by Kate Stewart
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:
As you know, a short time ago we offered to provide a home and a family for an emigrant child. We thought to take in a poor person for whom we could replace what their homeland had taken, to be their father and mother, to give them something and to be someone for them.
You then sent us Miss Ruth Rappaport, daughter of rich Jews, spoiled and self-important, with a personality that just doesn’t fit in with our plain-thinking family. I don’t
want to criticize Miss Rappaport at all, as she is just a product of her upbringing and surroundings, but it is nevertheless difficult for us to bring about any type of assimilation, which very much goes against her specific personality.
In short, it is far from what we expected and hoped for, and we ask you to organize an exchange. If you do not have a sweet-natured, poor girl, either from Sudetenland or Germany, we would rather pass on a German addition to the family and open our home to a Swiss girl . . . You can quietly and calmly change the situation. Miss Ruth does not know anything about this letter and we will also not allow her to find out.2
Dr. Keller wrote back to him a few days later, apologetically explaining her own feelings about Ruth:
We are very sorry you were so disappointed with Ruth Rappaport and had so much frustration. We thank you for trying so hard. We can understand your frustrations as we also found her very arrogant and stuck-up. In the last interview we felt this, but she talks very nice about you. We hope to find a place for her soon. We only have Jewish children so cannot supply you with another girl. All of the Christian children have been placed.3
But Mr. Röschard felt guilty about Ruth and didn’t want to appear so eager to cast her aside. He decided to give it more time and notified Dr. Keller, “She is too grown-up for her age. We will try it once more and see if we can work things out.”4
Ruth had been under the impression that her relationship with the Röschards would be more like that of an employer and employee. She wanted to retain her independence and come and go as she pleased. Immigrants in Switzerland were forbidden from working for pay, so Ruth imagined she would help with household chores in exchange for room and board. It appears that Ruth was not able to attend a free public school in Zurich.5 She explained to her American uncle Carl Rubinstein in a letter written in her awkward English, “I am not allowed to earn money in Switzerland, and my parents are forbidden to send me any . . . Every day I spend in Switzerland is lost time for me . . . If there were not the new law that also parents, whose children are abroad and want to go to school, are forbidden to send money out from Germany, I would go to school here. So I have no opportunity.”6
She had to fill her days with something. Ruth went out frequently to socialize with other teenage and young adult members of the Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth group that she had recently joined. Months later, she revealed that, in her opinion, she had worked hard for the Röschards and they had been generous to her. She had no complaints about the family or living with them.7 If she realized that Mr. Röschard found her behavior to be intolerable, she never indicated it in her diary. While living with the Röschards, Ruth inquired to several organizations in Germany and England about the possibility of joining one of the Kindertransport trains to England, but she was ineligible for various reasons. Near the end of January 1939, she was sent to a new family in Zurich, the Herzogs.
Kurt and Doris Herzog had two children, including a toddler daughter named Ursi.8 Ruth was responsible for caring for them to some extent, and she took photos of herself and Ursi out on walks around Zurich. After living with them for about three months, she compared them to the Röschards, angrily writing in her diary that although they were comfortably middle class, the Herzogs were stingy.9 She explained her difficulty playing the role expected of her:
On the other hand, supposedly the Herzogs wanted to have someone for whom they could do good, who would completely belong to the family, talk about everything with them, and who feels at home with them. And I didn’t want that. 1. Nobody owes me anything here, 2. If I really was the way they are accusing me that I am not, then surely they would have said that I am demanding, 3. They never were very warm towards me, and I have always tried to avoid being any bother to them, 4. I did not know that they wanted to have a relationship with me, like for instance, a child with her parents, or with an uncle and aunt, 5. We are so different in our views and with everything, that surely would not have worked, 6. I always thought they were not that interested in me. 10
Ruth also wrote about the feelings welling deep inside that she could never express to anyone:
It may be my mistake that I come across so cold. As much as I can talk about meaningless stuff with all people in a superficial way, when it comes to my own affairs, I am totally closed up. Even if I speak about those things with someone else, I always have such a cold and superficial tone, as though I am not even speaking about myself. It is not meant for me that I, with warmth, would repeat the things I feel, neither with my parents nor with anybody else. And it is not even theatrics what I feel say or do. Whereas people see me on the outside as hard-working, strong, etc., and they think that I know no sadness, at times I feel bitterly miserable.11
At the end of April, Ruth’s father came to Zurich, and shortly after, her mother visited for a few days. They stayed with Ruth at the Herzogs’, and she worried how this would play out. Had she given everyone in Zurich the wrong impression of her parents? She was particularly embarrassed by her mother’s brazenness in asking other families to financially support Ruth. She noted, “My parents really don’t have very much anymore. I actually feel sorry for them. They have worked very hard their whole lives and now they have nothing to show for it.”12 But she was thrilled to see her father again: “Papa is here now, and I am so happy, and if it wasn’t the fact that it is Germany, I would have for sure have gone back home, but . . .”13 She trailed off, not needing to explain the obvious.
