The Hours After Read online

  The Hours After

  Also by Gerda Weissmann Klein

  All But My Life: A Memoir

  A Passion for Sharing

  The Blue Rose

  Promise of a New Spring

  The Hours After

  Letters of Love and Longing

  in War’s Aftermath

  Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein

  St. Martin’s Press / New York

  Note to Reader

  The letters reprinted here are translated from the original German and edited for

  readability by the authors.

  The authors have changed the names of some

  of the individuals mentioned in this book. The following names are pseudonyms:

  Gerta Teppel, Henry, Gary, Bäumler, Tania, Ronka, Suma,

  Esther, Janka, Izlu, Franka, and Mario Sarino.

  THE HOURS AFTER. Copyright © 2000 by Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein. All

  rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be

  used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the

  case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address

  St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Except as noted in the insert, all photographs

  are courtesy of Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein.

  Digital collage art used on the title page and on page 33 by Marc Yankus.

  Endpapers: Front, letter from Kurt Klein to Gerda Weissmann, December 4, 1945; back,

  letter from Gerda Weissmann to Kurt Klein, December 1, 1945.

  ISBN 0-312-24258-1

  ISBN 978-0-312-24258-9

  First Edition: February 2000

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Book design by Fritz Metsch

  As we pack up our bundles of old letters, we realize with deep gratitude that most of the sentiments contained in their faded pages have withstood the test of time. Having lost our parents at a young age, we looked for direction in the building of our marriage and the raising of a family in the legacy they left us. We therefore dedicate this book to the blessed memory of our parents, Ludwig and Alice Klein and Julius and Helene Weissmann. Added to what they imparted to us in their unfulfilled lives are also the values left to me by my beloved brother, Artur Weissmann. Acutely aware of our past, we entrust our family’s future to the next generation, with high hopes:

  Vivian, Jim, Alysa, Andrew, and Lindsay Ullman

  Leslie, Roger, Julie, Melissa, and Jessica Simon

  Jim, Lynn, Jennifer, and Alexa Klein.

  With all our love,

  Gerda Weissmann Klein

  Kurt Klein

  Acknowledgments

  When we were faced with the question of whether we should share our intimate thoughts with strangers, and whether those musings would be of interest to the general reader, a number of people greatly bolstered our confidence in the pursuit of this venture. Thus, our profound thanks goto:

  Dick and Ree Adler, Kary and Karen Antholis, Bob and Barbara Blashek, Judge Susan Ehrlich, Margaret Goetz, Naomi Goodell, Rick and Beth Reisboard, and Kit Weiss. Our gratitude must also go to Ted Weiss, for the countless hours spent poring over our just-completed translations of hundreds of letters and for helping us to select those of merit. We greatly appreciate his perspicacious suggestions in regard to our efforts. Warmest thanks as well to Michael Berenbaum—generous, treasured friend of long standing—for graciously introducing us to Ron Goldfarb, who became not only our literary agent but advisor, mentor, and caring friend. It was he who delivered our ungainly stack of paper into the hands of Diane Higgins: No author could ask for an editor with a more discerning eye and feeling heart. Thanks, too, to our copy editor, Susan Llewellyn, for her many insightful comments and suggestions.

  Lastly, acknowledgments are due to our children and grandchildren, all of whom assured us that they are not too embarrassed to read their parents’ and, as the case may be, grandparents’ love letters.

  Kurt Klein

  Gerda Weissmann Klein

  The Hours After

  Prologue

  The dusty, battered carton Kurt lugged from our garage was vaguely familiar. The jagged gray waterline around its bottom attested to its narrow escape from one summer’s flood in our basement in Buffalo. The brittle, dented lid bore the marks of the odds and ends that had been carelessly heaped on top of it in the crowded crawl space of the attic to which it had been relegated decades ago. It had become one of the discards that accrue over a period of forty years, and had survived a moment of indecision about its future value before our move to Arizona. As usual—and because we always lacked time to sort things out—it came along on the journey west. There it was, crammed into the far corner of a low shelf in the garage, among similar items awaiting ultimate disposition. Now, when Kurt came upon it while searching for a ball of string, it saw the light of day.

  I remembered that the box contained our letters to each other, written right after the end of the war. Almost from the day of our first encounter in that small town in Czechoslovakia just before the end of World War II, they represented our tentative probing of unfamiliarity and separation, then served to bridge the distance until our ultimate reunion and marriage about a year later.

  Once, many years earlier, searching for something in the attic, I pulled out one of my letters at random. Not having read German for decades, I found some of it archaic, if not pompous, and was embarrassed by what I had written. Thereafter I never looked at it again.

  This time I was prompted by a combination of amusement and curiosity. I reached into the depths of the carton and, with Kurt next to me, flung myself into these fragments from our early years. Opening the tightly folded pages revealed my youthful angular script, standing out bare and vulnerable in the Arizona afternoon sun.

  Suddenly I found myself back there, in the spring of my freedom, in the spring of my life. There was the moment when I first laid eyes on my liberator in the abandoned factory building in Volary, Czechoslovakia (today the Czech Republic)—emaciated among my dying and dead friends, standing in rags, I beheld this handsome young American from what then seemed a faraway, strange world of freedom and again heard his words, “It’s all over—don’t worry!” spoken compassionately, sorrow and outrage reflected on his face.

  That night, in the field hospital his unit had hastily established, I lay on fresh sheets, as I had not done in years, and began to pray again, for my parents, my brother, and for that American whose name I did not know. Since then, I have prayed for him every night of my life, for him, my husband.

  I spent the next two months lying on my hospital bunk, hovering between life and death—between slavery, degradation, and my newly won freedom—trying to come to terms with the turmoil within me. His visits connected me to a vital self I was trying to recover. Uplifted by the presence of this handsome young American officer, I slowly made my way to the beginning of a new life.

  Reading those letters, I remembered how all his gestures and mannerisms had exuded gentle power. The only uniforms of those in authority I had known before were those of our oppressors, Nazis with brutal, often smirking faces, reflecting only self-righteous arrogance.

  Soon, though I was in awe of him, he no longer seemed a stranger; rather, he had become a caring friend. I felt bereft every time he had to leave; the fear and horror of my recent past would engulf me again, and so it seemed natural to take refuge in my letters to him. In them I could share with him the memories of my sunny childhood, of my parents and my brother, my home and garden and all that had been mine until I was fifteen, when the Germans marched into my hometown, Bielsko, in southern Pola
nd. I was able to pour out to him the loss of my entire family, the years in the ghetto, then in the camps, capped by the death march to which our guards subjected us toward the end of the war. He shared his memories with me, and we learned how similar his environment and upbringing had been to mine, although he had grown up in Germany.

  With each letter, remembering how private and reticent both of us had been, I marveled at how much we had nevertheless revealed to each other from the very beginning. I recalled my attempts to picture the world of freedom he came from: It all seemed like a planet in a distant galaxy, and he, who was so close, so accessible to me, belonged there. He was solicitous, treating me with gallantry and respect, and I could not picture his life there.

  Reading on, I wept for that innocent, lonely girl, who tried so valiantly to conceal how deeply and desperately in love she was, never daring to hope that he might love her in return. As the afternoon lengthened into early evening, we reached out to each other, our hands touching, our thoughts back in that far-off time. Feelings of boundless joy emanated from the pages written when I found that he loved me and wanted to marry me.

  Reflected also was the pain of parting after our engagement and his departure for the United States, where he would be discharged from the army. This was followed by our long separation and desperate struggle to be reunited. I realized again that I had vaulted from childhood to adulthood virtually without transition, with no one to guide me. Instinctively, and because there were no psychiatrists or support groups, I had turned to the anchor that had helped me to survive before, and on which I was now to build my future: love.

  Pulling out a letter at random, I read this sentence: “I pray that we will have children who will inherit the best that is in us: the legacy of our lost parents, and that through them we will be reunited with those we lost.”

  The shrill ring of the phone interrupted my musings, and though I was tempted not to answer it, force of habit never lets me ignore such a summons. I was on the verge of tears, but they changed into laughter when the caller turned out to be one of our granddaughters, informing me that she was faxing her homework for Grandpa to look over and correct.

  Once again the present had put the past into proper perspective and provided a consolation for which we are immensely grateful.

  How often is it given us to relive a part of our lives, step by step, exactly as it unfolded, with all its anguish and ecstasy, in a far-off, dim past? Unexpectedly coming across letters Gerda and I had written each other more than a half century ago, at a time when we were trying to cope with the profound losses we had sustained in our personal lives, afforded us the chance to illumine with piercing clarity an aspect of our formative years that would otherwise have been obscured by the passage of time.

  We initially regarded this retrieval with a combination of wry amusement and some trepidation, not knowing what the letters would yield, considering the youthful ideals and ardor we knew they must reflect. We were also apprehensive about the potential discrepancy between recollection and reality.

  On closer scrutiny what we found was an almost perfectly preserved record of the time following our encounter under extraordinary circumstances, as well as our tentative attempts to get to know each other in the aftermath of the harrowing war years. In the process each of us had tried to support the other in specific ways. Finding this cache of letters transported us back to that time some fifty years ago.

  When, in the waning days of World War II, I approached the small Czech village of Volary, then known by its Sudeten-German name of Wallern, I could hardly have imagined that in a sense I was keeping my own “rendezvous with destiny.” White flags were flying from the rooftops of houses, indicating that the largely German-speaking population of the town was ready to surrender to our unit, the Second Regiment of the Fifth U.S. Infantry Division, part of General Patton’s Third Army.

  My driver and I were two of a small force of six specialists assigned to take the surrender, each two-man team dealing with a different aspect of the formalities: civilian, military, and medical. What we did not realize was that a very special situation awaited us in town: One of the last Nazi atrocities of the war had been played out in Volary, final stop along a route SS guards had marched one of two groups, each comprising two thousand young Jewish women slave laborers, a distance of 350 miles, throughout the bitter winter months of 1945. We now came face-to-face with the pitiful remnants of the one contingent, the other having taken a different route. Of the 120 survivors, more than 30 were to die in the days to come. They had been locked up in a vacant factory building, and their tormentors had tried to destroy the evidence of their inhumanity in an abortive attempt to blow up the structure.

  The following morning, amid a scene of surreal horror, I had an encounter that was to change the course of my life. Approaching the factory building, accompanied by a full medical unit, I became aware of the slight figure of a young woman standing next to the doorway that led inside. Trying to absorb the scene before me, I saw that she was completely emaciated, her hair matted and grayish; nevertheless a spark of humanity had somehow remained that made her stand out among her companions, those hollow-eyed automatons I had just seen shuffling across the factory courtyard. We had an exchange in German, and as she led me inside, she pointed toward the figures of her skeletal and dying companions, and I was stunned by the words she uttered next: “Noble be man/merciful and good. . . .” In that place, and at the end of her physical strength, she had been able to summon the lofty words the German poet Goethe had written almost two centuries earlier, admonishing humanity to retain the divine that is innate in us. They lent their own irony to the depth of deprivation and degradation to which these young women had been subjected.

  From that point on I was to be continually impressed by this young woman, by her bearing, her composure under those unspeakable conditions, and later by all she expressed, verbally and in writing, even after she fell critically ill and hovered between life and death in the makeshift field hospital in that small Czech town.

  What I witnessed at Volary, shocking and unprecedented as it was for me, did not come as a surprise; rather, it was the confirmation of my worst fears, based on my own understanding of the Nazi mentality.

  I was born and grew up in Germany, amid the turmoil and strife that marked the Weimar Republic in the era between the two great world wars. I was witness to the spread of Nazi ideology until it assumed proportions that proved unstoppable. After Hitler’s assumption of power, we, the Jews of Germany, slowly came to the reluctant conclusion that we were outsiders for whom there was no future in that country. In my case I had the good fortune to be able to leave two years before the outbreak of World War II, when the Nazi machinery of annihilation was still in its incipient stages.

  It was in June 1937 that I made my escape to the United States. Then, together with my sister and my brother, I was compelled to stand by impotently as our worst fears were realized step by step, carried out by a nation that had always prided itself on its cultural achievements. We could only watch in horror as our parents were inexorably drawn into the maelstrom of the Nazi design, to become a statistic—two of the six million Jews who would perish.

  In due time I was inducted into the American army and, having taken part in the campaigns that followed the invasion, now found myself at the border between Germany and what had been Czechoslovakia.

  In view of my own experience, it was only natural that I should take a special interest—aside from a humanitarian one—in this young woman, Gerda Weissmann. It occurred to me much later that instinctively my reaction to the barbaric treatment to which she had been subjected must have been tied to my images of my parents’ fate, and my guilt at being unable to rescue them. Thus it became a personal triumph for me when, despite the physicians’ prognoses, she surmounted her “night of crisis” and gradually made a full recovery. During the period immediately following my transfer from the Volary area, I would contrive to return to the hospital whenever m
y duties permitted, and it was a joy to watch this remarkable person blossom and once again become the positive, compassionate, and creative young woman she really was.

  Although fate was to play a trick on us by consigning us to long periods of separation, the ensuing series of letters that bridged those gaps shows that Gerda had made her way back to normality in the face of great odds. In a larger sense they show the trauma and obstacles most Jewish survivors had to face in postwar Germany in the course of rebuilding their shattered lives.

  Starting with the very first letter, written only ten days after we met, there emerged from our outpourings profound insights each of us in our own way had tried to wrest from the wreckage of our former lives. Our instincts at that time proved to have been pure and keenly focused, and they did much to see us through a critical and difficult period.

  Soon after our encounter, my army unit was transferred to another area, but I was able to stay in touch with Gerda Weissmann not only through correspondence but through occasional visits to the field hospital in Volary where she was convalescing. In the course of those visits I was able to extract an important promise from a captain of the division that had replaced ours: We knew even then that this Czech territory would be ceded to the Russians in the very near future. The officer assured me that he would see to it that Gerda and her companions were evacuated to points inside the American zone, provided they were able to be moved.

  By July 1945, Gerda had been discharged from the hospital, and with the Russian takeover now imminent the captain was as good as his word. Once Gerda and her companion (the others had gone elsewhere) reached my army post, I was able to arrange their move to Munich, as well as to obtain jobs for them with the American occupation forces.