He dresses impeccably. He lives on Bayshore Boulevard. His art collection contains a signed Salvador Dali. As impressive as his surroundings are, the attraction to Sam Gross has nothing to do with material things. His love of his family is unquestioned. His enthusiasm infectious. His passion for life intoxicating.

Perhaps it’s because of his experiences with death. At the Florida Holocaust Museum Sam shows me a black and white picture of his family. “We lived in Czechoslovakia, in a small, primitive village named Palanok. We played a lot of soccer, looked out for each other and everyone got along real nice… until 1939. The Hungarians occupied the area, the Germans followed shortly thereafter and trouble started immediately.”

At age sixteen, Sam went to a concentration camp with his mother, father, two brothers and sister. They got there in a railroad boxcar (a similar one is on display at the museum). “I told my brothers let us try to be the first ones to board, because this way we have a choice to go into the corner there’s a small window to peek out and get a little air.”

“By the time the German soldiers filled up the car you couldn’t move. You couldn’t go to the bathroom. You couldn’t eat. At the first stop when they opened the doors there were 5 dead people thrown out, at another stop they threw out a whole pile of them….people dead or half dead”. “You look at your mother and she’s sobbing and sobbing and you try to bend down and tell her don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of you and you can’t talk because you choke.”

Three days later they arrived at Auschwitz. “Children were treated like they were little toys, like they were nothing. I watched a German solider take a child from his mothers’ hands and throw him to his death.” Separated from his family, the first sign Sam saw read, “you are at a German concentration camp, there’s only one way out of here and that’s the chimney.” “My uncle worked at the crematorium. He had to put his wife and two daughters in the ovens. Imagine a father having to do that.”

Sam’s father was sent to the gas chambers the day he arrived. His mother followed three months later. Sam was stripped, tattooed with the serial number A11099 (still visible), given a uniform and sent to work. Everyday he marched two miles to a warehouse to load and unload concrete, guns and war supplies. “The trip back we always had one or two dead people we carried home.”

In 1945, the American Black Brigade liberated some Nazi prisoners. Sam returned to Czechoslovakia “to find out who was still alive”. By 1956, Sam and his brothers were living in Pennsylvania. “We did all kinds of jobs butcher, cleaning business, worked in a store. Then we organized ourselves and opened up a company for precut houses. After the war, people were anxious for a home. We sold to developers, do it your selfers, teachers, you name it. Four years later the company went public.”

For the past decade, Sam has shared his story with thousands of Bay area students. “Part of education is the knowledge of history. I feel an obligation as a witness to tell young people what bigotry and hatred can breed.” He often ends his lectures by saying, “I can tell you from experience there’s no other place in the world that’s as great as the United States. Now I’ll give you one piece of advice, please study.”

Whether he’s motivating kids, chatting with people at the museum, or collecting donations for it (from small box car banks at Bay area restaurants), there’s always something you can learn from Sam. As I admire his magnificent home with spanning views of the Bay, I ask, “don’t you love living here”? In true Sam style he says, “Lynn, I’ve loved every home I’ve lived in and you should too”.