For Pat Gallagher, a visit from a holocaust survivor next month is the culmination of a 14-year friendship, rich in meaning and poignant with remembrance.
Gallagher, an instructional facilitator at the Kent Mountainview Academy, along with students of the Kent School District, will be welcoming Gerda Weissman Klein, a renowned human rights speaker and Nazi labor-camp survivor, when she comes to speak June 7 at a holocaust symposium that Gallagher has organized.
Klein, whose memoir “All But My Life” was the basis of the Oscar-winning documentary “One Survivor Remembers,” has been a friend of Gallagher’s since a chance meeting in 1996, when the Kent educator was attending a holocaust symposium in Washington, D.C.
Gallagher happened to be walking through the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, when his attention was riveted by the face and voice of a survivor, flashing on film clips being shown at an amphitheater there. The images were of Klein, speaking eloquently of the need to fight hatred and violence.
“I had tears coming down my face,” Gallagher said, from the power of her words. “It was like she was speaking to me.”
Gallagher sought out and purchased one of Klein’s books that day.
Two days later at the symposium, he was passing by a group of people in a meeting room, surrounding someone who was speaking.
That someone happened to be Klein.
Both of them saw each other and something happened.
“She looks up, and our eyes connected,” Gallagher said.
Their eyes locked on each other, Klein stopped speaking to the group and walked up to Gallagher. She greeted him warmly, as if they had always known each other, and signed his book.
“To Pat, who cares,” she wrote, simply but from the heart.
In that moment, a friendship was born. And ever since, the two have stayed in touch, with Gallagher sending his special friend a dozen roses every year for her birthday. The bouquet he’ll send is always 11 red roses and one white. The white one Klein will take out of the bouquet and lay in front of the photo of her late husband Kurt Klein, the German-born U.S. soldier who had liberated her camp and later fell in love with her.
The poignancy of Klein’s story – her parents sent to Auschwitz death camp, her survival of labor camps and a death march, as well as the subsequent love she found in her liberator – put a stamp of humanity on the inhuman conditions of the holocaust.
Combined with her passion for justice and compassion, it’s a powerful statement that Klein delivers as a human-rights speaker.
“She’s a gifted communicator,” Gallagher said. “She is extremely perceptive. It is just uncanny.”
Uncanny is the fact Klein survived at all.
A teenager in Poland when the Nazis rounded up her family in 1942 and sent her parents to Auschwitz and herself to several forced-labor camps, Klein managed to stay alive. In 1945, with the Allies advancing, she was one of 2,000 girls put on a death march by the Nazis. At the end of more than three months, she was just one of 115 survivors.
“They froze to death at night, or starved to death,” Gallagher said of the girls, noting that Klein’s best friend Ilse died on that march in Klein’s arms, burning with fever.
“Gerda (Klein) woke up – Ilse did not,” he said, of one terrible night on that march.
In May 1945, Klein’s camp in Czechoslavakia was liberated. By then she weighed just 68 pounds and her hair had turned white. One of her liberators, a young German Jew who had gone to America and returned as an Allied soldier, was the first outside person in years who treated the traumatized woman with kindness and respect, Gallagher said.
They remained in touch through Klein’s recovery, and fell in love, marrying in 1946. They came to the U.S. and settled in Buffalo, NY, raising three children. Through the years, Klein spoke to others about her experiences and became deeply involved in charities. In 1998, the couple started the Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation, which focuses on helping young people promote tolerance and compassion in the world through community service and education.
Gallagher said that Klein’s message, as well as that of other holocaust survivors who will speak at this year’s symposium, are meaningful to students here.
“For 14 years, I’ve been wanting to bring her here,” he said, noting the cost had been prohibitive. But this year, thanks to Klein’s ongoing desire to speak at Gallagher’s symposium, and with help from several corporate sponsors, her visit has been made possible.
Her June 7 speaking engagement at Kent-Meridian High School is the third and final event in the symposium that Gallagher organizes annually.
There will be two other events in the symposium: On May 28, a child survivor of the holocaust, Peter Metzelaar, will speak at Kent-Meridian. And on June 3 at Cedar Heights Middle School, Buchenwald death camp liberator Leo Hymas, and camp survivor Robbie Waismen, will reunite and speak.
Selected students from six area schools will be the audience: Kent Mountainview Academy, Kent Phoenix Academy, Kent-Meridian, Cedar Heights Middle School, Meridian Middle School and Seattle Christian School.
Gallagher said that the symposiums, which include training for how students should talk to the survivors, as well as the opportunity to connect with them personally, have put Kent on the map, as far as awareness in holocaust-survivor community.
“This is the place to come,” Gallagher said of Kent. “They know how to treat survivors.”
For the students, the symposium offers them a chance to connect with history and life choices on a deeply personal level.
“We’ve seen the power that can come from just one person,” Gallagher said. “This is people dealing with people. They talk about love. They talk about overcoming obstacles.”
The most poignant moment, Gallagher added, is when the students are allowed to come up to the stage with the survivor. The response on both sides is overwhelmingly emotional, with hugs and hand grasps.
“They will just swamp the person – it is so precious to watch,” Gallagher said.
“They (the students) don’t know it yet, but when flesh touches flesh, that’s the catalyst.”
The Kent Reporter will be airing Klein’s discussion with Kent students live on June 7. More details on that event to be publicized closer to the event, on this Web site.
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