Flora Klein was born in Hungary in 1925. When the Nazis invaded in 1944, she and her family were sent to concentration camps. Only she and one brother survived.
After the war, she rebuilt her life from the ashes. In 1949, she gave birth to a son in Haifa, Israel—Chaim Witz, who the world would come to know as Gene Simmons, the iconic frontman of KISS.
In 1958, Flora and young Gene moved to New York City. With no husband and no English, she worked factory jobs and raised her son alone in a modest apartment in Queens. She never remarried.
Gene often said his mother was the strongest person he ever knew. She rarely spoke about the camps, but her silence carried the deep weight of survival. “Everything I am,” Gene once said, “is because of my mother.”
Flora Klein passed away in 2018 at the age of 93. She lived quietly, but her legacy echoes on stages around the world—proof that from unimaginable darkness, resilience can create something extraordinary.