Ruth David (F / Germany, 1929-2020), Holocaust survivor

Ruth David (F / Germany, 1929-2020), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Refugees> <England> <Kindertransport>

• MEMOIRS : Child of Our Time (1996; ET 2002)

Biography

Born in Germany, Ruth L. David lived in England from 1939-1992 as a teacher of modern languages. Her parents perished in the Holocaust. Ruth then lived 17 years in Ames, Iowa before moving back to Leicester, England, where she died April 6, 2020, at age 91, of complications from COVID-19. She was a frequent Holocaust educator.

Book : Child of Our Time (1996; ET 2002)

• Ein Kind unserer Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: dipa-Verl., 1996). English ed. Child of Our Time: A Young Girl's Flight from the Holocaust (London: Tauris, 2002).

"Child of Our Time is the inspiring story of a little girl caught in the vortex of one of history’s great horrors. Plucked from deep rural Germany, after witnessing the horror of Kristallnacht and her family’s eviction from its village, Ruth David was sent to England as part of the Kindertransport—one of the few routes to safety and survival for many children who were to lose their parents in the Holocaust ... As a child of the Holocaust, David was one of the lucky ones: she was one of about 10,000 Jewish children who were taken by train to Great Britain and saved from death at the hands of the Nazis. "As a child I found it difficult to be grateful for this," she notes in a foreword to her own children. "I wanted to be with my family, wherever they were...." She was fortunate in another sense-her four siblings also survived the war. But David never saw her parents again after her departure for England: they perished in Auschwitz. She movingly describes her arrival in London, aged 10, part of a group of "tired, frightened children"; her gradual assimilation into the life of the hostel where she stayed; the strangeness of daily things such as corn flakes, which she had never seen before; up through the beginning of her new life when, at age 17, she left the hostel after the war. David notes she had never spoken about these events to her children. Readers will be glad she decided to share her moving experiences now."--Publisher description.