separation from her parents.

Meanwhile, Daisy’s parents and grandparents sought refuge in an underground bunker. Their hiding place was discovered after German forces arrested her grandfather and forced him to reveal its location. All were deported to Auschwitz, where her grandparents were murdered on arrival. Her mother was later murdered in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, while her father died of typhus at Auschwitz shortly after liberation.

Daisy remained with Tonka’s family until 1946, when two aunts who had survived Auschwitz took her to Hungary. Following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, she fled the country and arrived in Canada in January 1957, settling in Montreal. She trained as a nurse, worked at the Montreal General Hospital, married a fellow Holocaust survivor from Slovakia and raised two children.