By Anna Guido
Enquirer contributor

INDIAN HILL - The last time Gerda Weismann Klein saw her father, he told her to wear her ski boots.

That advice saved her life.

Klein, who lived in Bielsko, Poland, was 15 when Nazi Germany invaded her country in 1939, touching off World War II. Eventually, she and thousands of other Polish Jews were enslaved.

When she was 18, a 350-mile death march to a concentration camp caused many of the slave laborers to perish. Klein said the ski boots protected her feet during the treacherous march.

"I saw girls breaking off their toes."

On Friday, Klein spoke at Cincinnati Country Day School, but as more than just a Holocaust survivor. Upper School students and faculty - about 450 in all - packed the John Whitman Keeler Memorial Theater to hear Klein share some of her most personal memories.

"I'd like to talk to you, not as a former inmate of concentration camps, but as a grandmother," she said, assuring the audience that her stories would be inspiring, not horrific.

"I will not talk about things that will send you home with unspeakable nightmares," she said. "I will speak to you of the love, kindness and sharing that existed in the darkness."

The day her concentration camp was liberated, Klein said, she weighed 68 pounds, had gray hair and hadn't bathed in three years.

Klein's dream of freedom was realized that day, along with her dream of family and children. Her liberator, American Army Intelligence officer Kurt Klein, married her three years later. With this story, Klein told students "to never give up your dreams."

A speaker, writer and columnist, Klein - who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz. - deals with her past by focusing on uplifting aspects of the human condition. Her first book, an account of her wartime experiences in Poland and Germany, appeared in 1957, more than a decade after she settled in the United States with her husband.

She told students Friday her survival carries with it an obligation to share. "To tell you about the incredible privilege, which you have, and which you should cherish every day - freedom."

Junior Brian Rue, 16, of Loveland, said Klein's "strength is amazing."

"Being able to survive that tragedy is very impressive," he said. "It makes me feel that I should never take anything for granted, because everything I have could all be gone - just like that."

Klein credited teachers for being "the noblest professionals of all." She told students to try, like so many teachers, to "light a spark in someone's heart that will grow into a flame of greatness."

"Don't search for something that might be missing, because there might be something missing from everyone's life," she said. "Search for what is there."

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