Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein, an extraordinary woman of courage, will be the featured speaker for DePaul University's Memory and Conscience series, sponsored by the International Human Rights Law Institute. Her presentation will take place at 1:30 p.m. on April 13. The program, which will feature a screening of Klein's award-winning documentary, "One Survivor Remembers," will be held in the DePaul Center, 1 E. Jackson Blvd., Room 8005.

Klein's experiences have been so compelling that just the telling of them was enough to earn her an Academy Award. The dramatic twists and turns in Klein's life began one fateful day in 1939 when the Nazis invaded her Polish homeland, took her brother away, and changed her life forever. For two years following the Nazi invasion, Klein and her family struggled for survival in the basement of their home in Bielsko.

On the heels of that nightmare, Klein was sent off to a slave labor camp. There she remained a prisoner for three years, separated from her parents, whom she never saw again. While being held captive, Klein and a group of 2,000 women were forced to march for three months in the biting cold without proper clothing or nutrition to an abandoned factory in a Czech village. Only about 150 survived the trek--Klein was one. In 1945, weighing only 68 pounds and a breath away from death, Klein's horrors finally ended when she was rescued by American soldiers. One of Klein's rescuers, a young American lieutenant named Kurt Klein, would later become her husband.

Klein's riveting tale of survival is documented in the film "One Survivor Remembers," which won not only an Oscar, but an Emmy and two Cable Ace awards for best film documentary.

She will be accompanied by her husband, who as a U.S. Army officer in General Patton's famed Third Army, helped liberate Klein and the other women slave laborers from the SS death march. His story was included in a recently aired PBS award-winning documentary titled "America and the Holocaust."

The International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul began its Memory and Conscience series in 1996 to provide a forum for the university and greater Chicago area to participate in discussions offered by noted experts and survivors of historical events with distinct human rights overtones. The series is ongoing.