‘By the Grace of the Game’

Livia Grunfeld–Lily, she goes by, or Anyu, “mother” in Hungarian, as loved ones call her–is 96. Still cooking holiday meals in the Bay Area; still playing bridge with friends. She likes to quip that when she’s sitting down, she still feels young.

That she has lived to tell her story is a blessed miracle.

Her story– the Grunfelds’ story–has been written by grandson Dan, whose new book By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream [Triumph Books] chronicles a family’s unimaginable tragedy and sports salvation.

Ernie Grunfeld, son of Lily and the late Alex, arrived with his parents in New York from Transylvania at age nine and went on to play nine years in the NBA and serve many more as an executive in three organizations. His most notable years were spent–as a player and later as general manager–in New York with the Knicks, and he is believed to be the only NBA player, and possibly the only athlete in major American team sports, whose parents survived the Holocaust.

Dan Grunfeld played basketball at Stanford and had a successful pro career overseas, ending it in Jerusalem, where he became an Israeli citizen.

“There’s darkness in the story,” he said, “but there’s a lot more light. This is ultimately a hopeful, happy, inspirational story. That’s why I wrote it.”

Grunfeld wrote the book after extensive interviews with his grandmother and–in something of a breakthrough–his father, who’d never spoken much about the family’s egregious loss. Alex’s parents and siblings, both sisters, were lost. Anyu’s parents and five of her nine siblings, too. All perished at Auschwitz.

Anyu had been caught by Nazis and placed in a Budapest ghetto, where she went into hiding and would be saved–twice, according to Grunfeld–by the Swedish humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg. He would disappear in 1945 after reportedly sheltering thousands of Jews and is believed to have died soon after while imprisoned in Moscow.

Half a century later, Grunfeld, who today is the director of a venture-capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., became Stanford’s leading scorer. Before he signed out of school with a club in Germany, he had to run it by someone dearly important to him.

“I write in the book that I’m probably the only professional basketball player who had to call his grandmother and ask permission to sign his first professional contract,” he said.

What she told him is heart-rending and beautiful. She said, “Sons are not responsible for the sins of their fathers.” She told him to go and have a great experience there. He would remember her words often as he chased his dream, and certainly again throughout his time in Israel.

“This history is always with me,” he said. “There were times it did weigh on me. It was something I thought about always.”

Grunfeld’s father has, of course, read the book. Discussions about it, though, aren’t so easy.

“He’s very proud of me, very grateful,” Grunfeld said. “But it’s difficult. Basketball took him away from a lot of those things. Now I’m telling the story, and it makes him look back.”

But it was a book Grunfeld had to write. It is, after all, his own life story.

“It’s a story that matters to me,” he said, “but I think it’s also very relatable. I’m a human being here because of my family, its survival, and because of the love of family.

“I always had a profound sense of what basketball had done for my family. I’m very close with my grandma and very close with my dad, but it’s not something he talks about publicly. As I learned about what they went through so I could have the life that I have, it became my dream to tell it.”