Gerda Weissmann Klein (1924-2022) was born on May 8, 1924 in Bielsko, Poland. Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Gerda's brother, Arthur, and other Jewish men were ordered to report for forced labor. Eventually, Gerda and her parents learned that this had been a ruse. The men had actually been deported east in freight trains and forced across the border into Soviet occupied territory. In Bielsko, Nazi German authorities imposed anti-Jewish measures. Eventually, Gerda and her parents, Helene and Julius, were imprisoned in the Bielsko ghetto.
In June 1942, when the Germans liquidated the ghetto, Gerda was separated from her parents. She was sent to the Bolkenhain labor camp, where she was forced to work in a textile factory. From there, she was transferred to several other camps before being forced on a death march. American soldiers liberated her in early May 1945, in the Czech town of Volary. In 1946, she married Kurt Klein, one of her liberators. Klein was a German Jew who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1937. Gerda's parents and brother did not survive the Holocaust.
They needed German-speaking people to be trained, so he bought all of us for a place called Bolkenhain which was a new weaving camp in Oberschlesien [Upper Silesia]. And in fact this is where we went. In all fairness I must say that uh that camp was probably better than than most of certainly what followed because it was new. You see, we were only fifty girls there. And the person who became our lagerfuehrerin [camp leader], at first sight she looked like a bulldog and then I thought she's going to tear us limb from limb, and she was a very kind person. She was probably chosen for her looks but we all who were in captivity under her owe her a debt of gratitude. And I think by her very decency she pinned a lie to the lips of all who said they had no choice. I won't say she particularly loved us. She saved my life once for which I'll be eternally grateful. There was as far as I know, and I do know, that as long as we were there, and later in a place called Landeshut where she also was, nobody was sent to Auschwitz from our camp, from those two camps. And uh she showed that people could help individually and she did. I only met, during my entire years under the Nazis for six years, I only met two who were really kind and I think that they should be singled out for that. Frau..her name was Frau Kuegler.
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