All But My Life

Gerta Wiseman Kline

Book talk

All But My Life

• This book is a true story about Gerta’s life.• Gerda survived the ghetto, deportation, slave-

labor camps, and the infamous three-month death march from the Polish-German border to southern Czechoslovakia. As the sole survivor of her family, she has provided the world a glimpse of her ordeal through her written and oral testimonies.

Excerpt from Part 1, Chapter 1 “ The hands of the watch are cruel. Slowly they blur into its face. I lift my

eyes to the window. Everything looks unfamiliar, as in a dream. Several motorcycles roar down the street. The cyclists wear green-gray uniforms and I hear voices. First a few, and then many, shouting something that is impossible and unreal. "Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!" And the watch says 9:10. I did not know then that an invisible curtain had parted and that I walked on an unseen stage to play a part in a tragedy that was to last six years.

It was September 3, 1939, Sunday morning. We had spent a sleepless night in the damp, chilly basement of our house while the shells and bombs fell. At one point in the evening when Papa, Mama, my brother Arthur, then nineteen, were huddled in bewildered silence, my cat Schmutzi began to meow outside in the garden and Arthur stepped outside to let her in. He had come back with a bullet hole in his trousers."A bullet?""There is shooting from the roofs, the Germans are coming!"

• “I pray you never stand at any crossroads in your own lives, but if you do, if the darkness seems so total, if you think there is no way out, remember, never ever give up. The darker the night, the brighter the dawn, and when it gets really, really dark, this is when one sees the true brilliance of the stars.”

• Due to her personality and her undeniable abilities as an author, historian, and columnist, Klein has a become an internationally recognized motivational speaker. She also was given the Presidential

Medal of Freedom in 2011.

• If you are interested in the Holocaust and the remarkable stories of survival, you need to read this book.