ALL BUT MY LIFE

Memoir by Gerda Weissmann Klein, 1957

Gerda Weissmann Klein's memoir All but My Life is a mesmerizing account of one Polish teenager's three-year struggle to survive not only in body but also in spirit. Like Anne Frank 's Diary , the book is a classic of Holocaust literature. Divided into three parts, it begins with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and continues through the days following Gerda's liberation in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in May 1945. It is an unforgettable story of courage. For Gerda, memory sustains hope, and hope provides the strength to continue in spite of losing everything but her life.

In the first days of Nazi rule, the Weissmanns must move from the comfort of their home in Bielsko, Poland, to their damp basement, where there is no electricity and little food. Gerda can no longer visit her beloved garden, only a few feet away. Gerda and her mother unravel old clothes, dye them, and knit new sweaters to earn money for food. With little coal to heat their two rooms, the Weissmanns are warmed by their love for one another and their memories of happier days. They share the hope that Gerda's brother Artur will return from a forced labor camp and they will be reunited as a family. Soon even that hope is taken from them.

A heartbreaking letter from a school friend telling of the murder of her family foreshadows the excruciating loss that Gerda will soon experience. The question "How does one bury a heart?" echoes throughout the book. Yet no matter how great her suffering, Gerda never chooses to bury her heart.

The family's downward spiral continues when they must leave their home for the ghetto. Even there, their love sustains them. For her birthday, Gerda's mother sells a valuable ring to present her daughter with the priceless gift of an orange. Gerda's friend Abek gives her roses, a reminder of the beauty outside the ghetto. Soon the family is torn apart. Gerda paints a luminous portrait of their last hours together, as her parents talk long into the night of their love for one another and their children. Even when Gerda is separated from her parents, their love continues to protect her. Although it is June when the deportation order comes, her father orders her to wear her ski boots. Three years later, they save her life during a brutal winter death march. Her mother's last words, "Be strong," sustain her through loneliness and near despair.

Gerda demonstrates an extraordinary ability to recall and describe scenes that offer the reader a strikingly vivid portrait of the small, often forgotten, threads of the Holocaust. One sees her father's hands upon her brother Artur's head as he blesses and bids him farewell for the last time; one tastes the bittersweet cocoa, saved for months, that her mother gives her as a special treat the last morning they are together.

Part II of the memoir recounts Gerda's trials as she is moved from one slave labor camp to another. Friendships sustain her through illness, deprivation, and brutality, as do occasional scribbled sentences from her brother Artur. Her nineteenth birthday comes, bringing precious presents from her friends: margarine scraped from bread, bobby pins made from wire—testimonies to love and loyalty.

In January 1945, as liberation seems imminent, Gerda's worst days begin. She and her friends are sent on a brutal death march. Out of a column of 2,000 girls and women, fewer than 120 survive. Ilse, her best friend, dies in her arms. Unwilling to allow any of their prisoners to survive, the guards drive them into a factory building and plant a bomb. It does not detonate, therefore Gerda's life is spared once more.

Part III of the book opens with Gerda's liberation on 7 May 1945, one day before her twenty-first birthday. For Gerda this moment begins a new chapter in her life. She sees the young American lieutenant who liberates her as a gallant hero. He is, in fact, much more. A fellow Jew, he left Germany for the U.S. in 1937; however, State Department bureaucracy thwarted his efforts to rescue his parents. He, too, has known suffering and loss. In her, Kurt Klein sees a woman of extraordinary nobility.

Gerda's struggle back to health is a long one. In the end all she has left are the precious photos of her family, hidden for three years in her ski boot, and her life. With Kurt Klein's love and support (the two were married in 1946), she creates from that life a remarkable testimony to the power of love and the magnificence of the human spirit.

—Marilyn J. Harran