CNN
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Holocaust survivor and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, Gerda Weissmann Klein, died April 3, her son Jim Klein confirmed to CNN. She was 97.
Born in Bielsko, Poland, on May 8, 1924, Klein had loved a “normal life” till the Nazis invaded in September 1939, in accordance with her obituary. She and her household have been pressured right into a ghetto and her dad and mom have been finally deported to Auschwitz. Klein by no means noticed them or her brother once more.
Klein endured years in slave labor and focus camps earlier than being pressured to stroll a 35-mile loss of life march from Poland to what’s now the Czech Republic.
Against all odds, Klein survived. US troops, together with Lt. Kurt Klein, the person who she would later marry, liberated her on May 7, 1945, on the eve of her twenty first birthday. At the time, she weighed simply 68 kilos and her hair had turned grey, the obituary says. She and Kurt married in Paris on June 18, 1946, and later settled in Buffalo, New York.
Klein wrote about her experiences in the course of the struggle in her autobiography, “All But My Life,” which was the idea for the Oscar and Emmy-winning HBO documentary, “One Survivor Remembers.”
Throughout the years, Klein acquired quite a few awards and accolades, together with in 1997, when President Clinton appointed her to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, and in 2010, when she acquired the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. She additionally addressed the United Nations General Assembly in January 2006 at its first observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, her son informed CNN.
“Our family has always believed that Mom and Dad’s greatest achievement is that they were able to emerge from the Holocaust and create for themselves and their children a completely normal life in the United States. That they and others who experienced such horror were able to do so, is to us nothing short of remarkable,” Jim Klein mentioned.