She weighed 68 pounds. Her hair had turned white at 20 years old.
On May 7, 1945, hours after Germany's surrender, American soldiers found her and roughly 120 other survivors abandoned in a bicycle factory in Volary, Czechoslovakia.
Gerda Weissmann had walked nearly 350 miles to get there.
The march started in Grünberg and lasted 106 days through winter snow. Her father's last order to her, before he was taken to Auschwitz in 1942, was to wear her ski boots. That single choice kept her feet alive when other women's did not.
She never saw her parents or brother again.
At Volary, a young lieutenant named Kurt Klein stepped toward her. She told him she was Jewish, unsure if he'd understand what that meant anymore.
He paused, then said two words: "So am I."
Kurt had fled Nazi Germany in 1937. His own parents had perished at Auschwitz, the same camp that took Gerda's.
Then he asked to see "the other ladies" — a form of address none of them had heard in six years.
He held the door open for her.
She later said that gesture alone gave her back something she thought was gone for good: her humanity.
They stayed in touch through letters. Diplomatic red tape delayed things by a year. Kurt got engaged to her in September 1945, and on June 18, 1946, they married in Paris.
They built a life in Buffalo, New York, where Kurt ran a printing business and Gerda raised their three children.
In 1957, she published her memoir, All But My Life. It has stayed in print for over 65 years and gone through more than 60 printings.
In 1995, the documentary based on it, One Survivor Remembers, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
Gerda partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center to build Holocaust education curriculum now used in more than 100,000 schools, reaching close to 10 million students.
In 2008, she founded Citizenship Counts with her granddaughter Alysa Cooper, teaching young Americans what citizenship actually costs and means.
On February 15, 2011, President Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Kurt passed away in 2002, after 56 years of marriage.
Gerda died on April 3, 2022, at age 97. She left behind 3 children, 8 grandchildren, and 18 great-grandchildren.
One door. Held open for three seconds. It changed the shape of an entire family tree still growing today.
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