Holocaust Museum Boston to display lifesaving teddy bear

Driving the news: Jody Kipnis, president and CEO of the museum, plans to create a permanent display for Sasha as part of an exhibition on ghettos.

• Sasha is known for saving the life of young Michael Gruenbaum, who later became a civil engineer for the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the state Department of Public Works, before starting his own consulting firm.

What they're saying: "I kind of echo what my dad used to say: 'Sasha is the reason I'm here,'" David Gruenbaum tells Axios.

• He and his siblings became Sasha's custodians after their father died in 2023.

Kipnis picked up Sasha from the Gruenbaum family on the West Coast over Labor Day weekend.

• She says she wants the bear's display to "tell the story of resilience, resistance and strength."

Flashback: Michael, his sister Marietta and their mother Margaret were in the Terezín ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1944 when they learned they had been selected to board a train to Auschwitz.

• Margaret had worked in the arts department, making teddy bears as Christmas presents for Nazi officers and their friends, per the Gruenbaums.
• She asked her boss to tell the Nazi officer overseeing the arts department that the children wouldn't get their Christmas gifts if her family left.

• The officer wrote a note that got them out of the line to board the trains, saving them from the gas chambers.
• The family survived and eventually immigrated to the U.S.

Zoom in: Michael Gruenbaum inherited Sasha after his mother's death in 1974, but his sons, David and Peter, tell Axios they didn't learn the full story behind Sasha until adulthood.

• Michael Gruenbaum started sharing his story of survival with the world, first as part of his wife's book on the Terezín boys and later in his own memoir.

What's next: The museum, which is under construction on Tremont Street, is set to open in late 2026.