Holocaust Survivor: “I Did My Best Acting During the War”

Reading about a theatrical production in England, put on by older adults, we came across the inspiring story of a Holocaust survivor. Ruth Posner, who will be sharing her memories of the Holocaust, is an actress who saved her best performance for her escape from the Nazis:

By the time she was just 12, and the Second World War was underway, Ruth had lost both her parents and her world as she knew it. She was in the middle of the Holocaust.

Now, 72 years later, Ruth is re-enacting her story in a play. She is taking part in a production called Who Do We Think We Are?, which sees 10 older actors share their personal memories and covers the last 100 years of human history.

Ruth, 84, is acting out the story of how she escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto.

She lived there with her parents, and tells me: “The unfortunate story is that my father wanted to save me.”

Her father helped Ruth and her aunt – whose two children had already been killed by the Nazis – get a job working at a leather factor outside the ghetto. He also managed to acquire false passports for the women, giving them Catholic names and identities.

The plan was

for the pair to escape during one of their regular trips to the bathhouse, where workers were taken weekly.

“We were marched with guards on each side and marched back again,” explains Ruth. “On one of those events my aunt had the false passports. She explained to me, ‘this is my chance’.”

The two of them managed to run out of the bathhouse and on to the Aryan side of the road. “It was sheer luck. It was always, you might be lucky and you might not be. But it was worth taking that chance.

“Like a cat, I have many lives, I think.”

For the next year or so, Ruth and her aunt pretended to be Catholic. It wasn’t as challenging as it might have been for others. Ruth did not ‘look Jewish’ and her not particularly religious family had already assimilated to Polish life.

Ruth’s parents were tragically taken to Treblinka, the concentration camp, where they died. She believes that they always had plans to follow her, but were deported before they had a chance to put them into action.

The rest of her story is not told in the play.

When she was 13, Warsaw was evacuated and Ruth was moved to Germany.

“We were taken as prisoners of war to Germany, but not as Jews. As Christians,” she tells me.

“It was very very cold in the winter and we had to clean the snow away from a railway. This was kind of my school. It wasn’t as bad as being in a concentration camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka, where my parents died. But you know, it wasn’t a piece of cake. We weren’t tortured, we were not beaten. But the circumstances were not easy.”

When the war ended, she went to England and has lived here ever since

Read more: http://www.blog.standforisrael.org/articles/holocaust-survivor-i-did-my-best-acting-during-the-war#ixzz3I5OYgoBJ 
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