Gerda Klein has witnessed much pain and much triumph in her 86 years on earth, but she still gets emotional when she sees the American flag inching toward the top of a flagpole.

Her thoughts turn to her 21st birthday, May 8, 1945, the day after her future husband and other American soldiers liberated her from a slave-labor camp in Czechoslovakia.

The day she turned 21, Klein saw her first American flag, waving atop a church where she believes a Nazi swastika had been flying.

So that flag has become a huge symbol of freedom for Klein, the former Kenmore resident and well-known Holocaust survivor and author.

“When I see the American flag going up a mast, I cannot tell you what it means to me,” Klein said. “The flag means that everything is OK, that we are safe, that we are free.

“As you know, I’m very much a flag-waving American.”

It was only fitting that the flag-waving Klein, back for a visit to her adopted hometown of Buffalo, shared her thoughts about her latest project, “Citizenship Counts,” just days before this Fourth of July weekend.

Citizenship Counts is a nonprofit organization that seeks to provide middle school students with a civics curriculum that culminates in the hosting of a school-based naturalization ceremony for new Americans.

The idea is to teach adolescents how much new Americans cherish their citizenship.

Gerda Weissmann Klein is much more than a Holocaust survivor. Her activism has widened to the point that she has embraced both Columbine and Katrina survivors.

Her books are part of many high school curricula, and she has spent much of her time speaking to students.

Now she wants to spread some of her appreciation for American citizenship to middle school kids.

“If you are born in this country, you cannot possibly know what citizenship means, coming from where I came from to be an American citizen,” she said in an interview last week in the Buffalo home of her close friend, Ruth Kahn Stovroff.

Klein remembers studying so hard for her own citizenship test when she moved to Buffalo with her husband, Kurt Klein, after World War II. She was a little disappointed when she found out how easy the test was.

“What’s the name of our president?” she was asked.

“Harry S. Truman,” she replied.

“Congratulations,” the questioner said.

Klein says now, “I wish he had asked me what the S stood for.”

Klein clearly is bothered by the lack of patriotism among many Americans. She reels off all the times America has come to the aid of other countries, on medical and relief missions. She wants to instill in young people that pride in what our country has done.

So she wants to replicate, in as many places across the country as possible, the type of school-based naturalization ceremony apparently staged first in a middle school outside Cincinnati years ago.

Gerda Klein hasn’t lived here for 25 years, since moving to Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1985. This, though, remains her hometown, the place where her husband brought her in 1946.

“Coming back to Buffalo, it’s always nostalgic for me, because I didn’t have a childhood home,” she said. “Buffalo, that was my home.”

One of Klein’s dreams is to see a naturalization ceremony in a Buffalo-area school, as part of Citizenship Counts.

The not-for-profit agency, which has retired U. S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on its advisory board, offers a 42-page citizenship curriculum for grades 5-11, written by Klein’s granddaughter, Alysa Ullman.

“If the kids in Buffalo, already two or three generations from my generation, could get an understanding of the joy and pride of living in Buffalo in freedom, as I did when I came here, I think that would be a tremendous fulfillment of a dream for me,” she said.

Klein’s stories about the Holocaust provide an oral history lesson about those dark days. But for all the indignities that she saw after being sold into a slave-labor camp for about $3.50, Klein emphasizes the goodness and beauty of some of the labor-camp inhabitants.

Like her best friend, Ilse.

Ilse had found a raspberry in the gutter, carried it around with her all day before passing it to Klein through a barbed-wire fence.

“That one raspberry was her sole possession,” she remembered. “She never tasted another raspberry again. My friend Ilse died in my arms on the 29th of April [1945]. She was 18 years old. In the last hour of her young life, she revealed the depth of her humanity. She said she was angry at no one, and she hoped no one would be angry with her.”

Ilse had two last requests of Klein.

If Ilse’s parents and little sister survived, Klein was asked not to tell them how she died.

“They did not survive,” Klein says.

And Ilse made the young Gerda promise to try to survive for one more week, considered a long time in such a slave labor camp.

“I was liberated one week later,” Klein said.

During the interview in the week before July 4, Klein also recounted the story of the night she learned about the American concept of freedom of speech.

It happened in October 1946, one month before her first Thanksgiving in America.

Out for dinner with her husband, Kurt, and some friends at the Hotel Niagara in Niagara Falls, Klein became upset when one of the friends blurted out, “In my opinion, President Truman is a fool and an idiot.”

She grabbed her husband’s arm, afraid the friend would be arrested.

“Kurt, stop him. Stop him. For God’s sake, stop him,” she said.

The friend later reassured her that he was a Democrat and a Truman admirer, that he had made the statement for her benefit, to teach her about the freedom of speech.

Years later, whenever Klein visited Niagara Falls, she always made a detour past the old Hotel Niagara.

“To me, it is like the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial,” she said. “This is where I had my first lesson in freedom of speech.”