This contribution comes from 104-year-old Ruth Shire, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who has lived in Birmingham for over 80 years. It was read by Rabbi Dr Margaret Jacobi at the at Sandwell Holocaust Memorial Day event:
Thank you for asking me to contribute on this special occasion of the Holocaust Memorial Day.
I am Ruth Shire, a Jewish woman, born in May 1921 in Siegburg, which is near Cologne in Germany. When the antisemitic regime swept across Germany from 1933 onwards it became impossible to live our normal life. At the young age of 13 I was no longer allowed to attend my regular school and our whole existence dramatically changed.
In 1938 Kristallnacht (the Night of the broken glass) affected us deeply, across Germany Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues had all their windows smashed, as was my own father’s shop. It was after this that the mass imprisonment of Jewish men began and they took my father to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. He never spoke about his experience.
Ruth Shire on her 100th birthday
My parents in 1937 realised that they had to send me out of Germany for safety and managed to get me on “the Kindertransport”, which saved 10,000 Jewish children.
I was sponsored by a very kind Christian family in Oxford and lived with them for several years. At first, I spoke no English. It was this same family that gave a ‘guarantee’ to get my parents out of Germany just before the War started, to also come and live in Oxford but destitute.
And so today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember those six million Jews who were not saved and whose contribution in this world we will never know. It is therefore imperative that we ensure this human destruction does not happen again.
We need to build on human compassion and constantly look for hope and positive actions emerging from darkness, as famously written by the songwriter Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.’