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March 3, 2000/26 Adar 1, 5760, Vol. 52, No.26
Reality exceeds dreams
LENI REISS
Senior Contributing Editor
Gerda and Kurt Klein at home in Scottsdale, with a copy of the newly published book they co-authored.
Photo by Leni Reiss
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Gerda Klein's most treasured Oscar is not necessarily the one she won in 1996 from the Academy of Arts and Sciences for her personal story of liberation, the short documentary titled "One Survivor Remembers."
The world-famous author, lecturer and humanitarian also revels in the 18 mock "Academy Awards" presented to her several years earlier from her three children and eight grandchildren for categories including "best mother," "best orator" and "best baby sitter."
Her trophies include "lifetime achievement awards," both tongue-in-cheek and from the heart, ranging from "camouflaging chipped serving platters with appropriate placement of lettuce and parsley," to "making family feel like honored guests and making guests feel like family."
The latter was the case recently when Gerda and her husband, Kurt Klein, welcomed a visitor into their Scottsdale residence for a home-cooked lunch and three hours of conversation on a multitude of subjects including "The Hours After."
The recently published book, a collection of letters Gerda and Kurt wrote to each other in the aftermath of World War II, while Gerda moved from hospitals to DP camps and Kurt, a German-born American citizen traveled with his U.S. army unit, is all the more poignant in a time when letter writing truly has all but become a lost art.
In May 1945, Kurt worked alongside his fellow GIs in liberating the Nazi slave labor camp where Holocaust survivor Gerda was being held captive. In "The Hours After," Kurt writes that he went into the war to fight, "expecting ugliness and pain, but finding love."
For many years, the book's 300-plus letters, which touchingly document the redemptive power of love in the face of loss, sat in a carton in the Klein's garage. Three years ago, in a burst of spring-cleaning, "Kurt carried the box outside to our patio, and sitting in the Arizona sunshine we started to go through them," Gerda recalls.
Kurt clarifies that the letters "were intimate and definitely not written for publication."
Nevertheless, he says, "We are well aware that our children are interested in our life stories, and we realized that one day they would come across them. So unless we translated them (from the original German) for the sake of chronicling our family history, they would be useless."
"We spent the summer of '97 reading and re-reading and translating," says Gerda. "By and large, our Holocaust story is well known," she says. "What we share in the letters is how we rebuilt our lives."
"When I looked at them," she muses, "(I realized that) not by any stretch of the imagination could I imagine what our lives together would become. I am 75; Kurt is 80. Working together on this book has enabled us to look back and see what our dreams were and to appreciate all that we have accomplished."
"We learned that it is possible to build a life after great adversity," Kurt says.
"I never thought there would be such hard times (following liberation)," Gerda says. "But liberation broke down the walls of pretense and I had to confront the fact that even with freedom, the past couldn't be restored. But to see how far we have come gives great perspective to our lives. Whatever dreams we had have been far exceeded by reality."
"In this new millennium," says Kurt, " I want to do my part to ensure that the horrors of the past century are not repeated. I want to help apply the lessons of the Holocaust to the general world, not just the Jewish world. Jews will never live in peace if the rest of the world doesn't live in peace."
"And we continue to appreciate - and not take for granted - the privilege and obligations of freedom," Gerda says.
To this end, the Kleins have begun the new century with a full plate of philanthropic and educational ventures, including reaching out to young audiences on subjects such as bigotry, discrimination and racism.
They regularly appear before American and international audiences in behalf of humanitarian causes and now are concentrating their efforts on the fight against hunger.
"I remember how hungry I was," Gerda says.
"We strive to teach people to educate their hearts," adds Kurt.
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