She weighed just 68 pounds, her hair had turned white from starvation, and she had reached the point where surviving no longer felt possible—until an American soldier opened a door for her, and everything changed.
May 7, 1945. Volary, Czechoslovakia.
Gerda Weissmann could no longer walk. After more than six years of persecution, ghettos, forced labor camps, and a death march that stretched over 300 miles, her body had finally given out. Snow still clung to the ground. Her feet were wrapped in scraps of cloth because her shoes had disintegrated long ago. Each step felt like knives cutting into frozen bone.
She was only 20 years old, but she looked decades older. Malnutrition had drained the color from her skin and turned her once-dark hair completely white. She weighed less than many children. Her body was barely holding on.
What broke her, however, was not just the hunger or the cold. It was the absence of everyone she loved.
Her parents were gone. Her brother was gone. Friends from her hometown. Girls she had worked beside in labor camps. One by one, they had disappeared—shot, gassed, beaten, or left behind in the snow. Gerda survived when nearly everyone else did not, and she no longer knew whether that was a gift or a punishment.
The death march began in January 1945, when Nazi guards evacuated camps ahead of advancing Soviet forces. Hundreds of starving women were forced onto the roads in winter conditions, with no destination except exhaustion and death. Anyone who fell behind was shot. Bodies were left in ditches as warnings.
Gerda watched women collapse who had survived years of camps only to die days before liberation. By May, only about 120 women remained from a group that once numbered in the hundreds. They had marched for months, through hunger, snow, and terror.
Then, suddenly, they heard engines.
American vehicles.
The SS guards fled without warning, abandoning the women entirely. Liberation had arrived, but Gerda felt nothing. Hope had been beaten out of her long ago. She stood near the entrance of an abandoned bicycle factory, barely conscious, barely standing.
A jeep stopped nearby. American soldiers climbed out.
One of them walked toward the entrance. His name was Lieutenant Kurt Klein. He was 25 years old. Though he wore an American uniform, he spoke German fluently. He was Jewish, born in Germany, and had escaped to the United States in 1937. His parents had not been so lucky.
Kurt had liberated camps before. He had seen starvation, death, and despair. He thought he was prepared for anything.
Then he saw Gerda.
A skeletal young woman with white hair, hollow eyes, and rags wrapped around her feet. She swayed as she stood, barely upright. In that moment, something inside him shifted.
Kurt walked up to the door of the factory.
And he opened it for her.
He did not shout. He did not command. He did not rush her or touch her. He simply held the door open and gestured for her to go first.
For six years, Gerda had been shoved through doors—into trains, camps, barracks, and death. For six years, no one had treated her as a human being.
She later said, “He was the first person in six years who opened a door for me.”
That single gesture restored something the Nazis had tried to erase: dignity.
Kurt spoke gently. He asked if she was Jewish. He asked if there was anything he could do for her. No one had asked her that in years.
Gerda was taken to a hospital, where doctors were unsure she would survive. Her organs were failing. Her body was dangerously weak. Recovery seemed impossible.
Kurt kept coming back.
He brought food. He talked with her. He listened. He treated her not as a victim, but as a person. He told her about his own losses, including the parents he would never see again, murdered at Auschwitz.
They shared grief. They shared understanding. Slowly, Gerda began to recover.
As her body healed, something else grew.
They fell in love.
Not a fairy tale love that erased pain, but a bond forged between two people who had seen humanity at its worst and still believed in something better.
Kurt asked her to marry him.
In June 1946, just over a year after liberation, they were married in Paris. Gerda wore a wedding dress. She was no longer a prisoner, no longer a number. She was choosing a future.
They moved to the United States, settled in Buffalo, New York, and built a family. But they also made a promise: to speak for those who could not.
Gerda wrote her memoir, All But My Life. Together, she and Kurt spent decades educating students, soldiers, and leaders about the Holocaust. They spoke not from hatred, but from truth.
Their marriage lasted 57 years.
Kurt died in 2002. Gerda held his hand, just as he had once held the door for her.
Today, Gerda Weissmann Klein is remembered not only as a survivor, but as a witness. She turned unimaginable loss into testimony, and testimony into purpose.
Gerda Weissmann Klein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerda_Weissmann_Klein
One opened door became a lifetime of love, learning, and remembrance.
That is not just survival.
That is defiance.
That is victory.
