A Well-Read Woman

by Kate Stewart

  While the Zurich Central Library would have had a wide selection of books, newspapers, and magazines, it was not what we think of as a typical public library today, especially when it comes to children. First, there was no children’s or young adult department. Children younger than eighteen were not allowed to check out books. Only citizens had borrowing privileges, so Ruth would not have been able to check books out even if she were older than eighteen, although her foster parents or the parents of friends could have done so for her. Anyone was allowed to visit the library and read whatever he or she wished.5 It was located in the Rathaus Quarter, the oldest part of Zurich. Due to the narrow cobblestone streets dating to the Middle Ages, it is still largely cut off from car traffic. Built in 1914 after a merger of several small libraries, the sturdy stone building now serves as both the city’s public library and the main library of the University of Zurich.

  Ruth wandered the streets of Zurich during the day, waiting to meet up with friends after they got out of school. She could have passed the time in bookstores, shops, and cafés, but only at the public library was she not obligated to buy anything. She could browse for hours, read German newspapers—including, probably, her hometown Leipzig newspaper—write in her diary, or write letters to her friends and parents. In hindsight, it didn’t matter what exactly she read at that library. What mattered was the feeling it gave her: a sense of peace and safety and the opportunity to read, or not read, whatever she wanted to without judgment or regulation. Ruth was just one of many exiles who found refuge at Zurich’s public library. Many Communists and radicals from around Europe came to Zurich during times of crisis in their own countries. Vladimir Lenin lived just a few blocks from the library in 1917 and spent most of every weekday reading and working there.6

  When her father visited, she felt guilty for spending time with him in a carefree way:

  I spent my time in the exact manner that is frowned upon in the Bund, had invitations for dinner with Papi, gossiped and played cards. As a newcomer to the group, I can even openly talk about this but deep inside I am ashamed of myself. I have become so completely without any care and energy, that it is a total shame. I was disgustingly bored, but in the Bund, if we don’t have Sichot [discussions] about books or problems, then I am just as bored. This shows quite definitely that I stand for nothing, not in society nor in the Bund.7

  Like the Habonim in Leipzig, the Hashomer Hatzair would provide Ruth a social circle to discuss her intellectual, religious, and class questions. And like the Habonim, the Hashomer Hatzair would not live up to Ruth’s expectations of finding “true chaverim.” She was continually let down by this group of young Jews, who appeared to her more and more superficial and self-absorbed over the year she lived there. Most of all, she was disappointed with the group’s leader, Roger Garfunkel. It wasn’t just that he had rebuffed her after meeting him in Saint Moritz and that she was nursing an unrequited crush. She came to understand that he was a hypocrite, a comfortably middle-class person who encouraged others to practice hard physical labor in preparation for a new life in Palestine but didn’t seem to have any desire to do this work or move there himself.8

  Ruth remembered the activities of the Hashomer Hatzair in her oral history and described the group’s trip to the castle at Elgg in April 1939:

  I dug potatoes. I harvested potatoes. And one of the other strange things in all this mishmash was, there was some really large Swiss corporations. And they owned acreage in which they grew stuff. And when I went to Switzerland I volunteered to dig up potatoes for the Swiss chemical companies. These chemical companies owned farmland and they actually cultivated them, and we volunteered to dig up potatoes for them, in exchange for which we got to live in a Swiss castle.9

  Ruth compared herself to other girls in the group, jealous when they appeared more popular, condescending when they seemed naively enthusiastic about Zionism or kibbutz life. One girl, Ruth Zucker, who was also an immigrant, particularly annoyed her. Rappaport judged that Zucker’s standing was above her own because Roger had asked her to join the Hashomer, while Rappaport was left to explain to others in the group why if she was related to the Garfunkels they didn’t seem to help her out in any way. As she would her entire life, Ruth used humor to make fun of herself and convince others she didn’t care: “When I am asked how I can be here then I always tell a lighthearted and superficial story, but how I truly feel about it inside I don’t show that, I feel shameful about my situation.”10 Whether she fit in was a primary concern, but on the other hand, she knew she would not stay in Zurich much longer, so why bother to try?

  She became increasingly frustrated when the group did not discuss Zionism seriously. She observed a difference between the Habonim in Leipzig, a working-class group in which escaping Germany was imperative, and the Hashomer in Zurich, where Zionism was a theoretical abstraction that very few had to seriously consider.11 She reflected on how the last few years in Germany had hardened her: “I believe strongly, that because of what I experienced in Germany, I’m no longer youthful and fresh and lively, as I should be as a 15-year-old. As a matter of fact, sometimes I feel like a very old spinster.”12 As one of the only teenagers in the group who had grown up in Germany, she felt like no one else could truly understand the gravity of the situation there, and she feigned a lighthearted attitude with them. If there was anything she didn’t want from the members of this group, it was pity.

