Read All but My Life: A Memoir Online
Authors: Gerda Weissmann Klein
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #Women, #History, #Holocaust
All but My Life: A Memoir (28 page)
Inevitably, we all revert to the core of our existence in moments of crisis and look for our lodestar. I have tried to follow mine ever since I left my parents and my childhood home. I know full well what saw me through those unspeakable years. It was the powerful memory of an evening at home. The living room of my childhood. My father smoking his pipe and reading the evening paper; my mother working on her needlepoint; my brother and I doing our homework; the lamps throwing a soft glow around the room as my cat, stretched out on the green-patterned carpet, purred softly. An evening at home. How many times I saw that picture–from my bunk in the camps, looking down on the barbed wire, during the bitterness of bone-chilling nights during the death march. Those evenings at home that I had thought dull and boring! The desire to know them once more became a driving force leading to survival. I never saw my childhood home again nor any member of my family. But their images at times merge into those of my husband, and are re-created in my children. I am home again.
After nearly a half century, the opportunity presented itself for my return to the scene of the last chapter of that dark past. My husband, my children, and my friends made a pilgrimage to Volary, Czechoslovakia, the place where I was liberated–the site where the curtain closed on the tragedy, where the stirring of love and hope blossomed again in the springtime of my life.
We went back in the autumn and, for Kurt and me, in the
autumn of our lives. Although everything had changed for me, nothing there seemed to have changed. As if frozen in time and memory, I stood again in the doorway of the abandoned factory where I first greeted the freedom I had dreamed about for so many years. I paused at the graves of my beloved friends who were never privileged to know the joy of freedom, the security of a loaf of bread, or the supreme happiness of holding a child in their arms. I listened to the gentle wind in the trees, to the screech of a bird, and I looked at the flickering memorial candles on the headstones of their graves. It brought up the unanswerable question that has haunted me ever since the day I left them there: Why?
autumn of our lives. Although everything had changed for me, nothing there seemed to have changed. As if frozen in time and memory, I stood again in the doorway of the abandoned factory where I first greeted the freedom I had dreamed about for so many years. I paused at the graves of my beloved friends who were never privileged to know the joy of freedom, the security of a loaf of bread, or the supreme happiness of holding a child in their arms. I listened to the gentle wind in the trees, to the screech of a bird, and I looked at the flickering memorial candles on the headstones of their graves. It brought up the unanswerable question that has haunted me ever since the day I left them there: Why?
I lingered at the window of what used to be the American field hospital, now a furniture factory, where I then lay in critical condition for many months. It was the window next to my double-decker bunk, in which I awoke on my first day of freedom to ask myself, “Why am I here? … I am no better!”
Standing there, I prayed, in the hope that perhaps through my life’s work I might have provided a fragment of the answer and given back a small part of what I have received.
My debt of gratitude is boundless: to my husband, Kurt, and to our children, Vivian and Jim Ullman, Leslie and Roger Simon, and Lynn and Jim Klein. I owe thanks to my friends, my community, and the countless people who over the years have given me their friendship and encouragement. In that connection, I feel compelled to mention the person who, perceptive of all that passed in my early years, generously opened the door to my career. To my publisher, Arthur W. Wang, my profoundest gratitude, however inadequately expressed, for his trust, his vision, and his friendship, which made so much of everything possible.
Gerda Weissmann Klein
Arizona, August 1994
Arizona, August 1994
The pictures of her parents and brother that the author carried in her shoe during the years she was in the hands of the Nazis.
Lt. Kurt Klein in 1945.
The author a few months after her liberation.
Reading clockwise from top left:
Kurt and Gerda Klein at the factory entrance in Volary, Czechoslovakia: Jim and Vivian Ullman: Leslie and Roger Simon: Lynn and Jim Klein
Kurt and Gerda Klein at the factory entrance in Volary, Czechoslovakia: Jim and Vivian Ullman: Leslie and Roger Simon: Lynn and Jim Klein
Copyright © 1957, 1995 by Gerda Weissmann Klein
All rights reserved
Hill and Wang
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
eISBN 9781466812420
First eBook Edition : February 2012
First revised edition, 1995
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klein, Gerda Weissmann, 1924–
All but my life / by Gerda Weissmann Klein.—A new, expanded ed.
p. cm.
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-2460-5
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0-8090-2460-8
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-1580-1
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-8090-1580-3
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0-8090-2460-8
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-1580-1
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-8090-1580-3
1. Klein, Gerda Weissmann, 1924–2. Jews—Poland—Bielsko-Biała—Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Personal) narratives. 4. Bielsko-Biała (Poland)—Biography. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Conscript labor—Germany. 6. Holocaust survivors—United States—Biography. 1. Title.
DS135.P6 K536 1995
940.53’18’092—dc20 [B]
94—43065 CIP
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