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A Lifetime in Her Shoes:
Interview with Marianne R. Klein

By Carin Chea

By the age of 12, Marianne Klein had surpassed more hardships and trauma than most of us ever will in a lifetime.

Her memoir, All The Pretty Shoes, chronicles how Klein (whose book is published under her maiden name Marika Roth) escaped death during roundup executions in World War II. Klein learned how to survive in the landscape of persecution, and she did it all alone.

All The Pretty Shoes immediately pulls you into Klein’s world. Though the material can be stark and straight-forward (because, let’s be honest, the mere re-telling of events is descriptive enough) what strikes the reader is the astonishing courage and tenacity of its protagonist.

All The Pretty Shoes by Marika Roth (Marianne Klein)

While heartbreaking to read, Klein veers away from any semblance of self-pity, making her memoir all the more remarkable. Perhaps this quote from the first chapter best illustrates Klein’s extraordinary survival instincts not commonplace amongst 12-year-olds:

“I lay motionless, feigning my death. I shut my eyes and tried to block off the sounds of gunshots by pretending that I was someplace else. After all that had happened to me, I was an expert at being able to shut out reality by turning to happy memories and by fantasizing.”

It is such an honor to speak with you. Thank you so much for sharing your story with the world.

Your welcome, it’s a pleasure.

I understand you started writing after retirement. What made you want to write a memoir at that time in your life?

I’ve had quite a life because I was an orphan from very early on, and I went through the war. Every time people ask me about my experience, they’re enamored with what I went through.

My husband at the time (he’s passed away since then) always urged me to write my memoir. When he passed away, I thought I’d do that in honor of him. It’s not an easy task, you know. I was afraid to do that because I was afraid to go through the past.

I wrote it without any expectations. I showed it to my friends who were all enamored with it. They gave it to a publisher who immediately published it. The publisher then submitted it to a competition and I ended up winning an award. From there, I was encouraged to write.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I’ve had a challenging life. Having been a mother from a teenager on, I never had a chance to write. I had to make a living.

Tell me about your life as a teenaged mother.

My first child was born when I was 15 and a half. My second was born after that. My husband was a pathological liar and a cheat. He went away and I had to raise them alone. But then he reappeared only to kidnap them.

He then turned them over to a child welfare service, who placed them into foster care I had to search for them, and it took years and money to get them back.

I’ve written other books. I put some fiction in it, but it’s really based on different parts of my life – how I made a living, became a fashion model, how I wanted to be a jazz singer. But, all that was all taken away because I had to make a living.

May I ask, how are your adult children now?

[Laughing] Oh, they’re fine, thank you for asking. I don’t know if you realize, but I am 93 years old. They’re in their 70s now.

Initially, they were told that I abandoned them. They didn’t know they were kidnapped. We had to learn how to love each other in sequences. There were hills we had to climb.

How did you come up with the title, All The Pretty Shoes?

Because I witnessed the massacre at the Danube; the soldiers gathered and shot them all. They made them take their shoes off before they shot them.

Why did they do that?

Because they were mean. That was just to punish them [Jews] for who they were.

It was winter, so the prisoners had to stand in the snow and ice. The Nazis wanted them to suffer. As they were massacred and shot, they fell into the Danube.

If you go to Budapest today, you can visit the monument by the side of the Danube. Those shoes belonged to upper-class Jews. They took them out of their houses. They took the Jews with the most money because they took away their valuables – paintings and jewelry – and killed them.

In my research writing my memoir, I saw mothers holding their babies herded into the forest, where they were shot with their babies in their arms. I got sick to my stomach when I saw that. People can be very mean. I couldn’t figure out why people hate so much when you can get so much more out of love instead.

Last year, as I went through my pictures, I found a diary I kept at age 15 about my trip from Paris to Canada. I was with a group of war orphans being shipped to Canada for adoption. It was an exciting time since none of us had seen the ocean before.

Since sailing across the ocean on a big ship was a thrilling experience, I kept a diary, but it was in Hungarian. Once I finished translating to English, I wrote it into a book, Farewell, Paris. It came out last month on Amazon.com.

My escape from horrors has always been fantasizing. I have a great imagination. I grew up admiring Shirley Temple who was my age. She was my idol because everybody loved her. I wanted to be loved.

Being an orphan; I didn’t think anybody would ever love me. I wanted to be nice, cute, and helpful just like Shirley. Then, as I grew older, I wanted to be sexy like Rita Hayward.

Marianne Klein

Which I think you were able to emulate. You were a model as well, right?

I modeled clothes and I did fashion shows.

What do you want your readers to take away from your book?

All The Pretty Shoes is a story about self-discovery and the survival of a young orphan girl who’s faced with unimaginable horrors and impossible odds. The book portrays human suffering with amazing clarity.

After I’d been through a war and made my own decisions, I didn’t want to be adopted, although I wanted to go to Canada. Some of the children I went with did get adopted.

My other book, Farewell, Paris, talks about what happens to those children who get adopted and what happened to me, who didn’t get adopted.

My parents were on the verge of divorce when my mother was dying. With no one to care for me, she placed me in an orphanage with the help of an influential friend, a Russian Baroness.

Once the orphanage was confiscated by the Nazis, all the children were forced to find their way. I went to live with my father, who ended up being taken away and placed in a concentration camp.

After the war, starved and poorly clothed, I looked for my father at the train station and waited for days. I bumped into one of the girls from the orphanage and learned that she had become a prostitute.

As starving and raggedy as I was, if I didn’t have my parents’ upbringing, maybe I would’ve fallen into her trap. But, I didn’t.

Tell us about the process of writing your memoir and what your emotional experience was like.

I went through a lot of pain, especially when I wrote about the kidnapping of my children. There were passages, like when my mother was dying, that were hard. When they took my father away, and I was left by myself, that was hard.

My mother was dying of tuberculosis, you know. Because of her illness, my family rejected me. They didn’t have penicillin in those days.

Being that TB was a contagious disease; my family was afraid that I’d be a carrier of that bacteria. That’s why I was left by myself. When they took my father away, that was it. I was left with no one.

My mother had a brother in France. She wrote a letter to her brother that she was dying and asked if he could take care of me. I went to France, and my uncle didn’t want me for the same reason. I was not spoiled as a child; I’ll tell you that.

It’s amazing that you were able to transform that life into such a joyful one.

The harder the life, the better person you become, I think. You develop more compassion and understanding. Don’t you think so?

I think it takes a certain mindset to not turn all those hardships into bitterness and resentment. I think you had a strong upbringing and natural personality traits that made you into the joyful person you are today.

It’s true: I had a very classy upbringing, a refined upbringing. Manners and education mattered. I just didn’t have it long enough. I had it until I was six or seven years old. That gave me the basis of what I wanted in life.

Those are the most important years of your life, the beginning. I was always imagining that if I wasn’t going to be Shirley Temple, I’d be kind and helpful because that was what my parents wanted me to be. I like to think that if my mother and father had been alive, they’d be proud of me.

It strengthened my soul somehow. I couldn’t understand why we were hated so much, why someone would hate me for just being me. Those soldiers were merciless. They’d shoot and beat you.

I told myself I was going to stay alive just to spite them. In fact, when I turned 93 last week, I thought, “Hitler would be so pissed if he knew I was alive.”

[Laughing] That’s great. What did you do on your birthday?

I didn’t go dancing, if that’s what you’re wondering. I used to be a dancer in my younger years. I used to teach ballroom dancing.

For more information, please visit inklein2productions.com.



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