Mr. Kipper
English 8-2
19 May, 1999

The Serenade of My Life

All But My Life, by Gerda Weissman Klein, is the autobiographical story of a young Jewish woman who endured the horrors of the Holocaust and lived on to tell the stories of the friends and family she lost. By the time of the liberation of the Jews came, she was the only one left who knew them. The suffering began for Gerda’s family when the Germans gained control of her town in 1939; soon her older brother, Arthur, was made to register for “work”; in reality, all the young men who went to register were marched into the woods and shot. Arthur managed to escape and held out in Russia for quite a while, but he did not live to see the end of the war. At a nearby camp for Jews, Gerda met a man named Abek; he reminded her of Arthur and they soon became good friends. Abek fell in love with her and asked her several times to marry him, but she never grew to love him romantically. He, too, died in a concentration camp. Gerda and her parents were moved, first down to their basement, then to a ghetto, and finally to concentration camps. That initial parting, at which all three were sent to separate camps, was the last time Gerda saw either of her parents. She remained with her best friend, Ilse, up until the very end; Ilse died a few days before liberation. Another close friend, Suse, died soon after. And Liesel, a girl with whom Gerda shared a birthday, died on the very morning of Liberation Day. Fatefully, the date of liberation fell on that of their birthday. Gerda was freed by an American officer named Kurt Klein, and while she recovered in the hospital, she fell in love with him. They were married shortly after, and Gerda lived out her life in America.

Our project, entitled the “Serenade of My Life,” combined what we felt were especially meaningful passages from the book with piano selections. All three of us alternately played appropriate songs and read the passages. We used Zuki’s baby grand piano and tape recorder and brought our own music, meeting at Zuki’s house a total of three times. It’s true that we played Super Smash Bros. ALMOST as much as we played the piano, but who ever said we couldn’t enjoy ourselves?

The project was fun to work on and do, and the hardest thing about it was finding a good sound quality on the tape recorder. (Eventually, we found ourselves reading the passages upstairs while someone played the piano downstairs; we dropped a green feather from the balcony so the pianist would know when to start playing.) Sometimes it was also hard to get through a passage without cracking up. Not that the passages were funny or anything, it’s just hard not to laugh when you’re dropping green feathers and you’ve all just had caffeinated sodas. ^.^() And, naturally, when we finally DID get through a passage straight-faced, the piano player would usually make some kind of awful mistake so that we would have to go back and do it all over again. We didn’t mind any of this, however, since we all like each other! >^,,^<