by Kate Stewart
In the immediate aftermath of the war, American Jews seemed uncertain of how to go about finding relatives who had been left behind in Europe. Who was responsible for coordinating these efforts? For the American and Russian armies, the Red Cross, and Jewish organizations, the first task was to rehabilitate concentration camp survivors, who were eager to leave for Palestine or the United States. Jewish organizations compiled lists of survivors and dispersed the lists throughout the Jewish diaspora. On May 28 an announcement appeared in The Transcript that some survivor lists were already available at the Washington Émigré Bureau. Max Schneider, Ruth’s brother-in-law in Palestine, made the first inquiry for Mendel and Chaja Rappaport.8 Ruth probably contacted Clara and Mirjam to hear how or whether they made it through the war and to inquire if they had heard from their parents. She anxiously followed the news from Palestine, where Jews were fighting the British to allow more displaced people, known as DPs, into the country.
Ruth decided to take a break from school. The end of the war might have brought too much turmoil for her to keep concentrating on her studies, but she continued her job with the USO and the USS. The Seattle branches of these organizations would soon see a flood of soldiers returning home and would be busier than ever. In August the Seattle Times noted that women’s volunteer work for the war was not over yet. Concerning the USO, Aileen Hicks Finley wrote:
More than 1,000 feminine volunteers work at the Seattle U.S.O., according to Mr. William D. Martin, manager. These women man the Snack Bar, Information desk, Hospitality desk, cashier’s desk and program office, where they distribute razor blades, tooth paste and other creature comforts to the men. They run the switchboard every day after 6 o’clock and on Saturday evenings and Sundays. A special group sews buttons on uniforms and mends holes . . . Mr. Martin believes the club will see a sharp increase in patronage with so many service men leaving the Pacific as well as inductees leaving from here for that area as occupation forces.9
In August, Ruth applied for a secretarial position with the JAFRC. This job would have been a chance for her to officially work for the causes she believed in, but she didn’t get it. Likely disappointed, she continued with the USO through the end of the year. In October, Ruth helped plan a special event commending the USS’s 325 Seattle volunteers for their accomplishments over the past year, including placing eighteen thousand pounds of magazines and game chests on 360 ships at the Port of Seattle.10 Ruth was still eager and ready to move to a paying job within the Jewish community, working for some kind of cause she deeply believed in.
Chapter 13
In January 1946 Ruth began working for The Transcript.1 During the war a string of young women edited the paper due to the shortage of men. The weekly newspaper was usually four to six pages and on its front page included national stories from the Independent Jewish Press Service and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Most of the rest of the issue reported on local Jewish events, including organizations’ meetings, speaking engagements, and a social column. Ruth could now put her childhood “reporter” instincts to good use. She would not be allowed to vocalize her opinions on Zionism through her work at the newspaper, but she could observe and write about the community she had grown, if somewhat begrudgingly, to see herself as part of. Even if this job consisted of tasks such as compiling notifications of marriages, births, and routine meetings rather than hard-hitting reporting of the international drama concerning Palestine, it was a start on Ruth’s slow climb to a career that resonated with her.
She was appointed acting editor for the March 4, 1946, issue.2 On the front page, she featured an Associated Press article about President Truman’s recent meeting with representatives from the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) concerning the Nuremburg trials and the obligation of the US to admit Jewish DPs. She also included the Western Union telegram that was sent from the UJA to Al Shyman, president of Seattle’s Federated Jewish Fund, to report on the meeting with Truman. The issue included a notice of the newspaper’s new office hours in the morning rather than the afternoon, presumably a change meant to accommodate the new editor’s schedule. She no doubt was proud to see her name on the masthead, if only for one issue. Beatrice Sussman became the new editor for the next three months, and then Ruth took over permanently. The prolific engagement and wedding announcements of local Jewish couples competed for space in the paper against dramatic international headlines on the aftermath of the war and Palestine. As her friends began to pair off and have children, Ruth could finally say that her career was getting off the ground. As she put it, “I was a living encyclopedia on Jewish affairs in Washington, British Columbia and northern Oregon!”3
Ruth reenrolled at the University of Washington in the summer of 1946, taking her first journalism class on newswriting and one on economics.4 She seemed to be hitting her stride in her newfound career, making new connections along the way. A few years later Ruth explained in her diary how she met her first love around the time that she became editor of The Transcript in 1946. Riding on a bus in Seattle, she noticed a man who appeared to be Arabic. She spent weeks trying to find out who he was: M. Gamal Mostafa, also known as Jim (Ruth also sometimes spelled his name as Jamal). Five years older than Ruth, he had been born and raised in Egypt and had earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering at Cairo University in 1943. When he met Ruth, he was a student at the University of Washington, working on his master’s degree in civil engineering.5
On one of their dates, Ruth took him to the Washington State Press Club, where she was a new member. In advance she had asked the club if it was all right for Jim to join her, since, she said, “his skin color was a darker shade than ours.” In the Pacific Northwest, racial discrimination routinely occurred in social clubs, and Ruth was well aware of it. She was told, however, that it would be fine to bring Jim, so they attended the club together on July 30, 1946. When they arrived, one of the waitresses was “extremely rude” to Jim. After talking to other waitresses, Ruth was assured that it would not happen again. Ruth and Jim came back to the club about a week later. The doorman and two other people “in a very crude, blunt, tasteless and tactless manner, and these adjectives [described] their attitude only very mildly and inadequately, accused Mr. Mostafa of not being ‘white’ and therefore refused to admit him.” The next day Ruth wrote an irate letter to the club, detailing what happened. She argued that the club should welcome Jim, considering his accomplishments and the fact that he had been accepted by other social clubs in Seattle. She accused the club of “Jim Crowism” and asked that they “rectify, if possible, the blunder [they] made.”6
