In June 1942 in Bielitz, Poland, Gerda Weissmann was sent to the left line and a slave labor camp, her mother to the right and to Auschwitz. Her father had been taken the day before, his ill health sentencing him quickly to the gas chamber. Gerda's brother, Arthur, was already in a labor camp. As Gerda was taken away, above the screams she heard her mother's voice, "Be strong!" And again like an echo, "Be strong!"
Gerda Weissmann's strength came from an overpowering belief in God and in the faith of her father, who looked up from his Bible hours before his train departed to Auschwitz and told her to wear her ski boots when she left the next morning. "But Papa, skiing shoes in June?" How could he have known that three years later those boots would keep her alive on a 1,000-mile death march in the dead of winter through Germany to Czechoslovakia?But how did he know so many things? Soon after her brother Arthur received his call to leave, Gerda stood at a window thinking about the families that committed suicide rather than be parted. Her papa put a hand on her shoulder - she didn't move. Then placing a hand on the nape of her neck, he turned her around and said, "Whatever you are thinking now is wrong. It is cowardly. Promise me that no matter what happens you will never do it - I want your promise now." Gerda made the promise as a sacred vow.
Years later, in desperation, she stood looking at a train track wishing she could jump to end the daylong unloading of heavy bundles of flax at an inhuman pace and the nightlong job of unloading coal, her punishment for refusing the attentions of a German officer. "As I gazed down at the tracks, I felt a strange sensation on my neck. Suddenly I realized why it was so familiar. I remembered my thoughts about death when I stood in my parents' bedroom after Arthur had left, and how Papa had turned me, grasping my neck to make me look into his eyes, forcing me to promise that I would never give up. Strange that my neck should trouble me now, at the precise moment when death seemed the only solution!"
While Gerda's family and every friend she became close to died before liberation, her story radiates with hope and life. Gerda tells about her grandfather, who had been grabbed by Russian soldiers while walking in the woods one day. Sentenced to life imprisonment in Siberia, the old man surprised his family by walking in one day years later, freed by the Bolsheviks. As his elderly wife opened the door, Gerda tells, "An old man staggered in. He first went to his precious Bibles and kissed them, then he embraced his wife and children." When he saw his son, Gerda's father, 1-year-old Arthur was brought along. Gerda continues, "The old man had greeted Papa with the words Jacob had spoken when Joseph had brought his children for benediction. `I had not thought to see thy face again and lo, God hath shewed me also thy seed.' "
Gerda also remembers the last night her parents were together: "And so they talked on through the night, animated and happy. They faced what the morning would bring with the only weapon they had - their love for each other. Love is great, love is the foundation of nobility, it conquers obstacles and is a deep well of truth and strength. After hearing my parents talk that night I began to understand the greatness of their love. Their courage ignited within me a spark that continued to glow through the years of misery and defeat. The memory of their love - my only legacy - sustained me in happy and unhappy times in Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Switzerland, England. It is still part of me here in America."
Miraculously Gerda Weissmann moved through camps and terror - always in the right line, choosing the right thing, even finding that the bomb the Germans set to blow up the 120 survivors of 2,000 marchers does not explode. "The war is over! You can come out!" Gerda met Lt. Kurt Klein of the 5th U.S. Infantry Division, who not only physically liberated her but came back to the hospital where she was struggling to stay alive - wasted away to 68 pounds - to encourage her. A year after liberation, she and Klein were married.
"All But My Life" is, then, a love story, a tale of faith, of a father's hands placed on a child's head in benediction and blessing. During a telephone interview from her home in Scottsdale, Ariz., Gerda Weissmann Klein said, "I drew such inspiration from the stories of my family. In times of stress they can pull you through."
Klein also wrote "A Promise of Spring: The Holocaust and Renewal" (Russell Books; 1981; $4.95), a children's book that sensitively tells young people about the survivors, and says, "Listen, listen well to the tale of what they have seen, what they have gone through. For you are the new spring in the forest of the world."