Ruth Posner’s Memories

Ruth Posner’s memories of being ripped from a happy childhood and forced into the Warsaw Ghetto show where antisemitism leads.

The rise of antisemitism in our society must be challenged.

We must not allow the blood libel or conspiracy theories rooted in English Literature to permeate our culture.

One woman’s voice says it all.

Ruth Posner Childhood Memories for Holocaust Memorial Day 2022

My mother’s name was Anna
My father Marian
Weissberg was their family name
White Mountain.

Father was a civil servant
Mother was a dressmaker
He was good with his hands
He made wings on my costume in a school play
I was a seagull.

Then they came.
They pushed us out of our home
Into the ghetto.
Twenty three of us in one room
Jews
Religious Jews
Not like us
They speak Yiddish
I do not
I only speak Polish.

It was not just father, mother and me,
There was also aunt Lola
She had blond, blue-eyed children
A son and a daughter
Six and eight.
She sent them to Polish farmers
To hide.
Someone said, to the enemy
‘Those children
They are Jews!’
They were shot.

When aunt Lola was dying
Back in Poland as an old woman
She lay in the bed
And in each hand was a photo of each child.
In the Ghetto my father got Lola and me out

To work in a leather bag factory
All day we were sewing
I dropped stitches
I was beaten
Better than being sent east on a train.

Once a week
The bathhouse
Delousing
The building faced the free side
The Polish side
The Catholic side.
Father had got us false passports
With false names
For when we made a run for it.

Lola said, ‘We will do it on our third trip.’
She gave me a sign and we walked slowly
To the other side.
Walking, slowly, we took off our armbands with the Yellow Star
Walking, slowly, to the other side
To life?
To death?