ASHLAND, Ky. — There’s an anecdote Fred Gross relates whenever he tells the story of his family’s harrowing escape from Nazi pursuit in the early days of the Holocaust.

Gross and his family, which included his parents and two older brothers, had just crossed the Atlantic in a Liberty ship and were waiting for a train in the Norfolk, Virginia, station.

Gross found a public restroom and used it. When he came out, he saw a couple of young men talking sternly to his brother.

What’s wrong, he asked. You were in the wrong restroom, his brother said.

The “colored only” restroom.

“That made a big impact on me…I’m setting foot in America and on the first day I find a group of Americans being discriminated against. I was 9 years old, but I realized what was going on,” Gross said Monday to a group of Ashland, Kentucky, eighth-graders.

His anecdote is a distillation of a larger message — that hate and discrimination are all too real and that to recognize evil is the first step in fighting it.

“My mission is to tell the story and maybe make a difference in your lives,” he said to the students.

When Gross, 80, shares his Holocaust experience, he shares another equally important message — that fighting evil is the job not of superheroes, but of people not unlike his listeners and their families.

“All through our journey, ordinary people hid us, fed us, took care of us, and there were many of them,” he said.

The author and retired journalist’s introduction to discrimination came early. Gross was 3 when the Nazis invaded Belgium and his family fled its Antwerp home.

That was in 1940, and the following years were a succession of hair-raising escapes from town to town. He remembers sleeping in an empty theater, an abandoned castle, a school gymnasium and a barn.

His father scrabbled to gather as much cash as possible, supplemented by diamonds from his gem business, to finance their life on the run.

He remembers the farmer who hid them in his barn — not his name or even his face, but the simple fact of the risk he took in assisting strangers.

“Unknown people, not Jewish, trying to help us out. These are the heroes of my story. I don’t know their names; I never did. They were just good people to help us,” he said.

The family was confined for a time in a concentration camp in France, not one of the death camps like Auschwitz, but a holding camp where Jews were kept in limbo.

In 1942, the Nazis ordered the removal of Jews still in the camp and they were sent to their deaths. The Gross family had long since left, and Gross credits his brother, Sammy, with getting them out in an act of extraordinary courage.

Sammy, who was 16, managed to slip out the front gate of the camp and walked into town, simultaneously savoring his freedom and fretting about the rest of his family still confined behind the barbed wire.

Instead of disappearing into the crowd, Sammy went to the police and then to a bureaucrat and demanded his family’s release.

Inexplicably, the bureaucrat — who later was the one who ordered the arrest and transfer of 4,000 Jews from the camp — signed the orders that secured the release of the Gross family.

“So Sammy will always be my hero. It was a gutsy thing for a 16-year-old to do what he did,” Gross said.

In 1942, the family was staying at a hotel when a man warned them a raid was coming. They got out just in time. A policeman had tipped off their informant.

“That’s the power of one. The power of one can make a difference. It saved our lives.”

The family finally slipped over the border to neutral Switzerland after trekking for miles in the dead of night; nuns hid them for a week in a convent just before the dash for freedom.

Gross showed the students a pair of white baby shoes — his shoes, which his mother had kept in a hatbox until her death in 1989. Gross found the shoes and keeps them with him, “a symbol that I’m alive and doing well.”

Following his talk, Gross got a number of handshakes and at least one spontaneous hug. “I was really sympathetic and I felt empathy for him,” said Asher Stevens, the eighth-grader who offered the embrace.

“He went through a lot and no one deserves what happened to him. I feel like I have to thank him,” he said.

James writes for the Ashland, Kentucky Daily Independent.