A Powerful Testiment of Courage

I was very touched yesterday to have been able to see and hear Gerda Weissmann Klein (one of the few remaining holocaust survivors) speak. She spoke to the high school world history students. Her story is an amazing story of the human spirit. Gerda was a young polish woman of seventeen/eighteen when separated from her family and sent to slave-labor camps. She endured three years there and then sent on a three-month death march from the Polish-German border to southern Czechoslovakia walking 350 miles (of the 2,000 that started the march only 120 remained when liberated).

Gerda Klein is an example of the resilience of the human heart and our need to always have hope. She told the students to never take anything or anyone for granted and asked them to look around them as they entered their homes after school, to invision what it would be like to never see your family, your room, your favorite things again. I know that many of the teens were touched by her story. I started reading her memoirs last night in the book, "All But My Life". What a powerful and inspirational woman!