Gerda’s days blurred together with medical treatments. She weighed 68 pounds. Unusually quiet, she noticed other women receiving visitors. She repeatedly asked for Liesel but got no answer. She often thought of the kind American soldier and worried that he may have been harmed.

After a week, the soldier returned. Gerda recognized him despite his different appearance without battle gear. He gave her two LIFE magazines, taught her the English word “life,” and said that he wanted to see her smile. They talked; he explained that he was busy with prisoners and was stationed 16 miles away in a neighboring village. The nurse ended their visiting hours, and Gerda realized that she had forgotten to ask his name. That evening, however, he returned unexpectedly. She learned that his name was Kurt Klein and that he wrote to her uncle in Turkey.

Kurt’s daily visits continued. They formed a deep bond despite coming from different worlds. A few days later, he brought lilies-of-the-valley, which triggered Gerda’s memories. Kurt told her that they were his mother’s favorite flowers and then shared his family’s story: His siblings escaped to the US, but his parents stayed in Germany, hoping that the Nazi regime would collapse. They were eventually deported to Camp de Gurs in France. In July 1942, a letter was returned stamped with no forwarding address. Gerda took his hand and told him that there was still hope.

Gerda’s health declined, though she tried to hide it. She finally learned that Liesel died after an amputation. Feeling completely alone, she panicked about her future, considering going home to Poland, joining her uncle in Turkey, or going to Palestine. She also thought fearfully of Abek.

Kurt left an envelope containing money in a magazine. Though she needed it desperately, Gerda couldn’t accept it from him. When she tried to return it, Kurt explained that it was a loan in case he was transferred suddenly, but she refused.

Herr Knebel, owner of the factory where they were found, began visiting the women. He told Gerda that he knew her father or one of his business associates. His two married daughters visited and brought her a cotton dress. The hospital staff began calling Kurt “Gerda’s lieutenant.” Other women criticized Gerda for not asking Kurt for material goods, but she understood that his nonmaterial gifts preserved her dignity.

Hiding a high fever to avoid being denied visitors, Gerda saw Kurt, who told her that he was being transferred to Pfarrkirchen in Bavaria, 300 kilometers away. He showed her photos of himself; perceiving that she wanted one, he offered it to her. While he wrote on it, she persuaded a nurse to help her get up and dress. Kurt was surprised and moved to see her standing. He helped her walk outside, each step painful. Reminded of the mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, she said goodbye at the entrance to avoid crying in front of others. She thanked him for everything. He promised to see her as soon and as often as he could and then left quickly.

In her bunk, Gerda cried, fearing that she would never see him again. Another woman, Ida, pointed out that she was crying because her lieutenant left. Someone else said that she was foolish to think he would take her with him. Gerda read his inscription on the photo, a hopeful message marking the start of a new life.

That night, Gerda became gravely ill with a high fever. The doctor wrapped her in a cold wet sheet, and she lost consciousness. Days passed while she remained semiconscious. When she woke up, Kurt was there, smiling. He teased her for getting sick, and she learned that a week had passed. He shared news that his sister was having a baby and showed her a photo of his three-year-old niece, Barbara, holding a lollipop. The sight of a happy child jarred Gerda, who had come to associate children with death. Kurt told her about playing with Barbara, and Gerda contrasted his joyful relationship with Abek’s sad one with his niece. She impulsively said that she wished she had a baby or niece. Kurt affectionately called her a “silly little girl” (227), using the familiar German “du” for the first time. She fell asleep holding his hand, feeling peaceful.

The next morning, feeling better, she began drawing. Kurt visited briefly before returning to his post. The doctors informed her that she survived pneumonia and typhus but had complications with her feet. Her Austrian doctor hinted at possible amputation. Gerda refused emphatically. He proposed waiting but suggested painful therapy using alternating hot- and cold-water baths. The treatments began; though excruciating, the pain confirmed that her legs were alive. Kurt visited again with roses. The doctor joked that being in love raised her temperature.

Gerda’s health and appearance improved. She used a mirror more often, noticing that her dimples had returned. Kurt teased that she had aged in reverse from 40 to 16 since they met. For his upcoming Sunday birthday, she planned to take her first walk with him and wrote essays as a gift. She practiced walking all week.

Sunday arrived, but Kurt didn’t come at the expected time. Gerda took her first solo walk to a meadow across from the hospital, momentarily panicking at the absence of her Jewish star. While sitting under a tree, consumed with fear and despair, she believed that Kurt had abandoned her. She concluded that she loved him but assumed that he didn’t feel the same, comparing herself unfavorably to American women. She resolved never to reveal her feelings if she saw him again. She returned to the hospital, miserable.

Nearly three weeks passed without a visit or word. Mrs. Von Garnier, one of Herr Knebel’s daughters, made Gerda a new dress, but Gerda felt no joy and resented the charity. Mrs. Von Garnier hinted that Gerda might help them someday. Despite her freedom and improving health, Gerda was unhappy because she missed Kurt.

On Friday evening, a Military Government captain brought her a letter from Kurt. A dried Alpine rose fell from the envelope. The letter explained that he was abruptly transferred near Munich and encouraged her to write back through official channels.

The next day, Saturday, Gerda spent a pleasant day at the Knebels’ home, happy to have Kurt’s letter. After lunch in the garden, she napped until a storm approached. Mrs. Von Garnier told Gerda that the new dress was ready, and she tried it on. As Gerda prepared to leave at around six o’clock, Kurt arrived unexpectedly, soaked from driving eight hours through rain in an open jeep. He complimented her transformation and the dress. The Knebels invited him to dinner and overnight lodging; he declined dinner but accepted a room. He walked with Gerda to the hospital for her supper, and they then returned to the Knebels’ house.

While waiting for Kurt in the living room, Gerda was struck by how the tranquil house resembled her childhood home, intensifying her loneliness. When Kurt returned, he put his arm around her shoulder. Starved for affection, Gerda began crying. Kurt held her tightly, letting her cry. The moment reminded her of Abek’s words about understanding each other’s tears. Looking at Kurt’s gentle face, she recognized him from a dream she had in Bolkenhain. She buried her face in his chest, feeling safe and at peace.

The next morning, they walked in the meadows. Kurt’s light, teasing manner made Gerda wonder if the previous night’s intimacy was a dream. When she told him that she had been thinking of going home, Kurt seriously advised her to wait for news from her uncle and warned that she wasn’t strong enough for the arduous journey. Before leaving, Gerda gave him the essays she wrote for his birthday. He told her that it was the nicest present he had ever received.

After Kurt left, Gerda walked to the local cemetery. She found and placed flowers on Liesel’s and Suse’s graves. She decided to discover the true state of her health and wait for definitive news about her family before attempting to go home. She confirmed that her name was on survivor lists circulating in Poland.

She spoke with her doctor, who gave an inconclusive report about her lungs and tuberculosis exposure but agreed to let her help in the hospital lab to help her pass the time. About a week later, the Military Government captain told her that Kurt had arranged for her to leave for Bavaria the next day. When Gerda refused, he explained that their division was withdrawing and that the area may be transferred to the Russians. Kurt had asked him to ensure her safety. Arrangements were being made for other recovered women to go to Bavaria.

Gerda learned that some friends from the Grünberg camp might be in Cham, a Bavarian town. Mala Orbach, another woman from the hospital, agreed to accompany her. Gerda decided to go to Cham to search for friends rather than directly to Kurt in Freising. She said goodbye to the Knebels, who gave her parting gifts. Her doctor provided discharge papers and an envelope containing “wages” for her lab work, which Gerda notes was a much larger sum than she would have expected for her work, meaning that the money was a gift from the doctor. Gerda packed her few possessions for the journey.

Gerda and Mala arrived in Cham late in the afternoon and were left at Military Government headquarters. Their search for friends proved unsuccessful. At one house, a woman with curlers told them that the women they’re seeking left the previous day and then closed the window on them. Alone and exhausted in the unfamiliar town, they found a church to sleep in for the night.

Upon waking at dawn, Gerda felt desperately alone and decided that she had to go to Kurt. She and Mala hitchhiked to Freising. As they approached the Military Government building, they met Kurt coming down the steps. He told them that the captain who drove them had informed him of their location and that he was on his way to Cham to retrieve them. He arranged a room in Munich, where work would be easier to find. They arrived at a house near the Perlacher Forest.

Gerda insisted that she had to find work immediately. The next day, Kurt took them to the Civilian Censorship Division. A Women’s Army Corps captain interviewed them and said that they could start after a two-week training course. That evening, Gerda and Kurt walked in the woods. For the first time, Kurt spoke with bitterness about his parents’ fate, recounting his father’s last, fearful words about never seeing his son again. They sat in silent, mutual understanding. When shots rang out in the woods, Gerda was terrified. Kurt pretended not to notice her fear, claiming that she was simply cold as he put his jacket around her.

The next morning, Gerda forced herself to walk alone in the forest to conquer her fear. She panicked when she saw something red that she thought was blood, realized that they were berries, and forced herself to touch them, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat them. After training, Gerda began working, reading confiscated Nazi mail. She frequently visited the German Museum, which housed offices for displaced persons, to scan survivor lists for loved ones’ names. She met people from her hometown who told her that Abek died; however, she initially didn’t believe them. Kurt worried that she was torturing herself with these constant visits.

On a Sunday in mid-August, Kurt arrived with news that the war with Japan was over. He brought Anisette, and they drank to peace. Feeling dizzy and happy from the liqueur, Gerda laughed. Kurt took her in his arms and kissed her.

A few days later, Kurt brought the long-awaited letter from her uncle in Turkey. It contained no news of her parents or brother, only questions about them. Gerda finally accepted that she would never go home again.

On Thursday, September 13, Kurt told her that he was being sent home to the US. Seeing her tears and restrained response, he asked if that was all she had to say. He told her that he wanted her to come to America and be his wife, that he loved her, and that he wanted to marry her. Gerda clung to him, overcome with happiness. They discussed their options: They could marry immediately and stay in Germany, or he could go home first and send for her. Though Kurt said that the decision was hers, Gerda saw that he wanted to go home. She told him to go. That night, confronting her fear of being alone, she knew that this separation wouldn’t be a loss. She called her love for Kurt into the night and felt her cry answered, secure in the knowledge that they would never be alone again.

Writing in 1994, Gerda reflects on her life nearly 50 years after the events she has recounted. Survival, she explains, is both an exalted privilege and a painful burden. She recounts arriving in the US with Kurt in September 1946 and feeling that she had finally come home. She expresses her dual love for Israel, as her spiritual childhood home representing her parents and shared past, and the US, her country of choice representing her husband, children, and grandchildren.

She recalls her first home in Buffalo, New York, and a powerful moment alone with a refrigerator that symbolized her newfound freedom and abundance. Another incident during a snowstorm, when she realized that she couldn’t eat her bread alone while others remained cold and hungry, led to her volunteer work with the Jewish Federation and eventually to her life’s work of telling her story. She has spent decades speaking about her experiences, hoping to teach young people the preciousness of life and reminding them that one should never seek permanent solutions to temporary problems.

Gerda discusses the trauma of transitioning to normalcy and how simple routines—cooking soup, folding linen, and community work—have been great healers. She describes how for many years, she couldn’t say the word “furnace.” Painful memories still surface: Recently, forgetting to give her visiting son fruit triggered a half-century-old memory of taking an extra rum ball from a package intended for relatives in Auschwitz. These painful moments are compensated by immense joy, particularly in holding her three children and eight grandchildren.

She reflects on her deep bond with Kurt, with whom her life is completely interwoven. She shares anecdotes about how their three children—Vivian, Leslie, and Jimmy—have lovingly incorporated their lost grandparents into their lives as role models rather than ghosts. She describes a devastating experience speaking German on the radio in Amsterdam, which made her realize that English had become a protective barrier. The Nazis, she explains, perverted her German mother tongue, robbing her of comforting memories.

Gerda recounts contrasting incidents: one where embarrassment about her clothes was put in perspective by memories of the death march and another where her granddaughter’s simple longing for her mother triggered overwhelming anguish and memories of crying children from the camps. She affirms that the memory of her happy childhood—particularly simple evenings at home with her family—was the beacon that helped her survive.

She describes the miraculous postwar recovery of her family’s complete collection of 400 photos, which had been stored by a neighbor in her hometown, and states that the loss of her brother, Arthur, remains the hardest to bear. She shares a comforting memory of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin telling her that he had waited to meet Arthur’s little sister and that she had been brave. She reflects on the comfort of meeting fellow survivors who remember the skits she wrote in the camps to bring moments of joy.

Gerda reveals her guiding lodestar: the memory of peaceful evenings at home with her father reading, her mother doing needlepoint, her brother doing homework, and their cat purring. She describes a pilgrimage with her family back to Volary in the autumn of her life. Standing at the site of liberation and at her friends’ graves, she remained haunted by the unanswerable question of why she survived. She concludes with boundless gratitude to her family, friends, community, and publisher, Arthur W. Wang, hoping that through her life’s work, she has provided a small answer and given back part of what she received.

Writing at age 95 in July 2019, Gerda opens the Afterword by describing the moment when President Barack Obama placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck in February 2011. Rather than focusing on the honor itself, she recalls the charred piece of wood from her family's synagogue that her brother, Arthur, had given her during the war and that she lost on the death march in 1945. She frames the Afterword around the phrase “all in one life” (264), coined by her granddaughter's husband, and states her intention to update readers on people mentioned in the memoir, recount significant events since the 1994 Epilogue, and share new perspectives on people and events from the book.

Gerda provides updates on several figures from the memoir. Her uncle Adolph, reported dead during the chaos of the German invasion, was in fact the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust, later settling in Israel under the name Aaron. Her childhood nanny, Niania, remained a correspondent after the war until her death; Gerda also stayed in contact with Niania's granddaughter for some years thereafter. Frau Kugler, the factory supervisor at Bolkenhain who protected the women under her charge, was the subject of postwar affidavits that Gerda and other survivors signed on her behalf, though a film crew sent to Germany in the 1990s was unable to determine what had become of her. Her uncle Leo, whose cable urging the family to flee to Turkey before the German invasion went unheeded, played a significant role in Gerda’s life in the immediate postwar years, a story she recounts in full in her book A Boring Evening at Home.

Gerda revisits her longstanding view of Moses Merin, the Jewish community leader who forcibly returned her to a deportation truck when she attempted to run to her mother. Having denied any sense of gratitude toward him for decades, she describes arriving at a reassessment after looking at a family photograph and recognizing that his intervention made her subsequent life possible. She draws on research, including a 1958 article by Philip Friedman, to present a fuller picture of Merin’s conduct and his stated justifications for collaborating with the Nazis. She contrasts his choices with those of her father, who declined a leadership role in the ghetto rather than making decisions that might protect his own family at others’ expense. Merin and his daughter were ultimately deported to Auschwitz once the Nazis no longer found him useful.

While rereading her memoir in full for the first time at age 88, Gerda was surprised to find how prominently Abek Feigenblatt figured in the narrative, a centrality she hadn’t consciously registered. She reflects on the nature of their relationship—deep friendship on her part, romantic attachment on his—and acknowledges conflicted emotions upon learning after the war that he didn’t survive: grief at his death alongside relief that she wouldn’t feel compelled to marry him. She notes that the assurances of a shared future that she wrote to him while in the camps were, to her knowledge, false but offered him hope at a time when hope was essential to survival.

On the broader question of what enabled survival, Gerda identifies luck as the most decisive factor and describes hope—including irrational or fabricated hope—as the most sustaining personal resource. She recounts specific instances from the death march in which fantasy and deliberate self-deception allowed her to continue. She also argues that the Holocaust did not fundamentally transform personalities, but rather intensified existing traits and that survivors’ postwar lives reflect this same continuity of character.

Gerda addresses three questions that she has been asked repeatedly since liberation. Of survivor guilt, she states that she denied experiencing it for decades before acknowledging, during a return visit to Volary in the 1990s, that the guilt was genuine and hasn’t fully resolved. Of forgiveness of the Germans, she states that her answer is an unequivocal no and that her anger has increased rather than diminished with time, though she distinguishes this from debilitating hatred. Of belief in God, she states that she continued to pray throughout the camps and, after a period of cessation following a friend’s death, resumed praying after her liberation. She concludes that some force greater than humanity must exist but that this force may share humanity’s inability to prevent suffering—a position that she describes as imperfect but as close as she can come to a satisfactory answer.

Gerda then recounts a 1997 return visit to Bielitz with Kurt and their children. She describes passing through familiar sites—her school, the train station, her family home—with little emotional response until she noticed a piece of string still hanging in the garden from a kite that Arthur had once flown. She identifies this object as the one thing that day that connected her to the place and to Arthur, and she states that she felt ready to leave Bielitz and had no need to return.

Gerda describes her American citizenship, received in 1948, as among the most significant experiences of her life. She reflects on the gap she has observed between her own regard for civic freedoms and the more casual attitude of those who have never lived without them. She recounts the establishment of the Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation, the Academy Award received by the HBO documentary One Survivor Remembers, her appointment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Commission, her address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2006, and the receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

The Afterword closes with an account of Kurt’s death from a heart attack in Guatemala in 2002 and a statement of the depth of her loss. Gerda ends by expressing anticipation of a reunion with Kurt, echoing the final lines of the memoir itself.