Even though Ruth had expressed that it wasn’t allowed, Mendel had been sending her money periodically. She also received small sums from Dr. Keller and a hundred francs a month from her uncle Carl Rubinstein in Seattle. When Kurt Herzog discovered that Ruth was receiving money, he informed her that since she “didn’t have the need anymore,” she couldn’t stay with them any longer. She had already concluded, “The longer I am with the Herzogs, the more obvious it becomes how totally different we are . . . It already bothers me enough that I must be a burden to strangers, and needless to say when I am told about it constantly. I know that I owe the Herzogs many thanks, but the way they behave now is really not very nice. They are petty people.”14
Ruth was not an easy person to live with. Although she tried to be considerate, something in her personality turned off both the Röschards and the Herzogs. By this point in her life, she was strong-willed and spoke her mind. She explained what her ideal living situation would be in Zurich: “In any case, I just want to go where I can work and be with people who don’t just want to do something good, but where I have a real business relationship, working ½ day and the rest of the time I am free. The nicest thing would be if I could take a room somewhere and study something, but that is just not possible.”15 Ultimately, she just wanted to be treated as an adult.
Soon she would be living with a Jewish family, the Langers, who had a daughter near Ruth’s age, Rose, whom she met through the Hashomer Hatzair. By July, she would be shuffled to the Jakobowitch family, who had two daughters with whom Ruth would attend a Zionist camp. Ruth’s father wrote to her in July explaining that he was looking into moving her to Lugano, Italy. She wearily wrote in her diary that she had packed her bags eleven times since she came to Zurich and was loath to move to a new place again. She stayed with the Jakobowitch family until she left for the United States in October, complaining in her diary only occasionally about the antics of their daughter Gerda. Like other Jewish refugee children, Ruth had eventually learned to act as grateful toward her foster parents as she could, despite her growing bitterness.
Chapter 7
Out of school for a full year, Ruth had more free time than she knew what to do with while she waited for her visa to the United States. She helped out with housework daily for her foster families and occasionally studied English. She was annoyed with herself for wasting time that she should have spent preparing for her move, but she had trouble focusing. As she would for the rest of her life, Ruth wavered between her dual desires to, on the one hand, go out, socialize, and
be frivolous, and, on the other, to focus on her solitary intellectual pursuits. She could now read openly all the books that she had to be careful to hide in Leipzig. Regardless of where she read them, openly or in secret, Ruth knew that reading risqué or radical books was a marker of her own sophistication.1 She also seems to have started smoking, another habit she surely thought was sophisticated. In a letter to her cousin Rose, Carl’s daughter in Seattle, she alluded to this, explaining a photograph she had sent: “The last one, with the cigarette, was only a joke, because I was imitating a lady, and in truth I am an ‘ANTI SMOKER.’”2
Now she finally had the chance to openly pursue any topic that interested her, no matter how controversial. But she was disgusted with the fact that she was just not motivated and wasted time during the day taking photographs with her friend Teddie. She chastised herself in her diary but also partially blamed the political circumstances she was mired in:
Because of my surroundings in the last two years and because of the situation in Germany, I have become what I have never wanted to become, a person without an inner life, which means I don’t engage in anything intellectual, and I have no interest in the world, movies, etc. Like I already said, I am totally blah. That will definitely need to change completely now.3
An omnivorous reader, Ruth read whatever she could get her hands on: books owned by her foster families, books borrowed from her new friends, books she might have bought in Zurich’s plentiful bookstores, and books available at libraries, including the Zurich Central Library or possibly a synagogue library. Although she claimed at the time she didn’t do “anything intellectual,” decades later, when applying to library school, Ruth thought about this time in her life differently. She wrote, “I can truthfully say that the most memorable point of my stay in Switzerland was access to libraries and books which opened for me a whole world of new ideas that had been strictly taboo in Germany.”4