Born Warsaw, May 4, 1929.
Died London, February 10, 2008, aged 78.
Holocaust survivor Edyta Klein-Smith was saved by resourcefulness and good looks.
From a wealthy, assimilated family, she was herded into the Warsaw ghetto in 1940. Her mother worked at a Jewish factory making clothes for German soldiers. At 10, Edyta, with her smile, persuaded an official to let her join her mother. After the Warsaw ghetto uprising, they escaped with help from the Polish underground. They slept in stairwells and public toilets, trying to stay clean and respectable. Despite the risk of recognition, her mother worked in cafés.
After the 1944 Polish Warsaw uprising, Edyta was saved by a Red Cross woman who took her off a train to Dachau. Edyta screamed for her mother, who was also removed. But at liberation in 1945, nobody wanted them. They crossed borders until reaching a refugee camp in the American zone in Germany and applied to enter the US.
Edyta went first. At 17, she had secretly married a Polish Jew and did not realise she was pregnant. He arrived for the birth but returned to Europe to find his sister and died in a car crash. Her mother, meanwhile, came over and looked after them. She lived to the age of 70.
Edyta remarried in 1954 and came to London with her American husband in 1967. She spoke at schools about her experiences and supported Beth Shalom.
She is survived by her husband, a son from each marriage and five grandsons.