Holocaust survivor, author Gerda Weissmann Klein dies at 97

GERDA Weissmann Klein, a Holocaust survivor who wrote about her ordeal and went on to receive a presidential medal of freedom, will be remembered at a memorial May 1 after her death this month.

Klein died April 3 in Phoenix, where she had lived since 1985. She was 97. Her granddaughter Alysa Cooper confirmed the death but did not give a cause.

Klein was born May 8, 1924, to Helene and Julius Weissmann in Bielsko, Poland.

She was a teenager when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and the family was forced to live in the basement of their home for three years.

Klein’s parents were later deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and she never saw them or her brother again.

Klein spent the next three years in Nazi camps. She met her future husband, Army Lt. Kurt Klein, when American soldiers liberated her and others from an abandoned