Ruth Posner Research Paper

Ruth Posner is one of the many few holocaust survivors and a great dancer, choreographer and actress. Ruth was born on April 20, 1933, in Warsaw. She was raised in a Jewish family with her parents, but went to a Catholic school. At home, she spoke Polish. Ruth suddenly started hearing offensive comments by some of her close Polish Catholic friends. They said things like “you killed Christ.” It was an incredible shock.” That was just the beginning. By the time she was just 12, and the Second World War was underway, Ruth had lost both her parents and her world as she knew it. She was in the middle of the Holocaust.

Her father helped Ruth and her aunt – whose two children had already been killed by the Nazis – get a job working at a leather factor outside the ghetto. He also managed to acquire false passports for the women, giving them Catholic names and identities. The plan was for the pair to escape during one of their regular trips to the bathhouse, where workers were taken weekly. “We were marched with guards on each side and marched back again,” explains Ruth. “On one of those events my aunt had the false passports. She explained to me, 'this is my chance'.” The two of them managed to run out of the bathhouse and on to the Aryan side of the road. “It was sheer luck. It was always, you might be lucky and you might not be. But it was worth taking that chance. "Like a cat, I have many lives, I think.” Ruth and her aunt pretended to be Catholic. uth did not 'look Jewish' and her not particularly religious family had already assimilated to Polish life. Ruth’s parents were tragically taken to Treblinka, the concentration camp, where they died. When she was 13, Warsaw was evacuated and

I wanted to learn the language as fast as I could and be a teenager like everyone else. The only thing that distinguished me from others was that I was a bit more serious. "I wasn’t looking for boys and flirtations – but I made up for it later in