A Well-Read Woman

Chapter 4

The events of fall 1938 were the most vivid of Ruth’s memories of her childhood in Germany. Nazi authorities announced that Polish Jews would be expelled from Germany in October. Since Ruth’s mother had married a Romanian, she was not included in this group. Leipzig had a very large population of Polish Jews, who, on October 28, congregated at the Polish consul’s villa to seek passports that would allow them to stay in Germany or flee to other countries.1 Those who were denied passports were sent to the Leipzig railway station to wait for trains that would send them to Poland, where they would be turned back from the border, stuck in limbo there.

Her home just two blocks from the train station, Ruth walked over to see for herself what was happening. She saw people arriving in nightgowns, having suddenly been forced from their homes. An idea popped into her head: these people needed toothbrushes. She looked up a man who owned a sundry store and knocked on his door. He gave her the toothbrushes, and she went back to the train station to distribute them. She considered it her first act of volunteering but also acknowledged, “Of all the crazy—well, I guess it was appropriate as anything else, wasn’t it? Kind of weird in retrospect.”2

Just two weeks later, the tensions came to a head during an event known as Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass.” The murder of a German attaché in Paris by a seventeen-year-old immigrant Polish Jew sparked a “spontaneous” nationwide pogrom on the night of November 9. The Nazi Party ordered its members and sympathizers to destroy synagogues and Jewish businesses while wearing plain clothes instead of uniforms. A neighbor, who Ruth later thought may have been a Communist, warned the Rappaports not to go out that night. But Ruth defiantly went out despite the danger. She would never forget what she saw.

Orthodox Jews had been ordered to line up against a wall near a river, probably the Karl-Heine-Kanal. Ruth watched as they were ordered to face it and Nazis fired guns into the air. She said, “It didn’t kill them. They just pretended to kill them all. And in some ways that was worse, because you heard the shots, opened your eyes, and they were still standing.”3

Wandering through the city, Ruth also saw her own school, synagogue, and the reform temple, just two blocks away from one another, on fire.4 She couldn’t remember many details about what was happening around her—if anyone tried to put out the fire, if people seemed to be horrified or gleeful. But she never forgot how she felt watching the destruction of these buildings that symbolized her community, her family, and herself: “Shocked. Disillusioned. Sad . . . [but] I don’t think I was afraid. I think what saved me was not being afraid. I think that’s what helped me get through it. I was just sort of leading with my chin up front. Maybe I’m too stupid to be afraid.”5

The next day it was announced that the Höhere Israelitische Schule was closed. Her parents, no doubt panicked and wondering what to do next, had to figure out what to do with Ruth. They must have talked late into the night, considering what they could do, where their family could go. When asked what she did to fill her time after her school was closed, Ruth simply responded, “Reading . . . did a ferocious amount of reading.”6

I took a trip to Leipzig to try to find out more about Ruth’s family. My dad and my stepmother came along with me, and they visited historic sites while I spent several days in the state and city archives with a translator I hired named Elke. We skimmed through microfilm and files of documents for the names Rappaport and Rubinstein and celebrated when we found crucial information. My parents and I walked and drove through the cold, wet streets, stopping by landmarks that Ruth had known so well: the train station, the symphony hall, and the Volkshaus worker’s hall that had been the site of Leipzig’s major book burning. We went to a concert in the old Saint Thomas Church, where Bach directed the choir for many years, and rested our feet in the Saint Nicholas Church, which had led the revolution against German Communism in the 1980s.

A new, modern apartment building is now at the corner of Salomonstrasse and Kreuzstrasse. The address number on one side of this building was 18, but I deduced from old maps that Ruth’s apartment building probably would have been located in the vacant lot next door. At night, in the drizzle, we found the site of her former synagogue on Otto-Schill-Strasse. Just around the corner was the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust: 140 empty chairs arranged in a grid, on the site of Leipzig’s other major synagogue that had been burned to the ground. The 140 chairs represent the 14,000 Jews who once lived in this city.

