Gene Klein travels the world with his daughter, Jill Klein, to discuss surviving the Holocaust and the amazing power of human resilience. The pair came to Duke to speak with administrators about the power of resilience. Jill is a marketing professor at the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne and was a visiting professor at the Fuqua School of Business in 1994. She recently published a book, We Got the Water: Tracing My Family’s Path Through Auschwitz, which chronicles her father’s internment during World War II. The Chronicle’s Carleigh Stiehm sat down with the duo to discuss Gene Klein’s experience, the book and the importance of learning from our past.
The Chronicle: Mr. Klein, can you give us the background of your story?
Gene Klein: I was born in Czechoslovakia, and I went to school there. My family consisted of my father, mother and two older sisters. We learned foreign languages in school—in gymnasium, which was a combination of high school with a little junior college....I decided to take German and Italian. In only a few years, you were fluent because the teachers didn’t mess around.
In 1939 World War II started, Germany invaded Poland, and at the same time, this little part of Czechoslovakia—where I was living at the time—was given to Hungary, but we just continued going to school....Life was good....Then all of the killing started, and not just the Jews, all of the so called ‘undesirables’ too. And in the spring of 1944 my father was told to close his store, and we were told not to come to school anymore, and we were just waiting to see what was going to happen.
In May of 1944, the Hungarian soldiers collected all of the Jewish families, and they told us we were leaving, but we didn’t know where. Then we were put on this train, then we arrived at this place, that I later found out was Auschwitz—the killing machine. Men, women and children were separated. The officers decided who was going to die and who was going to live. My father was selected to be killed, and I was selected to do slave labor. I had no idea what happened to my mother and sisters. Then I was shipped from Auschwitz to a slave labor camp. People who weren’t killed outright died from slave labor, hunger and conditions.
In the fall of 1944, one of the officers asked the younger prisoners who speaks German, and I said that I did. There was a civilian German engineer who needed help for the next few weeks because he was surveying the road that was being built by the prisoners. And he began feeding me with his own food, which was very risky, and it actually saved my life because if I hadn’t gotten the extra nourishment, I would not have lasted.
In 1945, all of the work stopped. I turned 17 around that time, and our camp was evacuated. All those who could walk were marched to the next camp, and those who could not walk were taken to be killed because they were useless. And we ended up in a big collection camp where there was no work and very little food because they didn’t want to feed you if you weren’t doing any work. Basically, it was a camp where you went to die. Fortunately, the Russians were coming closer and closer to our camp, and the guards took off, and we were liberated by the Russians. I decided to go home instead of going to the hospital. And as I started my journey home, a young woman—who was still in her striped uniform—recognized me and told me the good news—my mother and sisters were still alive, and they had been liberated by the Americans. It was fantastic news because four out of the five of us had survived, which is unheard of.
TC: Can you talk a little about how you have learned to cope with being a survivor?
Jill Klein: When you talk about resilience, a critical aspect is how you interpret the bad event that has happened to you—what kind of sense you make of it [and] what kind of meaning you [give] it. Why has this happened? Even the situation that my father was in, which was so incredibly awful, there were still some choices he made about the mindset. The one freedom you had was your mental view of things. The key thing with coping strategies is figuring out how to move forward.
GK: When you see a lot of dead people, which a 16 year old boy is not very used to, especially when you first see it, you are very taken aback. That is someone’s brother, someone’s husband and someone’s son. Then your survival instinct kicks in, I don’t know where it came from, but it was there. But that is not enough, so you have to put a goal in your mind, what you have to do in order to survive. In my case, I knew my father was killed, but I didn’t know about my mother and two sisters. What happens if they survive and I perish and my father is dead then they lose two male members of the family? So that gave me an incentive to try really hard to survive. The other thing was, if they kill me, they win, and if I survive, then I win. So basically I had to tell myself these two things before I went to sleep every night and every morning when I woke up.
TC: Jill, why did you choose to write the book about your father’s experience rather than have a first hand account?
JK: I don’t think my dad was going to write the book himself. In the book, I tell the narrative, and it isn’t just my dad’s story, it is his two sister’s and his mom’s as well. The chapters tell the whole story, and once they are separated at Auschwitz, the chapters alternate between my dad and the women in his family. In between, I have theses essays, called recollection, and they are about the process of piecing together their story. I figured out that they were probably on the first train of the Hungarian deportation of the Jews, and I explain in the book how I pieced that together. But it also about what it was like for me to talk to them. The good and the bad side of having to ask these questions—about an unspeakable time—to your own family.
GK: What really made me emotional about Jill’s book, and I am not just saying that because she is my daughter, was when she covered my father’s walk through the camp. She follows the path my father took through Auschwitz after he was sent to the gas chambers. She walks with him to the gas chamber, holding hands.
JK: I reconstruct his path using photos and I say, ‘this is the part we all know, but no one remembers,’ because no one who was with him survived. It is very sad because at the end of the book, we reach the chamber together and I have to leave him. And that is the part of the book when the family kind of acknowledges that he isn’t coming home. Because until then, there was still hope. Even though they knew what him being sent to the chambers meant, it was all such chaos, they had hope that he was coming back.
TC: Has it been difficult for you to retell your story over the years?
GK: Not really. Usually I just whiz through it, but in some sessions, I break down about three times. When I get to certain parts, like when the German engineer gave me his food and when I was liberated, I break down sometimes. Fortunately, I kind of have the personality that when it is over, I forget about it. A lot of the survivors can’t do that. Their past is with them everyday for the rest of their life. But you can’t ruin your life about what happened in the past. I can bring it up and talk about it, and then put it back. I concentrate on enjoying life.
TC: Do you still see this level of bigotry in the world today?
GK: Definitely, first there have been several Auschwitzs, several holocausts since World War II. Yugoslavia, and people are killing each other in Africa. And there is still anti-Semitism, like in Hungary. It is one of those things that just doesn’t stop. It is very discouraging, because you ask, didn’t you learn anything? But I think a lot of people didn’t.
JK: The message of the story about the German engineer giving my dad his food is that, my dad doesn’t hate the Germans. Everyone is an individual, and you can’t lump everyone together. My dad has every right in the world to be angry with a group of people, but he doesn’t because he has seen the power of an individual. We have to remember that before we lump people together.
TC: What do you think the youth of today should learn from your experience?
GK: It is interesting because you think, is there anything good that has come from this, and in a way there is. Nothing will be as bad as this. There is nothing that I can go through in the rest of my life that can be as bad as that.
JK: The biggest thing I take from his story is that you don’t stand by when people are being bullied. All of this would have been prevented if, when it all started, people did not let others be singled out. If people had just stood up, in small ways, this could have been stopped. That is what everyone should take from this. You don’t stand by when somebody is being bullied, it is your responsibility to step in.
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