The Washington State Press Club had recently been taken over by a new group of young reporters back from their war service. Known initially as the Ale and Quail Society, this group had aimed to get on the club’s board of governors, which was dominated by an older generation of reporters.7 This new cohort seemingly had no use for the loud Jewish woman who was the new editor of The Transcript, a minor local paper, or her Egyptian boyfriend. Dudley Brown, the president of the Washington State Press Club, wrote back to Ruth: “The matter of your letter was read before the Board of Governors, and, on its instruction an amount equivalent to your unexpired balance of your membership is enclosed. Evidently you are not in sympathy with the manners and operations of this Club and the Board feels that in view of that fact it would be best to accept your resignation.” A check for $1.87 was enclosed.8
Chapter 14
Over a year after the war had ended, Ruth had still not heard from her parents or from anyone concerning what had happened to them. It had been almost seven years since she had seen them in person and three since their last letter. In July 1946 Ruth wrote to Leipzig’s recently reinstated Jewish community organization, the jüdische Gemeinde zu Leipzig. It might not have been the first letter she wrote to search for them. A copy of this tattered letter, handwritten in German, is included on the microfilm of the organization’s records:
I do not know who to turn to, so I am writing to you in hop
es that you will help. When I left Germany in October 1939, my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Mendel Rappaport, remained in Leipzig. My parents lived at Salomonstrasse 18.
Sometime later I received letters via the Red Cross in which they listed their address as Packhofstrasse 1 or Packhofstrasse 5. The last letter I received from Leipzig was dated August 17, 1943. At the time, the address of my parents was Gustav-Adophe-Strasse 7, which I believe was where the Jewish High School was. Since that time I have received no messages, despite all my efforts. I would very much appreciate it if we could get some information. If my parents are no longer in Leipzig I would like at least to know what happened to them—
My father, Mendel Rappaport, was a furrier in Leipzig, and has lived since approximately 1913 there. He was born in Rostoky (in Romania), and he was a Romanian citizen. My mother, nee Chaja Helena Rubinstein, was born in [Mielec] (in Poland). I am willing to give you more information if necessary and would be very grateful to you for any information.1
On August 27 the organization wrote a short letter to Ruth:
We received your letter dated 07/08/46 and must notify you to the fact that your father, Mendel Rappaport, died in January 1944 in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was sent in October 1943.
Your mother was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, from where she has not returned, so unfortunately, it is presumed that she was killed by the criminals of the SS.
We are sorry to send you this sad news.2
Ruth had expected the worst, and now the facts were laid before her. She had probably also found out by this time that Clara’s husband, Salomon Rosner, had died in Auschwitz in June 1943 after being deported from the Drancy internment camp near Paris. He had initially been sent to the South of France to a work camp and had tried to escape to Spain with other Jews when Germany invaded. But he was arrested and sent to Paris.3 Her cousin Deborah, Leo and Dora’s daughter, had been institutionalized in Germany for schizophrenia and was also murdered in a concentration camp, but which specific one is unknown. Michael Rubinstein, the son of Ruth’s cousin David, was shocked when he found out about Deborah. It had remained a family secret for decades.4 In her oral history interview, Gail Schwartz attempted to ask Ruth about the moment when she found out what had happened to her parents. When Schwartz remarked that the news about Ruth’s parents must have been devastating, Ruth answered, “Obviously, but . . . ,” and trailed off. She had nothing more to say about it. Like many others who had lost family members and friends in the Holocaust, Ruth never really wanted to discuss her parents or how they died. Many people who worked with Ruth through the years or were later friends with her knew nothing about this part of her life.
Mendel and Chaja were both deported from Leipzig on October 11, 1943.5 Like most Jewish couples, they were split up by gender as they boarded separate trains or trucks bound for different camps. Chaja was sent to either Ravensbrück or, as Ruth remembered in her oral history, Thereisenstadt. Chaja’s file at the International Tracing Service, the organization that documents Holocaust survivors and victims, suggests that she could have been sent to Thereisenstadt.6 Other women from Leipzig were sent there, so it remains a possibility. But there is no surviving record of her arrival at any camp. Her story ends there, when she left Leipzig. She seems to have vanished into thin air. In 1964, for the purposes of restitution, she was given a death certificate with a date of March 31, 1945, and Ravensbrück as her place of death.7 Mendel arrived at Buchenwald, just an hour west of Leipzig, on October 12, 1943.8
I visited Buchenwald with my parents after I completed my research in Leipzig. We drove an hour west through the pristine German farmland, passing by huge modern wind farms. The name Buchenwald translates as “beech forest,” and the thick woods still surround the camp for miles. In the parking lot, we saw German teenagers exit a bus and enter the visitor’s center on a common, and required, field trip for those raised in the country. The Buchenwald Memorial offers guided audio tours, and I downloaded the Buchenwald app on my phone. My guide, a male voice with a slight German accent, steered me through the camp on a bitterly cold day, October 13. Mendel Rappaport had arrived here almost exactly seventy-three years earlier.
