Fred Klein was born August 11, 1922 in Pilsen, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) into an upper middle-class family of highly assimilated German-speaking Jews. After the Nazis assumed power in neighboring Germany in 1933, his father Dr. Alfred Klein, a physician and German freemason, went into total denial of the Nazi threat though he was fully informed of anti-Semitic activities in the Reich; he knew about concentration camps but underestimated the tragedy that would happen. On September 1, 1939, he was arrested by four Gestapos in the presence of his son. Imprisoned in Buchenwald, he was transported to Auschwitz where he died November 17th in 1942. Fred was deported with his mother and other family members to Theresienstadt in 1942 and from the"ghetto" to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. He survived the death camp without a tattoo. He managed to be transferred to the little Friedland concentration camp in Silesia where he was liberated in May 1945 by the Red Army.
He returned to Pilsen. All 35 members of his extended family had perished. After the Communist coup in 1948, he fled to Argentina, where he lived some years with prof. Dr. Otto Klein, a famous physican from Prague and his wife Frida. He worked as a commercial artist, later as translator, interpreter and became in 1962 general manager of a Joint Venture (International Consortium) building the "Tunel Subfluvial Parana-Santa Fe"(an underground tunnel linking two provinces in Argentina.
He married in Buenos Aires in 1956 and has one daughter, Helen. In 1963, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, California.
In Los Angeles Fred has worked as translator, interpreter and commercial artist. He became head of the German Department, Berlitz North America, which is now the largest translation company in the world. Fred is probably the first professional who used machine translation (computer-assisted translation) in the United States on a commercial basis.
Because he was imprisioned in concentration camps during his youth, Fred lacks formal education. An autodidact, he speaks four languages in addition to his native German. Invited by three universities to China, he appeared on Chinese TV in an interview about the Holocaust and was featured prominently in the print media. In 2000, he was interviewed in Los Angeles by the German television channel ZDF for its documentary series called "Holokaust" (English title: Hitler's Holocaust). Fred is a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and Ambassador to the People's Republic of China. He is a member of the Museum of Tolerance. Please review the listings of his professional affiliations.
He is a frequent speaker at colleges, universities and a member of the Holocaust discussion list on the internet. He welcomes inquiries and loves to assist students in their research.