From Dieter

Dear Maureen,
thank you for a message I would have preferred not to read. At least she has her peace now and no pain anymore. My condolences to you all, in thoughts I am with you. At least I can say that I had the occasion to know a person like her, and the gift that I could call her my friend.  I have attached a text you may use in any way you like, as a whole or in parts. Or not at all - just do as you wish.  I have passed some lines to the local newspaper. They called me and said that they are going to print an obituary for Ruth.
I wish you strength,

Dieter

To know Ruth was to admire her love for the region where her roots were. And for its people, in spite of all what had happenend.The past was in her present, and she fought for years to make sure that her family would not be forgotten. Finally she achieved what she had wanted. Everybody who saw Ruth in her beloved Gau-Bickelheim in 2007 could see how satisfied she was that – finally! – the names of her grandfather and her aunt had found a place in the pavement right in front of the house which once belonged to the family. Her grandfather and aunt were both deported and murdered in the camp Theresienstadt, a crime and a loss which had the greatest influence on Ruth’s thinking. She wanted her hometown to remember what had happened, and she had been asking for restlessly for something which seemed more than justified.

Ruth was born in the family’s house on “Der Römer” – “The Roman” in English, as her town’s marketplace is called. She had a lucky childhood, she felt as a part of the town and its population, just like her whole family did. Even half a century later, Ruth still had that strong remembrance of the cozy rural town and the happy days she had had there. She particularly admired her grandfather Isaak, a proud Jew and a German citizen who wrote in his prayer book the names of battles in which Ruth’s father Kurt had fought during World War I in France.

Ruth’s family remained part of the town even when the whole country had begun to follow a government led by extremists. The town’s catholic population held its faith above anything else, the new ideology included, and did not follow the regime’s condemnation of some citizens because they had another confession. Ruth sometimes told the story how she went up the Wiesberg (“meadow mountain”) right behind the town with her friend Katharina. The girls talked about the often repeated accusation that the Jews had murdered Jesus Christ. “How could I believe this”, Katharina said, “my Jesus was Jewish himself”.

Gau-Bickelheim gave protection in a sea of violence and racism, but young Ruth had to travel every day to the elementary school in Sprendlingen, the next town just some miles away. There she learned what it meant to be Jewish. She was isolated by inhuman teachers and fanatic students, and she had to accept that someone like her could not earn better grades than the worst “aryan” children. It is hard to imagine the humiliations under which the girl had to suffer, with sadistic teachers punishing her and making clear that she now belonged to an inferior kind of human beings.

The family could not stay in Gau-Bickelheim, where they still had little to fear. The regime destroyed the businesses of the Jews, watching the trade between farmers and Jewish traders, and using pressure against this kind of commercial relations. The family had to go to Mainz, where they started to prepare their emigration. A first attempt to go to South Africa failed. But then the family was able to leave the region they had loved and which expelled them. They went to the United States, where they had to make a difficult new start - Ruth’s father learned to earn the family’s living as a welder. Finally he found the possibility to work as a wine-grower in California, where Oppenheimers found a new home.

But her grandfather and her aunt had to stay in Germany. That they could not be saved and become victims of the nazi government’s extermination policy was like a wound in Ruth’s soul. For years and years she fought for their remembrance, against an indifference which kept hurting. When a table was placed at the wall of the townhall in 1990, right in face of the family’s house, a new deception followed: there were words about the victims of terror, but no names. It took nearly another twenty years before the town council decided to allow “Stolpersteine” (“stumble stones”) to be placed in the pavement, small brass plates with the names of her beloved ones. One for Isaak Oppenheimer, another one for Klara Lazarus. Now Ruth could be sure: they would not be forgotten in the town where they had lived.

Anybody who has known Ruth could only admire her utter love for the region of her origins, and her awareness of any injustice. She brought both to California and kept it during her life with Sanford, her loved and amiable husband. Our life has become poorer without her.