Tickets are going fast for ADL’s 38th annual Governor’s Holocaust Remembrance Program on May 2. The program will take place at Temple Emanuel in Denver at 6 pm and features Holocaust Survivor Gene Klein in conversation with his daughter, author Dr. Jill Klein. Gene’s experience is captured in Jill’s book We Got The Water that tells the story of Gene and his family before, during and after the Holocaust. Last month, we shared an interview with Gene Klein. This month, we spoke to Jill Klein, a professor at the University of Melbourne who teaches at both Melbourne Business School and Melbourne Medical School.
ADL: Why did you become so invested in documenting your father’s Holocaust experiences?
Dr. Jill Klein: I think my dad was a really good role model because from the time I was a young adult, he was already speaking a lot in public about his experiences. I saw how important it was for him to reach as many people as possible. There’s nothing like hearing from an actual survival.
The reason I decided to write a book, is that a book is a way for the story to live on after he is gone. My dad is one of the last survivors and thankfully he is in good shape. Accompanying him to speaking engagements and hearing his story told first-hand was very important to me. Also, I had the added benefit of being able to speak to three living sibling survivors, my dad and his two sisters. That’s just incredible for this population in which whole families were routinely wiped out. All of them were willing to talk about it, all were willing to share the story and all of them had very good memories. I thought, well, this has to be done! It was a no brainer.
ADL: How long did the project take?
JK: When I started, I had their Shoah Foundation interview tapes [watch Gene discussing the selection process at Auschwitz here] and I thought, I’ll take a couple of months and turn this into a book. 15 years later, I had a book. It was a 15 year project, and during that time I was working full time as a professor, and I became a mom (we adopted our daughter from Thailand).
I am bookended by survivors – my father and my daughter, Paris. My daughter is a tsunami survivor, and we met her doing relief work. My husband and I were in Singapore and we were playing soccer with one of our students that had accompanied us there. We met a kid who kept saying, “no mama, no papa.” Long story short, after a year of hard work, we were able to bring her home. We returned to visit and met with her grandparents, who asked if we would raise her. She’s just starting university in Australia and is studying to be a nurse.
ADL: It seems as if your own story of adopting your daughter and your father’s story of survival overlap.
JK: Yes. An important part of my dad’s story for me is the civilian engineer who fed my dad in secret. For two weeks he consumed enough calories to keep working, to keep surviving. My husband and I had students traveling to the tsunami site from the university in Melbourne. One of them wasn’t in such good shape because not only was he a volunteer, but he had survived the tsunami himself. I just keep thinking about the civilian engineer, and how it wasn’t just about the food. It was about showing up, about providing moral support. People in Singapore were very touched that we came in person. It’s about more than writing a check (although certainly that’s helpful too).
That’s what was behind the book and my decision to write it. For me, it wasn’t just about writing the story and filling in details. The details came from my dad and my aunts, from that time. You can’t make this stuff up. That’s why I put the essays in between – I was constantly trying to resolve inconsistencies through close research, and the research was done by interviewing my family members who often remembered things the same way, but sometimes they were separated from one another and therefore, they had distinct stories. It was important to be very painstaking about the details. I would call my Aunt Lilly and say, “those Bavarian soldiers – what were they wearing?” and sometimes she’d remember and sometimes she would say “are you crazy? That was sixty years ago.” And sometimes she’d tell me something that I didn’t know, like that the soldiers brought along one of the teachers, so he could point out the Jewish students in order to turn them in. In this particular instance, we found a class photo, so I could see with my own eyes the teacher and the students that he turned in. That’s why it was such a long process, because in every conversation a detail would come up that would change the whole thing. It was a process like painting a picture layer after layer after layer.
ADL: You’re an expert in teaching about resilience, both at Melbourne Business School and Melbourne Medical School. How did you decide to focus on that subject?
JK: I got into resilience because my dad was doing all this speaking and I was teaching in the business school and I thought there would be a good overlap. After the financial crisis in 2009-2010 people were coming to us saying we need help with resilience in the business world. There’s organizational restructuring, mergers, acquisitions – it’s hard to find an organization that isn’t going through change. Change requires resilience, because otherwise it will wear your people down. And then there’s just general life circumstances – you lose people, things happen, and you need to learn to cope.
I started working to develop a training together with my dad for a large international business concern for their senior people on resilience and coping with adversity. We developed this section where I talked about the psychology of resilience and identifying the key tools of resilience, because we now know that people aren’t necessarily born resilient – it’s about developing a series of behaviors that can help any of us out. It’s got a very practical application. Psychology is the tool and interspersed in the training is my dad’s story – when things started getting bad, when he went to Auschwitz, etc. When we talk about coping strategies he’d talk about approaches he developed in the camps.
When I teach the executives, I use a video that my dad shot in a studio in NY (he lives in Florida and much as I’d love it, he can’t go to Australia every week to appear with me in person). Whenever I do a session and people write their feedback, they talk about watching my dad as life changing. I have people I run into on the street who say, “I saw your session, I lost a parent, and it helped me so much looking back at my notes.”
ADL: Was there any specific situation or situations that really brought the lessons of resilience home for you or your students?
JK: A key encounter that was really touching happened at the medical school. I had created a video for the medical students about resilience. We sent it all out to them. Shortly after the earthquake in Nepal, I received an email from a Nepalese student. She had just started medical school and the earthquake affected her family. She sent me an email telling me that she watched the video and it helped her get through her own situation. I don’t know if anything’s ever been quite so rewarding in my interactions with students.
Also, there’s a real issue with junior doctor suicides – around the world and particularly in Australia. I work with the graduating students trying to give them different tools to succeed. We just got approved by Oxford Publishing for a book that will be entitled “Thriving in Medical School” written by myself and a couple of colleagues. There will also be videos of doctors and students on how to use these tools to succeed. We’re thinking of expanding to the law school, nursing schools, etc. The “Thriving in …” book series might be the next chapter of my life!
Jill will interview her father Gene at ADL’s Governor’s Holocaust Remembrance Program on May 2. Get free tickets here.