Holocaust death march survivor married the American soldier who liberated her
The Germans arrived in the Polish town of Bielsko in early September 1939, the first days of World War II. Most of the inhabitants came out to greet them, some waving Nazi flags, but not Bielsko’s 8000-odd Jews.
A German family commandeered the house where Julius Weissmann, a factory owner, lived with his wife, Helene, his son, Arthur, and 15-year-old daughter, Gerda. The Weissmanns were forced to move into the damp, cold basement that had no electricity or running water. A sign appeared in the garden. It read: ‘‘No dogs or Jews’’.
Arthur, a chemistry student, was taken away soon afterwards.
His family never saw or heard of him again. In
April 1942 his father, who had declined to flee Poland before the Nazis arrived because of ill health, was sent to AuschwitzBirkenau, where he died.
Two months later the Jewish women and children of Bielsko were rounded up and taken from their ghetto. The younger, fitter ones were separated from the older ones. Realising what was happening, Gerda tried to run to her mother. The head of the Judenrat, a Nazi-organised Jewish Council, threw her in the back of a truck, saying: ‘‘You’re too young to die.’’ The last words she heard from her mother were: ‘‘Be strong.’’ She also died in a concentration camp.
Gerda, who has died aged 97, spent the next three years working in labour camps on the German-Polish border, weaving cloth for the German army. She and the other female inmates were starved and beaten. Some were randomly killed. But the worst was yet to come. By January 1945, with Germany facing defeat, Gerda was one of more than 2000 women sent on a three-month, 550-kilometre ‘‘death march’’ to southern Czechoslovakia. They went days without food, and often they slept outside in the snow. Those who collapsed, or sought to escape, were shot.
Fewer than 150 reached the Czech town of Volary, where the survivors sheltered in an abandoned bicycle factory. Gerda said she survived because her father had ordered her to wear her ski boots if she was taken away.
Early on the morning of May 7, a day before her 21st birthday, the Germans fled. Standing in the doorway of the factory, Gerda saw a military vehicle approaching with the white star of the US Army on its bonnet.
A man jumped out and walked over to her. ‘‘He looked like a god to me,’’ she recalled. She was a skeletal figure weighing 31kg, with prematurely white hair. She was dressed in rags and had not washed properly in years. He asked if she spoke German or English. She replied, in German: ‘‘I am Jewish.’’ After a long pause, he said: ‘‘So am I.’’
The American soldier asked to see the
‘‘I have been in a place . . . where winning meant a crust of
Gerda Weissmann Klein
writer, Holocaust survivor b May 8, 1924 d April 3, 2022
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Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz other ‘‘ladies’’ – a form of address Gerda had not heard in six years. He held the door open for her in what she would later call a ‘‘moment of restoration of humanity, of humaneness, of dignity and freedom’’. She showed him what he later described as ‘‘an indescribable scene. There were women scattered over the floor on scraps of straw, some of them quite obviously with the mark of death on their faces’’.
The American was a young intelligence officer named Kurt Klein. He had been born in Germany, but his parents had sent him to the US in 1937 for safety. They promised to follow, but were arrested and they too had died in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Klein visited Gerda almost daily as she recovered in hospital. They married in Paris the following year.
Gerda Weissmann Klein was born and raised in Bielsko. After she married Klein, the couple settled in Buffalo, in New York state, where he ran a printing company. They had three children, who all survive her.
She learned English and began writing a weekly column for young readers of The Buffalo News as well as children’s books. She and her husband established the Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation to remember the Holocaust, and to promote tolerance and community service. She also wrote a memoir, All But My Life, in 1957; it was later turned into a film, One Survivor Remembers, that won an Oscar for the best short documentary in 1995.
She made one of the most moving speeches in the history of the Academy Awards. ‘‘I have been in a place for six incredible years where winning meant a crust of bread and to live another day,’’ she said.
‘‘Since the blessed day of my liberation I have asked the question, why am I here? I am no better. In my mind’s eye I see those years and days and those who never lived to see the magic of a boring evening at home. On their behalf I wish to thank you for honouring their memory, and you cannot do it in any better way than to realise that each of you who know the joy of freedom are winners.’’ – The Times
bread and to live another day.’’ Gerda Weissmann Klein in her 1995 Oscar acceptance speech