Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein remembers: See the video

A raspberry, on a dusted leaf.

That was the gift Gerda Weissman Klein’s best friend gave to her. It was a bright spark on a dark night in a Nazi labor camp.

Ilse had found the berry in a ditch on her way to the factory where the two teenage girls worked. She kept the precious fruit in her pocket all day, presenting it to Gerda that night, after Gerda had been beaten by guards.

“Can you conceive of a world in which your entire possession becomes one raspberry, and to give this treasure to your friend?” Klein asked her audience Monday, bathed in the glow of a single light onstage at the Kent-Meridian High School Performing Arts Center.

Ilse, she said, was as bonded to her as a sister, as they struggled to survive three years of forced labor, and then, finally, a death march, as the Nazis faced certain defeat.

“She died in my arms in a wet meadow in Czechoslovakia.”

Klein, a holocaust survivor whose memoir became the Oscar-winning documentary “One Survivor Remembers,” was a guest speaker at the Kent School District’s annual Holocaust Survivors Symposium. Now in its 16th year, the event brings together local students with the real-life survivors and liberators of the Nazi death camps. It is a poignant time for both sets of people – the older generation who share their stories, and the younger generation, who are roughly the same age as the survivors when the holocaust began.

For Klein, the story of the holocaust, and her lecture Monday, are woven around her bond with Ilse, her childhood friend, who in addition to a precious raspberry, ultimately gave her a reason to keep living.

“I was 15 years old when a wave of hatred rose up over Europe,” Klein said, when the Nazis’ sweep of terror, which she likened to a tsunami, flooded Europe.

“I found myself on a desolate beach, pretty much alone, except for one friend I had known mostly my whole life…Here we were, bereft of our families, and here we were, sisters to the other.”

Klein and Ilse were sent – “sold,” she said – to a succession of slave-labor camps through the war. Their bond deepened as they lived through the daily brutalities of life under the Nazis.

In January 1945, with the Allies literally on the Nazis’ doorstep, Klein and Ilse were among 2,000 women and girls rounded up by the Nazis and put on a forced march, to be sent to a death camp near Berlin.

On the dawn of May 7, when the Allied liberators came to rescue the group, who had been locked in a factory, “there were fewer than 120 left,” Klein said.

Ilse had died in that meadow only a week before.

“She gave me the gift of her own life,” Klein said.

The night Ilse died, burning with fever, she asked Klein to do what sounded like a very simple thing, although it was not, given the circumstances.

“She asked me to go on another week. A week, I can tell you, was a very long time.”

Klein survived that week. That was long enough to meet her Allied liberators. Klein, who at that point weighed just 68 pounds, had not bathed in three years and whose hair had turned completely white, told the American soldier who approached her, “I am a Jew, you know.”

He responded that he was, also.

“This was the greatest moment of life,” Klein told her audience Monday of her first meeting with her future husband, a German-born Jew named Kurt Klein. “Not only to be liberated by an American, but an American Jew.”

Kurt Klein treated the young woman respectfully, holding a door open for her at the factory during that first meeting.

“In this simple gesture, he restored me to humanity again,” she said.

Klein described what she would go on to do – to marry Kurt in Paris, to emigrate to America, and, among the greatest gifts of all, to become an American.

“I love it with a love that only someone who has been homeless and hungry can have,” she said of her adopted homeland. “I would like to assure you, from experience, there is no better place in the world.”

That freedom is a privilege and birthright Klein urged her audience to never forget.

“Through the miracle of having been born free, there is nothing you cannot achieve,” she said. “I know you will accomplish what we in slavery have dreamed about.”

Klein also outlined her hope, to her young audience, that they would remember the legacy they have inherited, from those victims of the holocaust whose voices had been silenced.

“You are their spiritual heirs, and you must know the legacy that was left to you,” she said, encouraging students to visit the places, like the D-Day beaches of Normandy, where so many Americans died fighting to save the ideals of their country, and to stop the encroachment of governments that denied basic human rights.

“In this new spring, which is yours, you can forge a peace and a fulfillment of your dreams,” she said.

She spoke with a wryness, however, of the Oscar she won in 1995 for the short documentary film “A Survivor Remembers,” which was based on her memoir “All But My Life.”

“I don’t want to live in a world where an Oscar is more important than a potato,” she quipped. “Thirty-five million Americans will not have enough food tonight, and millions across the world. And you can do something about it.”

Students listening to Klein’s discussion came away impressed by her message.

“Seeing her was a dream come true,” said Simone Elerecht, 15, a student at the Kent Mountainview Academy. “I know that I’m lucky to be in the land of the free – I just didn’t know how lucky.”

“She seems just really nice, and really powerful,” said Benton Coblentz, 13, also a KMVA student.

Nicolette Fenton, a parent of a student in the audience, said she was overwhelmed.

“You just can’t even imagine the struggles she went through. Yet here she is, talking to the children and inspiring them,” Fenton said. “It’s hard to find the words.”

Klein was the last of the guest speakers at this year’s holocaust symposium. On May 28, a child survivor of the holocaust, Peter Metzelaar, spoke Kent-Meridian. On June 3 at Cedar Heights Middle School, Buchenwald death camp liberator Leo Hymas, and camp survivor Robbie Waismen, reunited and spoke.

Selected students from five area schools were in the audience: Kent Mountain View Academy, Kent Phoenix Academy, Kent-Meridian, Cedar Heights Middle School and Meridian Middle School.

The organizer of the event was Pat Gallagher, an instructional facilitator at KMVA. To learn more about the annual symposium, contact him at 253-373-6957, or via e-mail at patrick.gallagher@kent.k12.wa.us.

Be involved

With assistance from her family, holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein has started a new nonprofit foundation aimed at helping young people understand the principles of civics and democracy.

That entity, Citizenship Counts, has created a textbook and a number of school activities participants can do, including hosting local naturalization ceremonies for immigrants earning American citizenship.

To learn more about Citizenship Counts, go online to www.citizenshipcounts.org.