She survived the Holocaust by staying silent—then raised her son alone so he could scream for the world. Flora Klein was 14 years old when Nazi soldiers forced her family onto trains in Hungary. The year was 1940, and she was just a girl with a normal life, a family, a future. Within months, almost all of it was gone. Her parents. Her extended family. Her childhood. Everything vanished into the machinery of genocide, reduced to smoke and numbers. Flora and her brother survived. But survival in a Nazi concentration camp wasn’t about luck alone—it was about strategy, silence, and an almost superhuman will to endure. According to her son’s accounts, when SS guards asked prisoners “Who speaks German?”, Flora kept her hand down.
Others volunteered, perhaps hoping language skills would help them. Many were never seen again. Flora learned: invisibility was survival. She was assigned to work in personal service—cutting the hair of a Nazi commander’s wife, serving those who were murdering her people. She listened. She endured. She memorized everything she could. She made herself useful enough to keep alive, invisible enough not to be noticed. When the war finally ended, Flora made her way to Israel. There, in 1949, she gave birth to a son: Chaim Witz. In 1958, when Chaim was eight years old, Flora made another impossible journey. She immigrated to New York—alone, with her young son, no husband, limited English, and the weight of everything she’d survived. They settled in Queens. Flora worked multiple jobs—seamstress, whatever she could find.
Long hours. Hard work. Immigrant wages. But she had a purpose: her son would have the freedom to dream that she’d been denied. Chaim grew up watching his mother’s strength. He saw her work without complaint. He understood, even as a child, what it meant to survive impossible odds. And he promised himself he would make it all worthwhile. The world came to know him as Gene Simmons—fire-breathing, tongue-wagging, larger-than-life frontman of KISS, one of the most successful rock bands in history.
But Gene always knew exactly who the real hero was.”Everything I am is because of my mother,” he said repeatedly throughout his career. He bought her a house. He brought her onstage at KISS concerts. He dedicated his memoir to her. He even tattooed her concentration camp number on his own body—a permanent reminder of what she survived, what she sacrificed, what she made possible. Flora never sought fame. Even as her son became a global icon, she remained private, humble, and quiet—the same survival instinct that had kept her alive decades earlier. She passed away in 2018 at age 93.
By then, she had lived to see her son achieve impossible success. She had lived to see her grandchildren thrive. She had lived to know that everything she endured—the camps, the losses, the poverty, the hard work—had created something beautiful .Her silence in that concentration camp, when guards asked “Who speaks German?”, had preserved a life that would create another life, which would touch millions of lives.
Flora Klein’s legacy isn’t just that she survived. It’s what she did with that survival. She could have been broken by what she experienced. She could have been consumed by trauma. She could have passed that pain to her son. Instead, she gave him strength. She gave him work ethic. She gave him the understanding that when the world tries to destroy you, you survive—and then you thrive so loudly that history has no choice but to hear you.
Gene Simmons became famous for makeup, costumes, and spectacle. But beneath all of it was a boy who watched his mother refuse to be defeated, who learned that survival isn’t passive—it’s active, defiant, and determined. Some heroes wear makeup and take the stage. Others work double shifts in Queens, raise their sons alone, carry unspeakable trauma with quiet dignity, and never ask for recognition. Flora Klein was both kinds of hero. She survived by staying silent. And then she raised a son who would never have to.