Buchenwald was one of the first concentration camps in Germany and opened in 1937. Others besides Jews were sent there, including disabled people, homosexuals, foreigners, subversives, and prisoners of war. The camp imprisoned primarily men, and in total about 280,000 people passed through it before it was liberated in April 1945. Built before the “final solution” was conceived and implemented, Buchenwald was used as a work camp and holding station for prisoners who were waiting to be sent to other camps either in Germany or out of the country. About fifty-six thousand people died there, primarily from illness, but there were also many deaths as a result of medical experimentation and executions.9
The recorded voice led me past many buildings that served as barracks for guards outside the perimeter of the camp, and past the site of an abandoned zoo that had once entertained SS guards. It was certainly the most bizarre—and unexpected—aspect of the camp. I walked along the barbed-wire perimeter fence toward the main gate, which had a sign that read, “Jedem das Seine.” The phrase translates to the idiom “To each his own” or, more accurately, “Everyone gets what he deserves.” Through the gate, the wide-open camp slopes slightly down a hill. It is nearly all gravel, and the buildings that were destroyed are marked by rock and cement borders. The first thing I passed in front of the gate was the small memorial for all victims of the camp.
Because Buchenwald was one of the camps in which records were not completely destroyed by the guards before it was liberated, the International Tracing Service has a file on Mendel. It includes documents from the camp while Mendel was a prisoner there and the records of inquiries that were made about him after the war. His prisoner number was 9281. In addition to being imprisoned for being Jewish, he was classified as a political prisoner. One document lists what he wore when he arrived: a cap, coat, vest, trousers, two undershirts, underwear, a pair of shoes, two pairs of socks, a collar, and a tie. Another document lists the contents of his suitcase: six shirts, three pairs of underwear, eight pairs of socks, two ties, two scarves, one pair of gloves, one pair of pajamas, two handbags, one sleeping bag, one blanket, and one rucksack. Mendel signed both papers to verify the inventories.
For about three months Mendel lived in block 22, the barracks assigned to Jews. Like most prisoners, he probably worked in the rock quarry there; this might have been what Clara was referring to in her letter to Ruth when she said that “Pere” was working in a coal mine. The work was brutal, and Mendel died in Buchenwald on January 13, 1944, of heart failure. This may have been a generic cause of death assigned if it could not be easily ascertained. Buchenwald did not have gas chambers, so it is clear that Mendel did not die as so many other European Jews did.
After Mendel died, a document certified that none of his belongings remained in block 22. It was signed by the Blockältester (block elder), Carlebach, and the Blockführer, in an illegible scrawl. Carlebach was Emil Carlebach, a relative of Ephraim Carlebach, the rabbi who had led Ruth’s synagogue. Emil was from a Frankfurt branch of the family. Imprisoned at Buchenwald for joining the Communist movement in 1938, he was a leader of the resistance movement at the camp for years and led a mutiny in April 1945. He survived an execution attempt and was hidden by his fellow prisoners until the camp was liberated. He was chosen as the spokesman for the newly liberated prisoners, and he went on to serve on the Frankfurt City Council and own a newspaper there. He remained a committed Communist until his death in 2001.10
I walked farther downhill to the Little Camp Memorial, a notorious site of many deaths and where prisoners were held temporarily before being sent to other concentration camps. To the left was the infirmary; perhaps Mendel had been there when he died. Buchenwald includes a large museum in the former train depot at the bottom of the hill; the first floor is a stark, empty cement space with
a haunting, looping video about the camp. The second and third floors are filled with exhibits containing documents, photographs, and artifacts from the people imprisoned there and their captors. A remarkable array of well-known people passed through Buchenwald or died there: writer Elie Wiesel, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, French prime minister Leon Blum, as well as many other writers, politicians, artists, actors, doctors, and members of the resistance from across Europe. I scanned each exhibit case hoping to find something, anything, about Mendel, but I never saw his name.
Outside the museum lies a tree stump known as the Goethe Oak. An enormous tree, it is believed to be where Goethe wrote some of his famed poetry. The tree was famous before the camp was established; in fact, originally the camp was to have been named Ettersberg. But due to its association with Goethe and other writers and philosophers from the Weimar area, the name was abandoned in favor of the more generic Buchenwald. Although this tree was cherished by prisoners—as a reminder of the famed writer and the world outside the camp—it was also a site of many executions. During the Allied bombing attack of the camp in August 1944, the tree went up in flames. Many saw it as a sign of what was to come: if the tree fell, so would Germany.11