http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060420/NEWS08/60420009/1001/BUSINESS

Holocaust survivor tells story

JARED STRONG
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

April 20, 2006

Ruth David didn’t even know what a Jew was when she and her family were shunned by Nazi Germany.

Her parents were eventually murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

David was lucky. She was 4 years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, but several years later she escaped with other children to England, where she spent most of her life before moving to Ames in 1992 with her husband, Herbert.

Now, at age 77, David tells her story so younger generations never forget what happened.

“It’s a story that is now ancient history,” David said during a book reading at the Des Moines Central Public Library Wednesday night. [color="Red"]“For people growing up, it seems rather unlikely, which is why we must continue to teach it.”

After much prodding from her two children, David penned a book that was first released in German in 1996. “Child of Our Time: A Young Girl’s Flight from the Holocaust” was released in English in 2003. Before her library appearance, David discussed her book and her life Wednesday afternoon at Drake University.

[color="red"]Periodically, David speaks to Iowans about her life. She also travels to Germany for a couple weeks each year to discuss the Holocaust.

Her talks this week in Des Moines came ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday. A commemoration program and memorial service to mark the day are scheduled for Monday night on Drake University campus.

“Quota” was the first English word David learned. Although she was very young, she knew that when the quota number got high enough, her family could emigrate to the Unites States.

David’s number wasn’t called until her parents were dead and she and her five siblings were scattered around the world.

It took David about 40 years to finally return to Germany, back to her village where she and her family were persecuted.

David said she was expelled from her school for being Jewish. Each day, she and other Jewish students traveled in a van 25 miles to a synagogue that had classrooms, where her mother taught part-time. Other children threw rocks at their van as they passed through several villages along the way.

“They knew it was the Jew bus,” David said.

[color="red"]One day, she said, a prominent man from her village walked up to the van and broke out all the windows, to the screams of scared little children.

David briefly met that man when she returned to Germany. She didn’t stay long enough to hash over old times with him, but she met his son, who clearly had no knowledge of what happened years before.

[color="red"]“There’s a whole generation who have learned nothing of this,” David said. “Now they’re trying to work this up on their own, and they can’t do it.”

It’s a question David often poses to people she teaches or speaks to: Why wouldn’t they tell about what they did to the Jews?

“Someone will be brave enough to raise their hand and say, ‘Perhaps they feel ashamed,’” David said. “That’s a wonderful answer. That’s an answer I want to get.”

[color="red"]But she doesn’t want to hear from the Holocaust naysayers, who doubt millions of Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.

“That’s just a plain lie,” David said. “If you believe that, there’s something very suspiciously wrong with you.”

No question about her life is off-limits now, but for a long time David was deeply enraged by what her family went through.

“There was rage. Rage is the right word,” she said. “But you were also obliged to hide it. This is the reason I eventually wrote the book.”

Seven decades after the Holocaust, David looks back on a successful life as an educator, wife, mother and grandmother. But there is one thing she regrets not being able to tell her parents years ago before they died.

[color="red"]“I regret bitterly that they didn’t know the Germans would lose the war,” she said. “They must have gone to their deaths wondering if any of us survived.”