“The past is never dead,” said novelist William Faulkner. For those who have been scarred by history’s upheavals and tragedies, a painful living past can, with grace and will, provide the

motivation to transform the hearts of generations to come. Their hard-won wisdom, born of memories of brutality and injustice, may form the bedrock of a better world for all who follow.

Gerda Weissmann Klein, photographed above by Patrick Zachmann, likes to say that even a boring day is beautiful if you’re living in freedom. The 95-year-old Holocaust survivor, now residing

in Phoenix, doesn’t take these words lightly. After she endured six years of Nazi brutality, she was liberated by U.S. troops — including Kurt Klein, who would become her husband and whose