Cecile Klein

Cecilie Klein was the youngest of six children born to a Jewish family in Jasina or Yasinya, Czechoslovakia (later Hungary).

Her father, who was Polish, gave private lessons in math and German.
The family owned a small grocery story, which her mother Rosa managed. Cecilie's father died in 1934, when she was nine. In March 1939, Hungary annexed the area of Czechoslovakia where the family lived. Their Czech citizenship was revoked and they were informed that they were being deported to Poland. They went into hiding in Budapest, then fled to Horinc, Ukraine, where they stayed for a year until her brother was taken for forced labor. She moved with her mother to Nyíregyháza, Hungary, where arrangements had been made for her to apprentice in a dental laboratory. When she heard that her oldest sister had been arrested and sent to a labor camp in Bačka Topola, Yugoslavia, she traveled there to arrange for her sister’s release and then returned to Budapest, where she became engaged to her future husband, Joe Klein. In 1944, the Germans invaded Budapest, and she joined up with her own and Joe’s families in Huszt, Ukraine. They were forced into a ghetto and then transported to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Rosa and other members of the family were gassed to death on arrival. Cecilie and her sister Mina were sent as slave laborers to Nuremberg and Holleischen; she was liberated there by
Allied troops and returned to Czechoslovakia, where she was reunited with her fiancé and married him in 1945. They emigrated to the USA in 1948 and had three children. She wrote Sentenced to Live: A Survivor's Memoir, published in 1988.