Background

Klein was born as Klein György to an assimilated Jewish family in the Carpathian Mountains of the Hungarian-speaking part of what is now Eastern Slovakia, and at the age of five moved to Budapest, Hungary. He attended the Berzsenyi Gymnasium.

Klein has written in Pietà and elsewhere about his experiences during the Holocaust as a teenager in Budapest, during the German invasion of Hungary. Between May and July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp to be "resettled," according to the Germans, but most were in fact sent to the gas chambers. In May or June 1944 Klein was working as an assistant for the Jewish Council in Budapest, and saw an eyewitness report about what was happening in Auschwitz. The report had been compiled by Rudolf Vrba (1924-2006) and Alfréd Wetzler (1918-1988), who had escaped from the camp in April that year. It warned that most of those arriving at the camp were being killed.

Klein tried to warn relatives and friends, but many, particularly the older generation, did not believe what the report said. Klein has written about his feelings as a Cassandra figure, telling the truth but not being believed. When his own time came to board one of the trains, he decided instead to run, which almost certainly saved his life. Decades later, he looked for Vrba, then a professor of pharmacology in Canada, to thank him, and subsequently wrote about him and his report in two essays, "The Ultimate Fear of the Traveler Returning from Hell" in Pietà - first published in Sweden in 1989 - and "Confronting the Holocaust: An Eyewitness Account" (2011) in The Auschwitz Reports and the Holocaust in Hungary, edited by Randolph L. Braham and William vanden Heuvel.

Personal life

Klein moved to Sweden in 1947, and he has described the beginnings of his career and meeting his wife in an article written jointly with his wife. He is married to Eva Klein, another leading biologist, and they have three children: a son who is a mathematician, and two daughters, one of whom is a medical doctor and the other a playwright.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]