BILD talked with Gene Simmons about his mothers liberation from German concentration camp
Note from Gene Simmons:
Germany’s largest newspaper, BILD did an exhaustive investigation into the horrors of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps of World War II.
My Mother, Flora Klein was 14 years old when she was taken into the camps, along with the rest of our family. Only my Mother survived.
Never forget. There were 2 million Catholics, 2 million Romani, 6 million Jews and countless political dissidents, and other non-Aryan victims. All taken to the gas chambers, or were shot or simply died from malnutrition and slow starvation.
Below is the translation from the original German.
Never Forget. Never Again.
By: HANS-WILHELM SAURE UND SVEN KUSCHEL / www.bild.de/
Her surviving became an important part of his living ...
In five decades of rock ‘n’ roll, the four steel strings of his bass guitar have left deep furrows at the fingernails of his right hand. The tips of his fingers are callused. With these fingers, KISS frontman Gene Simmons (70) gently strokes a name and the number 318 on a document – “Flora Klein”. It’s his Jewish mother’s maiden name. The document records her liberation from the Mauthausen concentration camp 75 years ago.
The liberation marked the end of an ordeal that included living in a ghetto in Budapest and in three Nazi concentration camps. The young woman (then 19) was liberated on 5 May 1945. Simmons sees the historic document for the first time.
Prior to the corona crisis, BILD am Sonntag met the rock star with the famous tongue in Leipzig for a very personal conversation – without makeup or a mask. The conversation concerned the fate of his mother during the Nazi time – a fate that was mostly unknown to him. Flora Klein was born in Jand (Hungary) in 1925 and died in December 2018 in the United States, aged 93.
“I lost my mother. My mentor. My moral compass,” the KISS singer wrote, deeply saddened, when she died. He thinks of her and her values every day. Once he was told by her: “I’m supposed to be a good boy. That’s what I wanted to be for her.” Simmons told BILD about this close connection in an interview. He also said that his mother hardly ever talked about her time in the concentration camps. “I knew almost nothing.”
When asked whether it’s okay to film us handing over the papers, he says: “Yes, history must never be tampered with.”
Gene Simmons browses the folder that was compiled for him. It contains approximately 100 pages. The musician carefully reads every single one of them. Sometimes he sighs, with a brief “Yep”.
The documents include lists from concentration camps, file cards from the International Red Cross, records about the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp by US soldiers.
Simmons is sweating. “My children simply cannot understand all of this. They cannot believe it. The things that happened back then. How many people became victims. Not only Jewish people. Homosexuals, political dissidents, Sinti and Roma,” he quietly says. “Millions and millions …”
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