Gerda Weissmann Klein survived three years of slave labour in German textile camps and a death march of three hundred and fifty miles in the winter of 1945. She was eighteen when the war ended and a hundred and twenty pounds had become sixty eight. She had lost her parents, her brother, her grandmother, her aunts, her uncles, her cousins and almost everyone she had known in the small town of Bielsko in southern Poland. She married the American intelligence officer who liberated her, raised three children in Buffalo, and became, late in her life, the most prominent woman survivor in the United States.
The Weissmanns were assimilated, prosperous Polish Jews. Bielsko in 1939 had a Jewish population of around eight thousand. Gerda was fifteen when the Germans arrived in September. The family was confined to the town’s small ghetto. Her brother Arthur was deported in 1942 and never seen again. Her father was deported the same year. Her mother was sent to Auschwitz in June 1942 and gassed on arrival. Gerda was sent to a series of forced labour camps for Jewish women in the textile industry: Bolkenhain, Märzdorf, Landeshut and finally Grünberg, in Lower Silesia, where she worked at a loom for sixteen-hour shifts.
The death march began on 29 January 1945. Around two thousand women were marched out of Grünberg. They walked through Czechoslovakia and into Bavaria. They slept in barns and ditches. They ate what they could find. The march lasted ninety seven days. Around one hundred and twenty women were alive at the end of it. Gerda was among them. American troops of the Third Army’s 5th Infantry Division entered the abandoned bicycle factory at Voláry in Czechoslovakia where the survivors were sheltering on 6 May 1945, the day before her birthday. The first American officer she met was Lieutenant Kurt Klein, a German Jewish refugee who had returned to Europe in American uniform. They were married in Paris on 18 June 1946.
Her memoir All But My Life was first published in 1957. It went through more than seventy printings. The 1995 documentary One Survivor Remembers, made by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and based on her testimony, won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. Klein became a public speaker, addressing high school audiences across the United States, and a co-founder, with her husband, of the Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation for the promotion of citizenship and tolerance. President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
Kurt Klein died in Guatemala in 2002. Gerda Weissmann Klein died in Phoenix on 3 April 2022 at the age of ninety seven. The work of her later life was to make the catastrophe legible to American teenagers. She did it by sticking to the specifics of one woman’s experience and by refusing easy lessons. The American audiences who heard her left understanding what had happened in a way they had not understood it before.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards