"Survival is an incredible privilege. [It] comes with a responsibility to speak for those who did not survive and whose names are not recorded," Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein said during a speech last night at Hillel.
Klein, an Academy Award winner who has appeared on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," "Nightline" and "60 Minutes," shared her memories with a group of around 40 students. Brought by Hillel to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, which will be observed April 15, Klein reminisced about a girl named Ilse who was her "alter-ego" and was sold with her to work in a German factory.
"Together, we were sold in the slave markets. My parents' destination was Auschwitz, and mine was a transit camp where they took young girls aged between 16 and 28. Industrialists ... needed slaves who knew German," she said.
According to Klein, one morning Ilse found a raspberry in a gutter and kept it in her pocket all day to give it to her friend.
"Imagine a world in which your [only] possession is a raspberry and you give it to a friend," Klein said.
Klein spent three years doing slave labor, which culminated in a "death march" to a Nazi camp.
According to Klein, there were over 1,000 people when the march began, but by the time the survivors were liberated by Allied forces, there were less than 120 left.
The march also took the life of her friend, Ilse. "She died in my arms," Klein said. "She asked me to go on for one more week. A week later, nearly to the hour, we were liberated by American forces."
Klein also related that on the night before they were freed, the Germans locked the remaining survivors in a room, to which they attached a time bomb. During the night, it started to rain, which prevented the bomb from going off, she said.
She recalled that two men in unfamiliar uniforms then came to them.
"I looked at [one of the men] and said, 'We are Jewish,'" she said. "His own voice betrayed his emotion when he said, 'So am I.'"
She later realized that these were American soldiers and that she had been saved by an American Jew. It was her interaction with him during those first moments that made her feel human again.
"I weighed 68 pounds. My hair was white. I was in rags. I had not had a bath in three years, and here was this handsome American soldier holding a door open for me," she said. She married the soldier a year later and eventually moved to Buffalo, New York.
"[That was] where fear changed into cautious security, and sorrow turned into joy," she said.
Her husband's constant presence prompted her to speak out about her experiences and helped her return to a normal life. "My husband used to say, 'Pain should be used to heal, and not wasted,'" she said.
Klein did not forget her pain, even when she was accepting an Academy Award for her 1995 film "One Survivor Remembers."
"I have been asked, 'What does it feel like, you a holocaust survivor, holding an Oscar?'" she said.
Although she confided that it felt very nice, she said that when she accepted the award, her thoughts were far away. "My thoughts were on the death march," she said.
She said that she was thinking about holding an old bowl, standing in a food line during a death march, wishing that there would be enough food for her.
If she got a potato after waiting in line, she said that she considered herself lucky.
"I don't want to live in a world where a potato is more important than an Oscar, and I don't want to live in a world where an Oscar is so important that we forget that some people don't have a potato," she said.
Klein also spoke about the special connection that she feels with both Boston and Tufts.
The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston features a story about her and Ilse. "One vignette ... tells the story of Ilse ... who gave a raspberry to her friend," she said.
Klein is also very fond of Tufts, since her son attended the university and met his current wife during the first semester of his freshman year at a Hillel Rosh Hashanah dinner.
"Consequently, I have not been a stranger to this place," she said. "You must realize that this particular audience is very dear to my heart."
