Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein dies at 97
Weissmann Klein, a Holocaust survivor who spent her life writing and speaking about hope and humanity, died in Phoenix on Sunday. She was 97.
Klein, a Jew from Poland, survived three years of concentration camps and slave labor, starting when she was 15 years old. Her entire family died during the Holocaust.
Klein was one of fewer than 120 of 2,000 Jewish women who survived a 350-mile Nazi “death march” through Europe in 1945.
Then she spent the rest of her life sharing her story in hopes of preventing such tragedy from occurring again.
She authored 10 books, accepted an Emmy and an Oscar for a documentary based on her life story and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In 2008, she started Citizenship Counts, a national nonprofit organization that aims to educate young people on the tenets of citizenship and encourage them to appreciate their rights and responsibilities as Americans.
Klein was preceded in death by her husband, Kurt Klein, whom she met on May 7, 1945, the day she was liberated. Klein was a refugee from Germany who had become a U. S. Army intelligence officer.
The Kleins moved to Phoenix in 1985. Klein is survived by her three chilGerda dren, eight grandchildren and 18 greatgrandchildren.
“It’s very comforting for us to know she has inspired and helped so many people,” her daughter Vivian Ullman said.
‘What if we have incredible strength?’
During the 1945 “death march,” Klein and others were exposed to harsh winter elements and suffered starvation, and many met their fate at the hands of arbitrary execution.
The march came after Klein spent nearly three years of similar conditions
at Nazi work camps and three years before that living in her childhood basement in Poland hiding from the Nazis. She survived.
Not because of superior physical strength or health, she told The Arizona Republic in 2020, but because of the optimism she never lost, which translated to hope that the suffering would end, which led to strength beyond what she knew she possessed.
“If we have hope even in the darkest moments, I think it’s the most important weapon,” Klein said. ‘We all have an incredible amount of strength that we are not familiar with until we are really tested.”
She said it’s important not to let one’s mind wander into the dark doubting corners of fear.
“I think we should always have hope and never give into the frightening thoughts,” Klein said. “We always have the ‘what ifs.’ Well, what if we have incredible strength?”
A blue dress
Klein became a beacon of hope once more when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
People from all over the world reached out to Klein for advice to manage the fear and uncertainty that ran rampant in the early days of the pandemic.
Instead of finding the outreach overwhelming,
she was touched. And instead of dismissing the concerns as incomparable to what she went through, she embraced them with empathy and offered advice without judgment.
“Even in the most difficult times, you have to have hope. Hope is the light to the future, to everything,” Klein told The Republic in 2020.
She talked about the power of optimism and imagination.
Klein said the bitterness of the cold and the bitterness of her hunger would become unbearable during the years of intense labor at Nazi camps. She’d nearly lost the hope she worked so hard to maintain.
It was then that she allowed her mind to wander into fantasy.
She’d think about the parties she’d attend when she was free to go home and would contemplate the color of dress she’d wear. She’d always settle on blue.
“You can take such a stupid thing, such nonsense and occupy your mind with it,” Klein said. “It’s an escape. Any escape to fantasy at a difficult time is a good thing.”
On her birthday in 2020, her family threw a blue-dress party over Zoom.
“It really tickled her,” Ullman said. “She had such a vivid imagination, and that’s one of the things that helped her survive.”
The family will hold a private service but plans to host a public Zoom memorial in the coming weeks.