Ruth Kent - August 7, 1984
Reunion with Family
Did you?
I did but the clothes that I owned belonged to this city. And it was very difficult, so we ran away at night, I joined--my brother told me about his, a friend that he had once in the ghetto who was a Zionist, that if anyth...if any of us want to go to Israel, they should only think of this boy. His name was Berman, I remember. And I contacted this man and he uh, got me and about uh, five other children and the um, I don't know what organization from uh, the Haganah or something, came in and took us away at night. We had to leave at night because everything we had on belonged to the city where, where, like the uh, any...anything I owned, my dress belong to them. I was like a ward of the--what do you call it?--um, anyhow, so we joined this group and we were walking, we got papers that we're Greeks and we're, we're going towards the boats in Italy. And the boats were overcrowded, so they sent us to Germany, to Munich. And in Munich, I spent the night in the museum; I remember on these stairs that's where we slept. And from there they send me to a kibbutz that was about fifty miles away from Frankfurt, in Bad Nauheim. And after I got settled in the kibbutz, I went into the office. It was a DP camp in um, not Sax, in uh, Sachsenhausen, I think. And I went into the office and asked for the survivors, again for the list of survivors, and this girl that I asked happened to be in love with my brother already. And um, she says, "Who are you?" I says, "I'm um, uh, Ruth Weintraub." She says my brother survived and a month before that my brother Jack joined him. So immediately she arranged transportations for me to Bad Nauheim. And it was the longest, which was only thirty-five miles away, and I says that I don't believe they are, they survived. She took me in her home and showed me pictures of my brother Larry and he was already in an American uniform. He was working for the American Army already. And so uh, I did get transportation to Bad Nauheim and I remember my brother Jack was carrying a bundle of clothes on this terrace and as he saw me this man said, I brought you a little girl. And as he saw me, the whole bundle of clothes just fell on the floor, all over it was drizzling I remember, it was almost raining. And we were just walking and hugging each other. And we went to see my brother Larry and I was caught between my two brothers. And it was the most wonderful reunion of my life. And slowly uh, I realized that my mother did not survive and by then we knew that my mother had to be uh, cremated in Auschwitz. She went to the crematorium and uh, my brother was--they were all gassed. In Auschwitz. My sister didn't survive either. She couldn't survive the work. I met some people that were working with her in her camp and she didn't survive the walk. They're walking every day fifty miles. So, that was my most wonderful day of my life, meeting my two brothers.
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