Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 6, 1995 TAG: 9505090062
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN KING LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Long
``One Survivor Remembers'' is the first-person account of Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein.
Klein's life changed forever when the Germans invaded her homeland of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. In 1940, her 19-year-old brother, Arthur, was the first in her family to be taken away. For the next two years, she and her mother and father were forced to live in the basement of their home in Bielsko, Poland.
On June 28, 1942, Klein's father was taken away. The next day, her mother was led to a different group. Klein never saw her mother or father or brother again.
She was sent on a train to a labor camp where she became inseparable with a girl she met on the journey, Suse Kunz. They spent the next three years in camps along the border of Poland and Germany. In early 1945, Klein, Kunz and two other close friends, Liesel Stepper and Ilse Kleinzaher, began a three-month death march with 2,000 other women from the northern Polish-German border to southern Czechoslovakia. After months of exposure, starvation and executions, only 150 survived.
Weighing only 68 pounds and one day short of her 21st birthday, Klein was discovered May 7, the day before Germany's surrender was announced, by a young American soldier, Lt. Kurt Klein. He was a German-born Jew who had moved to the United States in 1937. They married a year after their first meeting and have three children and eight grandchildren.
A distinguished author, journalist, historian and lecturer, Klein has received honorary doctor of humane letters degrees from Daemen College in Buffalo, N.Y.; Our Lady of Holy Cross in New Orleans, La., and Carthage College in Kanosha, Wis. She's written five books. Her autobiography, ``All but My Life'' is in its 31st printing.
Klein, 70, was interviewed from her home in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Q: Do you think the memory of your friends and family helped you survive the Holocaust?
A: Absolutely. This is why I think for the first time I was totally lost on liberation day because I was alone. I lost my three best friends. My closest friend, Ilse, died the week before, Suse died on liberation morning and Liesel died a couple of days later.
Frequently, the idea of concentration camps ... people think of it as a snake pit where people stepped on each other. They didn't see that there was kindness there and friendship and love and that was the sustaining part.
I hope that I can somehow convey that there is still a normalcy even under the most horrible circumstances. Even when somebody faces the death of somebody they love, they still have to get up in the morning and brush their hair to go out. It gives people some hope that one can cope.
Q: What do you feel when people say there has been too much done on the Holocaust and it's time to move on?
A: I understand it to a certain degree. People want to go on with their lives. There's so much violence and so much pain that people don't want to expose themselves to it continuously. However, I feel this is the lesson of history. If we understand it, hopefully, we can prevent it from happening again. It's, of course, an old cliche. But the one thing that I have always felt personally very sad about is, most of the time people immediately expect to see unrelieved horror [when dealing with the Holocaust]. I think it's important to know that even under those circumstances there was a certain nobility and caring and friendship. I think that many positive lessons can be learned because we live in an age when people are terribly afraid and say, ``How would I ever cope with such and such?'' I hope that somehow I can convey that one can and if something bad happens that we somehow have the resilience and strength to cope with a lot.
Q: Have you ever gone back to your hometown?
A: We went back to Czechoslovakia where I was liberated. I went with my husband, my children and many of my American friends. I did not go home, but my children, at that point unbeknown to me, did go. For me it was frightening. I didn't want them to go back.
Q: How long after you were liberated by your future husband, did you come to America?
A: I was liberated on May 7, which is, incidentally, when the documentary airs. I was in the hospital for a few months (after liberation) and then I worked in Munich. My husband used to visit me as often as he could. When he got his orders to go home, he asked me to marry him, which was in September 1945. I couldn't get out of Germany then. It was a whole long story. But, ultimately, my husband did come back and we were married in Paris in June of '46. He saved my life and he restored me to it all. I came to Buffalo in '46. You can well imagine what it was like to come here. It was unbelievable. I couldn't stop eating. I still haven't stopped (laughs).
by CNB