"If there weren't brave people like you – I wouldn't be here, and neither would my mother," Gene Simmons told Harold "Hal" Urban, who participated in liberating Mauthausen in May 1945.
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.