File:1957 Klein.jpg

Title

Gerda Weissmann Klein. All But My Life. New York, Hill and Wang 1957. <memoirs>

• See Gerda Weissmann Klein (F / Poland, 1924), Holocaust survivor

Abstract

"The experiences of a young Jewish girl in occupied Poland and Nazi concentration camps. When Gerda's father told her to wear her ski boots to the work camp in June, he could hardly know that they would help in her desperate fight for survival. Three years later, one of the two hundred slave girls remaining from the four thousand who were forced on a thousand-mile winter march, she took them off her frozen feet and extracted the family photographs which she had hidden in the soles. The Nazis had taken from her indeed all but her life. Every member of her family, every friend, died in the concentration camps. Gerda tells of many courageous people, lost now but for her story, and of her own unbelievable struggle, through the darkest hours of her people's history, to survive by hope alone. Despite incredible experiences, and the complete destruction of the world she knew and loved, she was able to begin a new life based on her compassion, love, and faith. In June 1946, a year after her liberation from the Nazis, Gerda Weissmann married Lt. Kurt Klein of the 5th U.S. Infantry Division. They moved to the United States and raised three children in Buffalo, New York. This is her story. -- Publisher description.