  Which social class she belonged to now and which one she would belong to in the future were foremost on her mind. She mulled over the possibilities:

  There was a time, when I longed for a life like, for instance, the life of Mrs. Herzog. Which means having parties, being elegant, to play a role, to have a well-tended house, and to have very little work. At other times I wished for a trade that would be completely fulfilling for me, but would that be ideal? The former is certainly much too empty, that I know. But if being a laborer could ever satisfy me? Can it be that in the long run a laborer will remain an intellectual?13

  It is telling that Ruth could not conceive of making a living somehow as an intellectual. To her the future seemed abstract, with many options and possibilities to consider, some of which she would not have any control over. Even at age fifteen, she had a foreboding feeling about being on her own for the rest of her life. She wrote, “I guess it is my fate that I have to make my own way, which means that I have to force myself to make a decision. But someday it will come, either to a good or to a bad ending.”14 At other points in her diary, she seemed to know exactly what her fate was: “I admire the people who can do [hard labor] and were not just doing it because of economic reasons and who are in the kibbutz. I think I am much too weak for that. When I will be going to the USA, I will most likely make a very good member of the middle class.”15

  The bright spot in the Hashomer was the camping excursions that Ruth clearly enjoyed. She had high hopes that on the trips she would bond with her “true chaverim.” That usually turned out to be a disappointment, but she realized what she loved about these trips: the satisfied feeling she had at the end of a long day of physical labor. Such labor was either a distraction from her overactive, analytical mind or an opportunity to burn up her restless physical energy, and in her diary she tried to explain the calm that would come over her at the end of these days spent at camp. In August, she fought with her parents by letter over an expensive camping trip just over the border in France. She defied their wishes and went anyway, despite the hassle of obtaining a visa and feeling cheated about the surprise extra costs of the trip. She ended up walking with her Zionist friends all the way to Mulhouse, about seventy miles from Zurich. Ruth had fond memories of the exhausting hike and sleeping in a barn next to her friends. She woke up feeling a sense of solidarity with them.16 Soon after she got back from this trip, Germany invaded Poland, and England declared war. A month later, Ruth would start her long, circuitous journey to the United States.

  Obtaining a visa to the United States was a bureaucra
tic ordeal that she was forced to navigate for over a year, alone as a teenager. She had to reapply every three months to the local “foreign police” for a permit to stay in Switzerland. She had to prove to them that she was in the country only temporarily and on her way to the United States.17 In February 1939 she found out that her family’s US visa application, first filed in Berlin in August 1938, was still valid, but it would take at least eight months or more for her to get it due to the long waiting list.18 In April, she found out that her Romanian passport would expire soon and she had to apply for a new one.19 The American consulate in Zurich informed her that her uncle’s affidavit to sponsor her family, written the previous August, was invalid now, and Ruth had to trouble him to write a new one.20 She explained to him that if she could not prove within the next few weeks that she was going to America, her permit from the Zurich city police would expire and she would have to leave the country.21 Throughout the summer, she worked on submitting to the consulate required documents, such as her birth certificate, a certificate that she had lived in Germany, letters from her parents stating that she would be going alone to the United States, and health questionnaires. In September, she finally received a summons to appear at the American consulate in Zurich to finalize her visa application.22

  Although her parents were restricted from coming to the United States by the low quota for Romanian citizens, Ruth was considered under the US Immigration Act of 1924 a citizen of Germany, which had the second-highest quota after Great Britain. It is unclear why Ruth received a visa when so many others were denied one at this time. Perhaps she was just next in line to be approved, but she may have received favorable treatment because she was under eighteen and her uncle Carl was wealthy.

  In October she finally obtained her visa and made plans to leave for the US from Holland, the only open port in Europe at that time. Ruth’s mother sold her piano to help her buy a ticket for her voyage on the SS Veendam.23 On the train ride from Basel to Leipzig, she claimed, she “led learned conversations about Madam Curie, youth league, and women’s issues.”24 She stayed with her parents in Leipzig and made preparations, which included sewing and shopping. Just getting from Germany to the SS Veendam would be an ordeal, one that left her confused about the travel plans and when and where the ship would leave for the US. She was turned away at the border of Amsterdam for arriving before the ship was in port, and it appears she stayed overnight in Oberhausen and spent a day in Duisburg trying to straighten everything out at the American consulate in the Netherlands, the Romanian consulate, and a travel agency. She had to backtrack to Leipzig without a valid travel pass and claimed she had to live in hiding for a week before returning to Holland, although she did not explain more about what that entailed.25 After staying briefly in Rotterdam, she finally left from Antwerp for the United States on the Veendam on October 28, 1939. Looking back on how she made it through this time in her life, she explained her transformation into an assertive person who had to advocate for herself. She argued that it was simply the result of the events that had happened and of her forcing herself to rise to the challenge, whatever the circumstances were: “My whole behavior is strictly existential. Meet what comes.”26

  After presenting a paper about Ruth’s work to an international library conference in Lyon, I went to Zurich for a few days to find out more about Ruth’s year there. I switched trains at Mulhouse, where Ruth had walked from Zurich to the Zionist camp. As I waited for a delayed train, an older man sat beside me on a bench and we struck up a conversation. He was an American who had grown up in Afghanistan, where my boyfriend, Greg, happened to be on a deployment at the time. The older man’s wife had recently passed away, and he had decided to take a long trip through Europe to visit their favorite places. He couldn’t wait to get to Prague, which she had loved. We talked for a long time about the war in Afghanistan, and later, on the train, he asked why I was going to Zurich. As another person who had fled a repressive regime, he was enraged when listening to Ruth’s story of escaping Germany.