Part II:

A Whole World of Ideas

ZURICH, 1938–1939

Chapter 5

The last photograph Ruth took in Leipzig was a self-portrait in the courtyard of her family’s apartment building while hanging laundry on a clothesline, a strikingly ordinary and peaceful scene captured on November 8, 1938, the day before Kristallnacht. On November 23, she took a photo of her mother standing in the snow in Saint Moritz. Sometime during those fifteen days, she had boarded a train in Leipzig with her mother. In the 1950s, Ruth wrote a narrative, titled “Curriculum Vita,” as part of her application to the United Restitution Organization. She explained in it why she had gone to Switzerland:

My mother, on doctor’s orders, was planning a trip to Switzerland and all arrangements for this trip were completed during the early part of November. Since the Höhere Israelitische Schule was closed at the time of the pogroms, it was considered best that I accompany my mother for a few weeks to Switzerland, and accordingly about the middle of the month of November we arrived in Switzerland.1

They went to Saint Moritz, a well-known spa and resort area in southeastern Switzerland where Chaja could receive medical treatments. On November 18 Ruth and her mother met Roger Garfunkel, a distant relative of the Rubinsteins’, who lived in Zurich but was visiting Saint Moritz, probably on a ski trip. Roger was born in France, and his parents were Polish immigrants from the same area where Chaja had grown up.2 He was twenty-five

years old and a leader of the Zurich branch of the Hashomer Hatzair, another Zionist youth group.3 Ruth later wrote in her diary that his mother had died four years previously and his father was wealthy. Roger’s father supported him financially while he worked to convince Jewish children and teenagers they should move to Palestine.4 She explained that she had first thought he might be a “true chaver,” a friend or mentor with whom she could discuss Zionism in depth, develop her own beliefs, and find the path she would take in the future. Roger told her to get in touch with him in Zurich, and Ruth looked forward to getting to know him better. Sometime in late November or early December, Chaja and Ruth took the train from Saint Moritz to Zurich, where they stayed in nice hotels and visited the Garfunkels again. Chaja planned to go back to Leipzig with Ruth after visiting Zurich.

What happened next was a turning point in Ruth’s life. She and her mother boarded the train in Zurich, but as it began to leave the station, Ruth grabbed her suitcase and jumped off. She just could not force herself to go back to the hell of Germany. As she put it, “No ten horses could get me back there.” When asked if her mother knew what she had been planning, she explained, “Well, yes and no, because when we packed for the trip, she went through my luggage and she said, ‘You don’t need’—some of whatever season of clothes I’d packed was the wrong season. So, she knew what I was planning. But there wasn’t much she could do. And when I jumped off the train and the train moved on, that was it.”5

Did Ruth really jump from the train and run away from her mother? She told this story often to her friends and neighbors on Capitol Hill, and who wouldn’t love it? She framed it as a crucial moment in her life, when she grabbed the reins of fate and started to forge her own path. But she never referred to this incident directly in her letters or diaries from the time. Perhaps Ruth remembered herself as a daring, rebellious teenager who would jump from a train to escape being dragged back to the horrors of what was to come in Germany; perhaps her parents wanted her to stay in Switzerland because they knew it would be safer. But a few months later, Ruth obliquely referred to what had happened the previous winter with a simple phrase, “When I made the decision to stay in Switzerland,” indicating that the decision was hers alone, not her parents’.6 She wrote that she had stayed briefly at a Salvation Army women’s home. She didn’t explain how she ended up there. She might have gone to the Garfunkels first, but clearly they had no interest in allowing her to stay in their home. She disparaged them later as relatives who were “for the birds.” She wrote:

Yes, when my Mother left, and I didn’t have anything, I simply slept at the Salvation Army. All the people thought that it didn’t bother me at all, you can’t get her down. Yes, it did not harm me, but especially the contrast, first living in a hotel, to eat in a first-class restaurant, always together with Mother, then suddenly to be totally alone in an ice-cold room without love, so truly in poverty, with immigrants, where everything is disgusting. While I, in the past, even though I never mentioned it, had a loathing for poverty, looked at the poor with disdain, I am now deeply convinced that poverty is not shameful…7

Reading this diary entry convinced me that Ruth was indeed the girl who jumped. At the very least, there is no doubt that Ruth ran away from her mother in Zurich and refused to return to Leipzig.

An annual report from 1938 explained the mission of the Salvation Army home for women in Zurich. Many of the women there were immigrants; some had sad stories of alcoholism, abusive husbands, or abandonment. The goal of the organization was to train poor women to work as maids in Zurich. Every weekday, residents took classes in sewing, ironing, cleaning, and cooking until they passed tests and earned a certificate. Some residents were extremely difficult to work with, but it was always considered a triumph when these downtrodden individuals succumbed to the good influence of these progressive women of Zurich, accepted their lot in life, and became obedient maids for the wealthy.8 Ruth stayed only for a few weeks, but she probably had some training in how to perform the housework she would later be expected to do as a foster child.

On November 22 Richard Röschard wrote to the Schweizer Hilfswerk für Emigrantenkinder (the Swiss Aid Society for Emigrant Children, commonly known as SHEK), offering to house an orphan or immigrant child who would be treated as a member of the family.9 SHEK had been founded in 1933 by Dr. Nettie Sutro, a woman who had earned her PhD at the University of Bern. Living in Zurich as a Jewish immigrant from Germany, Sutro was moved by the plight of the starving children of Russian émigrés in France. She founded the organization to bring these children for just a few weeks to Switzerland, where they could eat heartily and regain their strength before they were sent back to France.10

Sutro enlisted the help of women across Switzerland and opened offices in several cities where local families were recruited to host children. This program continued until November 1938, when Kristallnacht changed everything. Sutro decided that German Jewish children would now be the top priority. She wrote up a list of German children who wanted to enter the country, titled “300 Kinder Aktion,” and submitted it to immigration authorities in Switzerland for approval. She organized the Frankfurt–Switzerland line of the famous Kindertransport train. Dr. Ruth Westheimer, known then as Karola Siegel, was one of these children. She spent the war in an orphanage in Switzerland before learning that her entire family had been killed in concentration camps. Westheimer was then sent to Palestine with other orphans. While Ruth Rappaport was staying at the Salvation Army in Zurich, someone who worked there probably contacted SHEK on her behalf. Even though she was already living in Zurich, her name was also placed on the “300 Kinder Aktion” list for approval. Making the list was what ultimately allowed Ruth to stay in Switzerland for almost a year.11

Dr. Bertha Keller, a SHEK employee who had a law degree and a PhD in economics, was assigned to Ruth’s case and replied to Mr. Röschard on December 7. She explained, “At the moment we have a 15-year-old girl from Leipzig. Her name is Ruth Rappaport . . . She is very intelligent and very independent for her age. Please let us know soon.”12 Dr. Keller, an intelligent and independent woman herself, immediately recognized a self-reliant, if somewhat defiant, free spirit inside this bookish and bespectacled teenage girl.

Chapter 6

On April 20, 1939, Ruth started a new diary. She might have bought it earlier that day at a stationery store in Zurich, or maybe her mother had mailed it to her from Leipzig. Ruth had just returned the day before from a weekend Zionist camp at a castle in Elgg, where she and other Jewish teenagers had dug potatoes, sung songs, and prepared for life in Israel. On the first page, she wrote her full name and the word “Tagebuch” (diary). She must have been thinking about the importance of friendship when she wrote out the Golden Rule above her name. Under her name she wrote the word “Zurich” twice, once in pen and once in pencil, underlining both with dashes. She may have hesitated before turning the page to begin her first entry, where she would start to diligently document her new life in this city over the German border and at the foot of the Alps. At the bottom of this first page with her pencil, she wrote, “I wonder who will find this diary.”

As Jewish children and teenagers began their exodus out of Germany in the 1930s, they were unaware of the new roles they were expected to assume in these new countries. Too distracted by planning logistics and not wishing to worry their children, most parents did not explain much to them about their impending new lives or were unaware of exactly where they would end up. Grateful that their children would be the lucky ones, they bid them goodbye, told them to “be good,” and sent them on to the Swiss foster parents who had been generous enough to open their homes. Most probably told their children they would be together again soon, whether they truly believed that or not.

Many of these children later wrote as adults about their confusion, guilt, loss, or complete ignorance about what was happening in Germany. Their titles alone are telling: A Boy in Your Situation, A Child Alone, A Lesser Child, A Transported Life, Against All Odds, Girl in Movement, My Heart in a Suitcase, Shedding Skins, and one of the most well known, Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses. Segal was placed on the Kindertransport from Vienna to England and was politely shuffled among many different families. Even when her parents were later able to come to England themselves, she was not allowed to live with them initially. As former business owners who had lost their wealth, they were now expected to assume deferential roles of housemaid and gardener and to be grateful for such opportunities.1 Ruth was no different from any of these children forced to live with strangers due to the tragic circumstances of German Jews, whose lives and families were ripped apart in the 1930s. She used her diary as an outlet to describe in detail how she felt about being a foster child, how she missed her parents and friends, her opinions on Zionism, and her concern about what would happen to her in the future.

In Zurich, Mr. Röschard agreed to take Ruth. Just three weeks after Dr. Keller had written to him to ask if he could take her, he wrote a confidential letter to SHEK: