The Sacred Duties of Democracy: Gerda Weissmann Klein

By: USC Shoah Foundation

Four generations: Gerda Klein with her great-granddaughter Kayla, granddaughter Alysa Cooper and her daughter Vivian Ullman

As Americans head to the polls on Election Day, Alysa Cooper, granddaughter of Holocaust Survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein, is working hard putting her grandmother’s values into practice.

Alysa is Executive Director of Citizenship Counts, a non-partisan organization started by Gerda in 2008 to educate middle and high school students on citizenship and encourage them to appreciate their rights and responsibilities as Americans.

Since arriving in the U.S. in 1946 after suffering unimaginable horrors and losing her entire family in the Holocaust, Gerda has cherished the basic democratic freedoms enjoyed by Americans on Election Day.

Alysa says. “My grandmother has always remembered where she came from and views the right to vote as being one of our sacred privileges.”

Today, Alysa says her grandmother, now 96, remains optimistic despite the uncertain political climate. “She says you have to believe that everyone that has the opportunity to vote wants the best for their country, for their children, and for the future.”

In the following clip from the testimony she gave to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995, Gerda described being liberated by the American Army and her first taste of freedom.

Gerda Klein on her liberation

Gerda describes being liberated by the United States Army and encountering her future husband, U.S. Army Lt. Kurt Klein, in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in May 1945. Gerda Klein was born Gerda Weissmann on May 8, 1924, in Bielsko, Poland. Gerda and her brother, Arthur, grew up relatively unaware of the spread of Nazism, until Poland was invaded in 1939; soon after, Arthur was taken away on a transport. In April 1942, Gerda and her parents were ordered into the Bielsko ghetto. Two months later, Gerda, her mother, and father were separated, and Gerda was sent to the Sosnowitz transit camp in Poland. She never saw her family again. After that, Gerda was moved from camp to camp. In January 1945, Gerda was sent on a death march from the Grünberg labor camp to the Helmbrechts labor camp in Germany and from there continued into Czechoslovakia. Gravely ill during the forced march, Gerda was liberated by the American Army, including her future husband, Lt. Kurt Klein, in Volary, Czechoslovakia. In August 1946, Gerda and Kurt were married in Paris before rreturning to Kurt's home in Buffalo, New York. There, Gerda would eventually work as a columnist for the Buffalo Evening-News. At the time of her interview in 1995, Gerda was living with her husband in Scottsdale, Arizona, and had three children and eight grandchildren.

USC Shoah Foundation

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