An extraordinary moment unfolded on Monday evening in Washington when Gene Simmons, the 75-year-old frontman for the legendary rock band KISS, encountered Harold (“Hal”) Urban, a 100-year-old World War II veteran who participated in the liberation of the concentration camp where Simmons’s mother was imprisoned as a teenager.
Urban’s memories of liberating Mauthausen remain vivid and traumatic, even at age 100. He described the overwhelming stench of burning human remains, emaciated prisoners stumbling in confusion and terror, and the psychological trauma that proved more devastating than conventional combat. His unit buried approximately 500 corpses within 24 hours of the camp’s liberation—a grim testament to the Nazi regime’s systematic extermination efforts.
While Urban cannot definitively recall meeting Flora Klein, Simmons’s mother, during those chaotic days, both were present at Mauthausen when American forces arrived. Klein was just 14 years old, one of thousands of Jewish prisoners whose survival depended entirely on the Allied advance reaching them before the Nazi machinery of death could complete its work.
Following the war, Urban returned to civilian life, establishing himself as a farmer in Illinois and raising nine children. But the psychological wounds from his wartime service, particularly his experiences at the concentration camps, never fully healed. “The psychologist said that when you raise a family, the nightmares subside. And when your children leave home, they return. And that’s what happened,” he reflected.
Simmons, born in Israel after Klein’s immigration following the war, grew up understanding his mother’s Holocaust survival in only the broadest terms. Klein, like many survivors, rarely discussed her experiences in detail. Only in recent years has Simmons learned the complete scope of how narrowly his existence depended on historical circumstances beyond anyone’s control.
“She was in the camp at age 14,” Simmons explained. “She hardly talked about it at all. Now I know how close I came to losing everything.”
Originally published by Israel Hayom.
