Well, the NYT and the WaPo finally got around to her, starting on the 8th...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/04/08/holocaust-survivor-gerda-weissmann-klein-dead/
By Harrison Smith
When Gerda Weissmann Klein was liberated by American soldiers in May 1945, one day short of her 21st birthday, she weighed 68 pounds, had a shock of prematurely gray hair and had not bathed in three years. Her parents and only sibling were among the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and her best friend had died in her arms the previous week during a 350-mile death march.
The Nazi regime and its collaborators had taken “all but my life,” as Mrs. Klein later put it in the title of a 1957 memoir. But she went on to spread a message of hope and tolerance, marrying one of her liberators and lecturing to audiences around the world with her husband, Kurt Klein, a German Jew who had immigrated to the United States as a teenager and returned to Europe as an Army intelligence officer.
...Speaking extemporaneously, with her composure rarely cracking, Mrs. Klein brought forth memories that were still vivid more than seven decades later. There was the family cat that stayed outside when Mrs. Klein and her family were forced to move into their basement, as a non-Jewish family took over the rooms upstairs. There was the intimidating, bulldog-faced German supervisor who once saved her life, whisking her out of the infirmary after an SS inspector began sending sick patients to the gas chambers. And there was the raspberry — slightly bruised — that her friend Ilse found in a gutter on the way to a factory, then kept in her pocket and gave to Mrs. Klein even though both women were starving.
For Mrs. Klein, the raspberry was a reminder that love and friendship could endure even in moments of hopelessness and despair, and could serve as a “sustaining force” when survival seemed impossible. “Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry,” she often said, “and you give it to your friend.”
...In an oral history with the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kurt recalled that Mrs. Klein led him to a group of emaciated women “scattered over the floor on scraps of straw,” then “made sort of a sweeping gesture over this scene of devastation” and quoted a line by the German poet Goethe: “Noble be man, merciful and good.”
“There was nothing that she could have said that would have underscored the grim irony of the situation better. … It was a totally shattering experience for me.”
...Reviewing her memoir in the New York Times, Herbert Mitgang wrote that “her story, like Anne Frank’s, is not morbid but soul-searching and human.” Mrs. Klein later wrote children’s books including “The Blue Rose” (1974), about a girl with developmental disabilities, and “Promise of a New Spring” (1981), which used the allegory of a forest fire to teach young people about the Holocaust.
Her other books included “A Passion for Sharing” (1984), a biography of philanthropist Edith Rosenwald Stern, and “The Hours After” (2000), a collection of love letters that she and her husband wrote before their wedding.
Like Mrs. Klein, Kurt often spoke about his own experience during World War II and the Holocaust, when his parents were unable to join him in the United States and perished at Auschwitz. His story was featured in a 1994 episode of the PBS documentary series “American Experience.”...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/world/europe/gerda-weissmann-klein-dead.html
By Clay Risen
...Two months later, the Germans liquidated the Bielsko ghetto, marching its inhabitants through the center of town to a line of trucks. Older adults and children were placed to one side, young adults to the other. Gerda lied about her age, saying she was 18, but when she realized she was being separated from her mother, she ran after her. The head of the Judenrat, a Nazi-imposed Jewish council, stopped her.
“You are too young to die,” he said, and he put her back on her truck. She later learned that her mother was murdered in a Nazi death camp.
Over the next three years, Gerda and three friends, along with hundreds of other young women, were sent to a series of work camps, barely kept alive on meager rations. At one point she considered suicide, even trading a piece of her jewelry for a small amount of poison.
By early 1945, with the war turning decisively against the Germans, Gerda’s captors evacuated their camp. Though the weather was freezing and snow piled on the ground, the captives were forced to march west. Hundreds died along the 350-mile trek. Gerda survived — in part, she said, because while many others wore sandals, she had her ski boots. She also had her imagination.
“If unfortunately you were a person that faced reality, I think you didn’t have much of a chance,” Mrs. Klein said in the film...
(snip)
Btw, here's a detail from the Jerusalem Post obit I posted days ago:
...With Allied forces swiftly approaching during the liberation of the concentration camps, Nazis barricaded Gerda Weissmann Klein and other Jewish survivors inside a barn, planting a time bomb outside. A sudden rainstorm disconnected the bomb’s wiring, and American forces found the barn and unlocked the door. ..
And, incredibly, it wasn't until AFTER all those obits that a couple of major TV networks took note!
https://www.nbc.com/today/video/holocaust-survivor-gerda-weissman-klein-dies-age-97/421893911
(from yesterday - this includes very old photos of her family and husband)
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/passage-in-memoriam-4-10-2022/
(from her old home, Buffalo NY)
Finally, from a long speech she made about her life (not on video, I think) to students at Bala Cynwyd Middle School from January 16, 2003:
http://www.kleinfoundation.org/programs/bala_cynwyd2003.asp
(this is from the last third)
...When I remember that little bit from my own life, I remember a couple of days after I came to this country I overheard a boy say to his mother, “This lady is so stupid; she doesn’t even speak English.” I didn’t speak English but I speak other languages. I understood what he said. I thought, how strange and how bad that we cannot communicate, and that I cannot tell him what I am thinking because we don’t speak the same language. So perhaps, in a silent way, Jenny understands things which are way beyond our understanding cause she hears things. This is why I think it is so tremendously important for us to sometimes reach into somebody else’s life who might look different; who might play differently; or might be of a different color; who cannot speak our language – to try to understand the beauty and the greatness of their thoughts...