  In Zurich I stayed at the Hotel Otter, which had a raucous “western bar” on the first floor. In a cowhide-covered booth, I ate my breakfast of hardboiled eggs and yogurt before heading to the public library. Once I arrived, I stood for a while in the lobby and grand stairwell of the old building, soaking in the solemnity of the space and imagining a fifteen-year-old Ruth walking up the steps. I spoke with a librarian in special collections about the library’s history and viewed older photographs of the building. I sat at one of the desks in the new modern wing, impressed with the fact that it was completely packed with students on a weekday afternoon in August. The next day I navigated a maze of narrow cobblestone streets, trying to find the city archives, which seemed to be hidden in plain sight. I pored over Zurich phone books from the 1930s, finding the addresses of the Garfunkels, the Röschards, the Herzogs, and the Jakobowitches. An archivist looked up more information for me about each of these families, including their immigration records, the occupations of the men, and the dates their children were born.

  At night I walked through a crowded festival and window shopped at the very expensive stores. I went to what I thought was going to be a late-night concert at Grossmünster Church, a concert that also turned out to be a haunting candlelight tour that ended with a climb up one of its tall bell towers. At the Swiss National Museum, there was a film exhibit consisting of many small booths with clips of famous Swiss films subtitled in Switzerland’s four official languages. I opened the curtains and sat on the benches to watch a few. In one film the characters joked about the Swiss always welcoming immigrants and refugees, so long as they had money. The people sitting around me laughed at this national inside joke.

  I took a train to Bern for the day to visit the Swiss Federal Archives, which has the records of SHEK. I passed by the beautiful government buildings with their window boxes of red flowers and walked over a high bridge that crossed the crystal-blue River Aare. I waited a long time for Ruth’s file to be delivered to the reading room and panicked when the archivist told me they couldn’t find it. When they searched again and found it and delivered it to me, I marveled at the documents and letters within it—her mother’s handwriting, the word “arrogante” in a letter from Dr. Keller to Mr. Röschard. It was utterly remarkable to find this small cache of documents that told so much about this single year in Ruth’s life. Just an hour before the archives closed, some other files from the SHEK collection that I thought might be relevant arrived in the reading room for me.

  The files were housed in large bundled cardboard cases tied with archival string. I skimmed and copied a few documents related to the “300 Kinder Aktion” group. I looked at one last folder, the title of which roughly translates to “Various Cries for Help.” I flipped through what appeared to be hundreds of letters from all over Europe, mostly written by parents, but some were from the children themselves. Some had small portraits attached with paper clips. What had happened to all these children? Were these the ones Nettie Sutro was just not able to help? I didn’t have to translate these letters to know what these frantic parents all said, very politely, in one way or another: “Please save my child.”

  Part III:

  Your Life Is a Battle, Your Peace a Victory

  SEATTLE, 1939–1945

  Chapter 8

  Ruth arrived in New York on November 10, 1939, at the age of sixteen, after an exhausting month of travel. She later wrote in her diary about how she felt when she got there: “I had such a joyful feeling such as I hadn’t had for a long time. I think that now I was the most restless person on the boat. I could no longer wait to be finished, and I simply had no more calm in me. It was so wonderful to know that I now no longer had to be worried about traveling further, staying overnight, etc.”1 She stood on the upper deck of the ship “dumb, fat, and happy,” as she later put it, watching the other families, who were almost all Jewish refugees like her, greet each other in joy and relief. Her uncle Carl and aunt Dora Rubinstein had ta
ken the train across the country to New York and had waited there for weeks for her to arrive. Due to the mix-up in her travel out of Europe, Ruth had no idea who, or even if anyone, would be meeting her in New York. Eventually she noticed a Western Union boy that had been circling the ship with a message and shouting, “Paging Ruth Rappaport! Paging Ruth Rappaport!” When she finally found her uncle Carl, he exclaimed, “What in hell is taking you so long?”2

  Her father’s brother who lived in New York, Irving Rappaport, was also there, and the two uncles met for the first time while waiting for Ruth to exit the ship. He wanted her to stay with him for a while in New York before traveling to Seattle, but she felt like she should go with the Rubinsteins because they had been waiting for so long for her. For one night, they stayed in a nice hotel, and she went to Broadway with her cousins Marvin and Selma, Irving’s children. She wrote of her first impressions: “I liked my family a lot. I had expected something as in Witznitz [Vyzhnytsya], outdated, pious, stingy, in particular, different. Modern, refined, simply: I was pleased with them.”3

  The next day she boarded the train with Carl and Dora for the long cross-country trip to Seattle. They had their own first-class suite on a Pullman car, and Ruth had her own bedroom. She remembered about her uncle on this trip: