Eulogy

Ruth Paula Opper Plainfield Eulogy

Rabbi Dean Kertesz 

Sunset Cemetery, El Cerrito, Ca

Ruth Plainfield wrote, “I am in a constant state of remembering the past and only addressing what is said at the moment. I am burning with the abrupt, devastating losses of the past and lightheartedly participating in present, everyday conversations. And I choose not to talk about what is gong on inside me. I choose it because there is no point. Talking about it gives no newer truth, no relief.” Ruth Plainfield lived a life that exposed her to the worst cruelties a human being can experience and out of that experience she chose to build a life dedicated to love, friendship, commitment, and justice. She felt an urgency to speak the truth, often felt her words were inadequate, and had to act to make the world a better place.

She was born in her family’s home in Gau Bickelheim, Germany, on January 27, 1925, the only child of Kurt Opper and Gerda Oppenheimer. Gau Bickelheim was a small village surrounded by vineyards, about 40 minutes southwest of Mainz. It was and still is wine country.

She came from a family of wine makers, lawyers, and art dealers. Her family was part of the German-Jewish gentry. They had a good life, but money wasn’t the critical value. Being honorable and having a good name were what mattered. A life well lived meant focusing on people, on friends and family, on entertaining guests. All the women in her family were excellent cooks. Her father made wine and wine was a part of life. Like most German Jews of that time her parents were proudly Jewish – religious practice and respect for the tradition was very important to her father Kurt. But they were also proudly German. Kurt served in the First World War and was seriously wounded, more than once. He had the scars to prove it. His father, Ruth’s grandfather Isaac, recorded the names of the battles in which Kurt had been wounded in the family bible. When signs first went up in the 1930’s saying, “Jews Get Out,” Kurt would go out with a hammer every night and take them down.

At that time the family lived in the city of Mainz, but they moved back to Gau Bickelheim because they thought the anti-Semitism, that had become official government policy, would be less virulent there. The strong Catholic faith of many of the villagers kept them from obeying the racial laws of the Reich. But the impact of the official anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime was unavoidable. Ruth had to attend the regional school Sprendlingen, a nearby town, which was run by the Nazis. For four years, she was the only Jewish girl in the school and she really suffered there. Just one example: Every morning she was made to stand in the classroom while the other students sang anti-Semitic songs. She, like all Jewish children, was not allowed to associate with non-Jews. As she put it, “The overwhelming changes that came into my life in Germany transformed me from a child delighted with living to one who doubted her right to exist.” But, in the midst of that orchestrated darkness, there was a light of human compassion. She had one friend, Katrina a devout Catholic, who snuck out every night to play with Ruth. Ruth asked her, “How can you still be a friend to me?” Katrina responded, “How can I love my Jesus and not love you?”

In December 1937 her father was shown a Nazi newspaper and said it reminded him of the funny pages. He was arrested the next day and imprisoned. Upon his release the family was told that should he ever show any resistance or disobedience against the Nazi regime again he and all his family would be imprisoned for life. A month later, January 1938, the family left Germany. Leave taking was heart wrenching, because they knew they would not see many of their relatives again.

This is some of what we know about what happened to members of Ruth’s family who stayed behind. Caroline Metzger, a survivor of Theresienstadt, told them later about Ruth’s grandfather Isaac’s death in Theresienstadt in February 1943, “In the first few weeks he portrayed great courage. He looked like a ship’s captain in his dark blue suit and captain’s cap. He was admired for his tidy appearance, especially since most men of advanced age no longer cared for their appearance. He always cared for himself. Only sometimes he complained of the small ration of daily bread. I am sorry that I can’t tell you that it was January or February 1943… Mr. Oppenheimer is reported to have died quietly in his sleep without pain or suffering. Generally, it was fortunate among all that tragedy that death came softly without people’s consciousness of the approaching end. Aunt Klara and Aunt Berta also died in the same way in 1942.”

They left Germany in 1938 on the SS Manhattan of the U.S. Line. A cousin in New York, Ilse Herz, sponsored them and brought the three of them to New York. They stayed there for a few days and went to Chicago to visit a cousin before heading to San Francisco. Her uncle, her mother’s brother, Max Jonas was already there and he sponsored them. Ruth’s maternal grandmother was able to get out of Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938 and joined them in San Francisco.

Life was not easy for them here, as new immigrants. Her father was 46 years old. Before emigrating he had studied to be a mechanic and welder because he thought he might never work as a wine maker again. He worked at those trades in San Francisco, but didn’t like the climate. He took a job recapping tires to move to San Jose for better weather and started looking for work as a vintner. He got a job offer from Fountaingrove Vineyards near Santa Rosa in 1941. So the family moved to Sonoma County and lived in one of two houses on the property, surrounded by 400 acres of grapes. It was an eden-like setting and Kurt oversaw the entire wine making process from growing the grapes to bottling the wine. The house they lived in is now gone, but the winery still stands behind a chain link fence, surrounded by an industrial park. It was terribly important for Ruth to lose her German accent. Because of her experiences in Germany she was suspicious of assimilation but assimilated in her own way.

Ruth met her husband, Sanford, at Santa Rosa Community College in 1943. She was studying social work. He had enlisted in the Army and had scored so high in his aptitude test that the Army sent him to the college to continue his education. They first saw each other in the library. The next time he came looking for her he whistled “The Blue Danube” to get her attention. It worked. Their first date was a picnic with her family at Fountaingrove. Let’s just say that Ruth took one close look and knew that Sanford was the man with whom she wanted to make a family and a life. They were engaged and had three years of courtship, while Sanford was stationed at different Army posts around the country. They kept into touch by writing to one another daily. They were married at Fountaingrove in 1946 and first lived in Kansas while Sanford finished dental school. They returned to California in 1947 and settled in Santa Rosa. Ruth worked for Sonoma County Social Services. The family moved to Berkeley in the late ‘40’s and Ruth went to graduate school in psychiatric social work at Cal. Sanford established his dental practice in Alameda. Their first son Mark was born in Berkeley in 1951 and their second, Kim, in 1954. They moved to Montclaire and hated it. It was the McCarthy era. Montclaire had a right wing atmosphere. In 1960 they moved back to Berkeley to the house they had built at 800 Woodmont Ave.

Ruth worked as psychotherapist at UC Berkeley’s Cowell Hospital which became a national model for caring for college students. She said she liked her work because she loved helping people. Ruth and Sanford were actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement. They were part of the effort to desegregate the Berkeley public schools in 1963, the first school district to integrate voluntarily. She started a program at Berkeley High, “Philosophy for Senior Girls” She was deeply involved in her son’s lives. She came to know many of her sons’ teachers.

In the early ‘70’s Ruth founded the first shelter for battered women in Berkeley at the YWCA. She worked with the Traveler’s Aid Society for the homeless and while serving on the United Way executive committee in the 1980’s she worked hard to have the national United Way draft a statement of purpose that it, “was committed to fighting racism by any means necessary.”

Kim remembers that Ruth and Sanford were highly sensitive to racism, oppression, or unfair treatment of any type. He speaks of their constant encouragement not only for himself, but for all who touched the family. He recalls the great efforts she made to become friends with his friends and to know the world in which he moved. She was deeply interested in whatever interested him and did all she could to help him grow in the path he chose for himself. He says that she was always his “greatest fan”

Mark recalls that Ruth intuitively identified with anyone who was oppressed and was quick to make her stand beside them. She was driven to help lift them up, to help them in whatever way she could to become more self reliant and speak with their own voice. She mourned when she saw ties broken and people left behind. He uses words like these to describe his mother: self reliance, justice, loyalty, fidelity, nurturing. He says that she infected him with her power of empathy; that she was incapable of condescension; that her concern and care for people was always a close and very personal thing. She took people to her heart.

Except for the period from 1938 – 1941 she lived well. She kept the family tradition alive of cooking, entertaining, and hosting friends and family. She loved people coming to the house, especially young children. The dining room table in her home in Berkeley was always beautifully set with a table cloth, place mats, cloth napkins, silver napkin rings, and candles. The Jewish ritual that meant the most to Ruth was the Passover Seder with its celebration of liberation and its focus on family and friends joining together in a meal.

Another important part of Ruth’s life was reclaiming her past and demanding recognition of the crimes that had been committed against her family and German Jews in general. Kim once asked her, “How many or our relatives died?” Ruth replied, “They didn’t die. They were murdered.” She returned to Germany for the first time in 1967. She wanted to see it. She wanted to know if anything was left of her childhood. She went for a week on her own while the family stayed in Paris. On the plane she was visited by her father, who died in 1965. She heard him say, “you’re finally going back home.” After she returned from that trip she had difficulty speaking English for a few days. It was a profound experience. Gau Berkelheim was still intact, much the same as it had been in the ‘30’s. And Ruth was reunited with her brave and loving friend Katrina. From that point on her determination to connect with her past, honor her family’s memory and ensuring German accountability drove her.

In 1999 she was interviewed as part of the San Francisco Holocaust Oral Project. Her interview was sent to Germany. A group of 11th Grade students at her former school in Sprendlingen, where she had been tormented 35 years earlier, saw it and invited her to come and talk about her experiences. She accepted the invitation. That meeting was taped and broadcast on German television, closing the circle that had been opened so many years before.

Ruth worked to establish a memorial to the Jews of Gau Berkelheim. Due to her effort the town put up a memorial plaque on the main square, opposite her family home. But the plaque had no names on it; just a general mention of the victims. That wasn’t good enough for Ruth. She kept pushing for complete recognition and true memorial. In 2007 she went back to Germany with two of her grandsons, Samuel and Joel, to see memorial cobblestone markers bearing the names of her grandfather, Isaac Oppenheimer, and her aunt Klara Lazarus placed on the walk in front of the family home she was forced to leave 69 years earlier.

Ruth lived a long life. She experienced the worst humanity has to offer but chose to seek the best in people. She built a beautiful life and made a difference in the world and in the lives of all the people she touched. Ruth leaves behind her husband Sanford, her two sons, Mark and Kim, her daughters-in-law, Vicky and Maureen and her grandchildren: Fernando, Samuel, Joel, Julian and Sebastian. They share her hatred of oppression, her commitment to social justice, to helping others and her love of adventure, philosophy, culture and art of all kinds. They carry on her life. May her memory be an example and a blessing to us all.