I have found it to be true that one of the pinnacle reasons so many of us are drawn toward literature is that we find a common spark of humanity igniting on the pages below our eyes, and it is there, in that revelation, that we are bought and sold all at the same time to this ideal. We realize that through the written word, someone else’s story can have a significant impact on our own. Not every book has this voice. Not every author can speak with it. Gerda Weissmann Klein, however, summons it in All But My Life.
All But My Life is a memoir of a girl in her teens during the Holocaust being taken first from her home, then from her family, until she is left quite literally with only her life. As Gerda tells her story, there is courage, hope, contemplation of suicide, miraculous triumph, and great love. She tells of her parents love as they talked on the last night they were ever to be together. She tells of the horrors of a death march from Germany to Czechoslovakia, when a group of 2,000 girls slowly became 150, and when her dearest childhood friend died in her arms a week before being liberated. When I finished this book, I began to wonder why more books don’t carry such an impact. But not every author has a story to tell like Gerda’s, and Gerda makes it her duty to tell the stories of those forgotten in mass graves, ditches, and crematoria.
All But My Life doesn’t look for sympathy, and it doesn’t raise a loud noise for us to take into account the atrocities of the past. Rather, it sits us down and tells us of things that happened, and inspires us with the courage and hope that overcame it all. Gerda was left to tell her story and the stories of others who no longer can. Stories that ended lost—obscure in the vast population of the dead, but remembered and quickened once again so that they might never be forgotten.
~Kevin Kaminski~
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