by Kate Stewart
Was Ruth’s father oblivious to the dangers lurking ahead? This is how she remembered it, but the records indicate that he indeed tried to get his whole family out of Germany. In the spring of 1938, he corresponded with Jakob Gross, who was living in Nairobi, Kenya. Gross described what steps the Rappaports needed to take to immigrate to Kenya and the business opportunities for Jews available there.3 Ruth’s family also wanted to immigrate to the United States, either to Seattle to be near Chaja’s brothers or to New York, where Mendel’s brother, Irving, lived. Mendel was especially focused on getting Ruth out of Germany. Her name was placed on a waiting list in August 1938 at the American consulate in Berlin.4 In 1937 or 1938 Ruth’s sister Clara moved to Paris to marry her boyfriend, Salomon Rosner, also an immigrant from Vyzhnytsya, who had first tried his luck in Berlin.5 The letters and other documents that described her father’s efforts were all in Ruth’s papers that Peter, my Library of Congress colleague, found in her house, so none of these efforts to immigrate were concealed from her. But she still angrily remembered her father as oblivious to what was to come.
If most Jewish parents in Leipzig tried to protect their children from unnecessary worry, teenagers in the Habonim and other youth Zionist groups received a very different message from their group leaders: get out now. Ruth explained that the leaders of the group were urgently encouraging their members to go to Palestine as soon as possible if they could. In hindsight, the group’s efforts to teach its members agricultural skills seemed like a waste of time to her considering what was looming, but as she later said, “At the time it was a solution to a problem.”6
Ruth was conflicted about “making a decision”: choosing whether to move to Palestine and live on a kibbutz or leave Zionism behind and assimilate into Leipzig’s (or possibly America’s) bourgeois culture. She agonized about it, weighed each option, and examined her own personality and flaws. Was she physically and mentally tough enough to work on a kibbutz and forsake most physical and intellectual comforts? Would a bourgeois middle-class life as a housewife be too empty?7 If there was one thing she knew she wanted, it was to work hard and to become a professional. What exactly that profession might be, especially since there were so few open to women, remained unclear to her.
On Ruth’s thirteenth birthday in 1936, her parents sent her alone on a trip to Romania to visit Mendel’s family. She remembered:
For my birthday, I received a suitcase and money for traveling at the Pentecost vacation. I was very into the Chaluzisch movement.8 When I then traveled to Romania, I totally felt like a traveling lady, totally independent, which I actually was… Most of all, I was also in a good humor and I made my vacation with the yucky relatives very nice.9
Ruth might not have ever been to Romania or met her father’s family before. She obtained her Romanian passport for the trip and took photos in her father’s hometown. Traveling on her own might have been a marker that she was mature enough to go to Palestine alone if she wished. She also described the trip with sadness and revealed her propensity to act tougher than she really was:
In Romania, the relatives were so different from me, and at times we even butted heads, and everyone admired me because I refused to let it get to me; they thought that I didn’t care and I’m going my own way, a different child would not be happy anymore, would have cried, and the vacation would have been ruined, but nobody knew that I was desperately unhappy in the evening in bed by myself.10
It may have been the first time she did not connect well with her extended family, especially without the benefit of her parents to bridge the distance, but it wouldn’t be the last.
On New Year’s Eve in 1936, Ruth started a diary. She reported that her uncle Leo (her mother’s brother), aunt Dora, and cousin David had just left for the United States, yet another Leipzig Jewish family making a break for it while they could. David was the youngest of four children; the oldest daughter, Deborah, lived in Hanover in a mental hospital, and Meier and Rosel, his middle children, had already left for Palestine.11 Ruth acknowledged that she had not made an effort to see her relatives recently and did not get along with them, but now that they had left, she missed them. It felt like everyone was leaving, and Ruth feared that she would be one of the last people stuck on an obviously sinking ship.
Despite the fact that their world was beginning to crumble, Jewish girls in Leipzig sustained intense friendships with one another. Most of Ruth’s friendships grew out of the Habonim. She revealed, as only a thirteen-year-old girl could, the reason why she had started her diary in the first place:
With Esther things are very different on the outside, but basically we play act. We talk about many different things, but we don’t talk about anything really personal. I get along better with her than Miriam, for sure, but it is not a friendship, because she will not let me read her diary and I won’t let her read mine, which I just started to write today.12
A few days after she’d begun the diary, Ruth wrote about her conflicted feelings concerning the Habonim, and, in particular, her disagreements with Ury Rotschild, the leader of the group. She explained that he had recently left Leipzig on a trip and that since his departure everyone had formed their own cliques, despite their frequent criticism of them. Ruth wanted to leave the Bund. She couldn’t stand their judgments about wearing flashy bourgeois clothes, when clearly these working-class kids coveted them.
Ruth abandoned her diary for the next two and half years. But when she started writing again later at age sixteen in Switzerland, she picked right back up with reflections on why she decided to quit the Habonim in Leipzig in 1937 or thereabouts. Her parents had been pushing her to act more like a middle-class girl, which she had resisted while in the Bund. But the group had distracted her from school, and to her embarrassment, she failed and had to repeat a year.13 Although she got along with the other girls in the Habonim, she developed tensions with the boys, Ury in particular. After going to a Zionist summer camp with the group, likely in the summer of 1937, she had had a big fight with him and finally quit.14 He had accused her of being a conceited bourgeois girl concerned only with clothes and makeup. Ruth knew this flatly wasn’t true; she was an intellectual who cared deeply about class issues, Palestine, and the fate of Jews in Europe. But she couldn’t blindly adhere to any one ideology; her deep independent streak forced her to acknowledge that she would likely be unhappy on a kibbutz. Ruth revealed, “We were brainwashed in the sense that the way of the Bund is the only one, this is the way you have to go or you are losers.”15
She explained the sense of liberation she felt when she quit the Bund and how she could finally go out and do the things she wanted to do without risking criticism from Ury and the others in the group. Her grades and her teachers’ comments on her report cards dramatically improved in 1937. Even though she feared she was drifting into shallowness, she longed for a normal teenage life:
I didn’t have any real girlfriends, because I was already so influenced by the Brith that the typical young girls who only knew about fancy dress, silly movies and books were way too childish for me. But given a little time, I almost turned into the same kind of person. I wore clothing that was more stylish, a bit sporty, not like before in the common dress, but with a degree of elegance and for Leipzig, I stood out. I was an equal with all of the rich girls in my class. What I didn’t yet do was dancing, use makeup or powder. I often went out to a coffee house with my parents, and I was able to have amusing conversations with the young men. In any case, everybody thought I was 17 or 18 years old.16
She looked back at this period with some sense of regret, however: “I was, by the way, until January of 1939, very much on my way to being a superficial, vain, dumb, which means good middle-class society girl, just like Ury Rotschild had predicted.”17
In 1936 Ruth started using a camera and kept a photograph log with captions and dates for every shot she took. The initial captions from 1936 reveal outings with the Bund and names of members in each photo. The captions from later in
1937 and 1938 are only of Ruth, her family, and friends Edith and Esther, often in parks or in the squares of Leipzig. There are a few of Ruth alone, posing like a fashion model in a park, trying on her new liberated identity. Meanwhile, letters of complaint flooded into the Leipzig parks office demanding that Jews should be banned from parks or, at the very least, from sitting on park benches. Leipzigers were especially concerned about Jews in the large Rosental Park, where Ruth had taken many photos.18
As Ruth became a teenager, she grew into a very independent, outspoken person who clashed with her parents at times. She remembered, “I was much closer to my mother. We had a good relationship. I think my dad was a little bit of a control freak, but I think most parents were in those days.”19 After she left Leipzig, she reflected on some prescient advice that her mother had given her but she did not want to hear: “Your two best friends, your two least jealous friends, are your parents, but you will learn that too late.” Ruth lamented, “How rightly she had it! I know today that, when I didn’t speak to her, she also understood me better than anyone.” 20
By the time Ruth was fifteen, she saw herself largely as an adult, free to come and go as she pleased on her own, even at night. Later, when she moved to Seattle to live with her aunt and uncle, she would long for these times in Leipzig when, she claimed, she “did what [she] wanted and went where [she] wanted.”21 The streets of Leipzig were becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews, but Ruth desired to go out and watch what was unfolding, which she described as akin to being a reporter. She said, “In a peculiar way . . . I’m not sure I can explain it, but I guess I always kind of went along feeling it’s better to see than not to. I felt more in control being able to watch. I wasn’t so puzzled. I could see what was going on. But I just sort of hoofed it around.”22 Her Romanian passport didn’t say she was Jewish, which meant she didn’t have to follow the curfews for Jews. She revealed that the police in fact suspected she was Jewish, but when they confronted her, they couldn’t prove it.23 Ruth defiantly roamed the streets on her own, half flaneur and half spy.
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