KLEIN, Gerda Weissmann

Nationality: American (originally Polish: immigrated to the United States after World War II). Born: Bielitz (now Bieklsko), 8 May 1924. Family: Married Kurt Klein in 1947; two daughters and one son. Career: Writer and lecturer. Prisoner, German labor camps, 1942-45. Columnist, "Stories for Young Readers," Buffalo Sunday News. Founder and honorary chairman of civic, educational, and philanthropic organizations, including Blue Rose Foundation, Silver Circle at Rosary Hill College (now Daemon College), and Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation. Member of the board of directors, United Jewish Appeal and Holocaust Commission. Awards: Woman of the Year award, Council of Jewish Women, 1974; Humanitaria Citation, Trocaire College; special award for Year of the Child, D'Youville College. D.H.L.: Rosary Hill College (now Daemon College) and Our Lady of Holy Cross College, both 1974. Agent: St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.

Publications

Memoir

All but My Life. 1957; expanded edition, 1995.

Other

A Passion for Sharing: The Life of Edith Rosenwald Stern. 1984.

The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in the War's Aftermath, with Kurt Klein. 2000.

Other (for children)

The Blue Rose. 1974.

Promise of a New Spring: The Holocaust and Renewal. 1981.

Peregrinations: Adventures with the Green Parrot. 1986.

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Film Adaptations:

One Survivor Remembers, 1995, from the memoir All but My Life.

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Gerda Weissmann Klein was fifteen years old when the Nazis invaded her town of Bielsko, Poland. Her memoir All but My Life is a classic of Holocaust literature and was the basis for the Academy Award-winning best documentary short One Survivor Remembers. In 2001 the book entered its forty-eighth printing. It is an extraordinary account of one teenager's struggle to survive and retain her humanity through deportation, slave labor, and a winter death march. It is a remarkable testimony to the sustaining power of family, friendship, loyalty, and love.

Gerda's first heartbreaking loss was that of her beloved older brother Artur, who was sent to a forced labor camp soon after the Germans occupied Bielsko. Then, on 28 June 1942, Gerda's father was taken from the family and sent to a concentration camp. The very next day she was separated from her mother and transported to a series of forced labor camps. Although her parents and brother were taken from her, their spirit continued to guide and sustain her. When tempted to commit suicide and end her suffering, she remembered the vow she has made to her father never to end her life. Her mother's last words, "Be strong," sustained her, as did the occasional scribbled note she received from her brother. None of them survived.

Her memoir is also a testament to the power of friendship. Four girls—Gerda, Ilse, Suse, and Liesel—join together in friendship. Gerda makes a wager with Suse that the war will end in six months—their bet is a quart of strawberries with whipped cream. Suse did not live to collect the bet, dying at the very moment of liberation.

In the end, all that was left to Gerda Weissmann was her life. Liberated in Volary, Czechoslovakia, on 7 May 1945, a day before her twenty-first birthday, she weighed only 68 pounds. Kurt Klein, the young American army lieutenant who liberated her, saw more than an emaciated survivor; he saw a young woman whose luminous humanity endowed her with remarkable beauty. Gerda shared a special bond with her liberator, for he too is Jewish and had experienced tremendous loss. After fleeing to the United States in 1937, he waged a fruitless battle to save his parents. He later discovered that his parents, like Gerda's, had died in Auschwitz.

Although Klein was soon reassigned, he and Gerda shared a bond that neither time nor distance could disrupt. They eloquently describe the story of their growing love in The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War's Aftermath (2000), based on the year-long exchange of letters following their first meeting. Their letters are a testimony to the healing power of love as they share their memories of their families and their dreams for the future. Married in Paris in June 1946, the Kleins have dedicated their lives to Holocaust education and to furthering human rights.

In Promise of a New Spring: The Holocaust and Renewal (1981), a book for children, Gerda Klein translates the experience of loss into imagery a child can understand. Even as a devastating fire may destroy a forest, sparing only a few trees, so the Holocaust destroyed the Jews, leaving only a few survivors in the winter of their lives to tell the history of that time to the young—those who are in the spring of their lives.

—Marilyn J. Harran

See the essay on All but My Life.