Dan Grunfeld said the tale has never been told.
It was too much heartache for his famous father, Ernie, to discuss in countless interviews during his career as a college star at Tennessee, then as a Knicks forward and NBA general manager for the Bucks, Knicks and Wizards.
As Ernie Grunfeld’s son writes in a new book, “By the Grace of the Game,” which comes out Nov. 30, his father is the only player in American sports whose parents survived the Holocaust.
“He didn’t want people to know,” Dan Grunfeld told The Post. “It’s such a painful past. It was painful for me to write. He wasn’t hiding it. It’s something he never wanted to talk about.
“In the ‘Bernie and Ernie’ 30 for 30, they say Ernie’s parents are Holocaust survivors. I did a whole book on that one sentence.”
Grunfeld said he interviewed his 94-year-old grandmother, Anyu, and his father for a year about their European past.
Dan Grunfeld, who played four years at Stanford and attended Knicks training camp in 2008, spent three years writing the book.
It’s part Holocaust history of his family’s journey — many of his relatives perished at Auschwitz — part Ernie Grunfield biography and part Dan Grunfeld memoir.
The book’s foreword was penned by former NBA star Ray Allen, an advocate of Holocaust education named by former President Barack Obama to the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Allen writes the author allows us “to walk in the shoes of prisoners in concentration camps.”
The Grunfelds came from Transylvania, where Hungarian was the predominant language. Ernie arrived in New York with his parents at age 9, not speaking a word of English.
“He had never touched a basketball,” said Dan, now a venture capitalist in the Bay Area. “He went to the park to make friends and found basketball at 9 years old.”
Ernie Grunfeld, a 6-foot-6 forward who emulated the game of his hero Dave DeBusschere, played for the Knicks from 1982-86 and was their GM across most of the glorious 1990s. Ernie Grunfeld was let go by the Wizards in 2019 but still is open to an NBA return, Dan said.
“His first job after retirement as a player was broadcasting Knicks games on radio (1987-89), which is ironic for a person denied admission to a yeshiva in The Bronx because he couldn’t speak English,” Grunfeld said.
The book describes chilling scenes from the death camps. Dan Grunfeld writes about his great-aunt Bubby, the only family member to come back from Auschwitz:
“She was evaluated at the camp by Dr. Josef Mengele, known by history as the ‘Angel of Death.’ He took pleasure in deciding who’d live and who’d die. When Mengele’s shadowy eyes surveyed Bubby, he pointed to the right, indicating she was fit for labor. The prisoner before her, one of Anyu and Bubby’s aunts, had been sent to the left — directly to the gas chambers.’’
While Dan Grunfeld writes about facing anti-Semitism growing up in New Jersey, being called “Jew Boy’’ by classmates and discovering a swastika on the baseball storage building in Franklin Lakes, there’s a lot of basketball.
Dan Grunfeld sought his grandmother’s permission before he signed a contract to play in Germany. When he entered Mike D’Antoni’s first training camp in Saratoga, he turned down his father’s No. 18 jersey and took No. 9 — half the number.
However, Grunfeld was hardly treated like the former Knicks GM’s son. He was just another undrafted rookie.
Grunfeld writes ex-Knick David Lee ordered him to buy poker chips because the players spent a lot of camp playing cards. Grunfeld took a long cab ride to the closest Costco.
“In my heart, I want to believe that someone said thank you when I handed the chips over and the door closed in my face,” Dan writes. “I’m not sure I heard those words. I am sure that no one mentioned my good deed again, nor did anyone reimburse me for the cab rides or the poker chips.
“After a week of training camp, I asked one of my teammates how poker was going. He was an NBA veteran who’d made tens of millions of dollars in his career. He told me he was up $56,000 for the week. I didn’t have the guts to ask for my 60 bucks back.”
