On Monday, April 13, Holocaust survivor Ruth Cyzner visited Swarthmore to share the story of her escape from Nazi Germany in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The event was co-sponsored by the college’s Interfaith Center, Inclusive Excellence Office, Kehilah student group, and history department. In addition to campus community members, the audience included visitors from a local high school and a synagogue.
Cyzner, 95, has lived in the Greater Philadelphia area for several years. She has spoken at colleges and synagogues across the United States, and her story has been featured in a number of publications.
Cyzner began by recounting her memories of her childhood in Berlin, where she lived with her mother, father, and half sister in the years before the war. She fondly described early moments with her parents, both of whom were later killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
“I had two parents who loved me and whom I loved. My mother was a terrific cook, which I think spoiled me for everything I’ve tasted ever since. She took me all over Berlin,” Cyzner said. She recalled long walks with her father as well: “If we passed a tree in the beautiful big park by our house, and there were lots of birds congregated on the branches, he would always say, ‘Look, they’re having a wedding.’”
The escalation of Hitler’s fascist agenda was gradual, Cyzner noted. She recalled her classmates and teachers praising the Nazi administration for its claims that it had brought wealth to the German economy.
“My favorite teacher loved Hitler, and would always talk about Hitler. I would come home and tell my mother, ‘Hitler is seeing to it that everyone will have bread.’ I can’t remember what my mother said, but I’m sure she wasn’t happy about it.”
It was not long, however, before the political intentions of the Nazi regime became terrifyingly apparent. As adults in her life began to be excluded from the labor market, Cyzner was sad to learn that she was no longer allowed to spend time with her good friend Marianne, a gentile whose father feared that proximity to Jews would earn him negative attention from the government. She recalled her parents whispering about colleagues who had committed suicide and remembered her fear while hearing Hitler’s radio broadcasts.
Cyzner’s experience of Hitler’s rule transitioned from one of anxious confusion to one of trauma in October of 1938, when her father was deported to Poland in a mass governmental expulsion of Polish Jews. Her voice broke as she described her father’s final goodbye.
“My father came into the room I shared with my half sister. I still remember that he did not turn on the light. Maybe to save our eyes because the light was so bright, or maybe to hide his face. I’m not sure. But I remember standing on my bed and hugging him. I never saw him again. I was eight years old.”
Shocked by the loss of her husband and fearful for her children’s future, Cyzner’s mother debated whether to send the young girls westward via the Kindertransport youth evacuation mission or to take them to their father in Poland. After her Polish relatives cautioned her against the latter option, she packed each girl a valise and sent them on a train toward the United Kingdom. They left Germany on May 4, 1939, hardly four months before the war began.
“I still remember what she was wearing. She was so beautiful. I ran to the window and I watched her, and then she was gone. And that was that.”
Her mother would ultimately join her father in Poland, though Cyzner has never been able to determine whether she made this move of her own volition.
Upon arriving in Great Britain, Cyzner and her half sister parted ways; while her half sister stayed with a brother of their father’s, Cyzner found refuge in the home of another family acquaintance. Though her arrival was exciting for both herself and her relatives, the affection she received from her hosts was short-lived. They lived in Birmingham, a city dogged by relentless air-raids, and the stress of wartime eroded any closeness between the family and their young guest.
“I was a big novelty, the little refugee girl, for a while. After that, the novelty wore off, I was the errand girl and everything else that you could think of.”
While in England, Cyzner received letters from her mother describing the situation in Poland. It was through this correspondence that she learned that all of her father’s ribs had been broken, leaving him in critical condition. According to the letter, he had sustained this injury from a fall off of a table, though Cyzner and her relatives in England suspected that her mother had contrived this explanation in order to avoid censorship by the Nazi authorities. The couple was killed not long after.
“I will never say of my parents that they ‘died’ in the camps, or ‘passed’ in the camps,” Cyzner emphasized. “They were murdered.”
Though Cyzner had spoken German more or less exclusively for the first eight years of her life, she refused to speak the language after the outbreak of the war. She gradually learned English, although the accent that colored her speech during her first years in the United Kingdom earned her an ironic reputation amongst her schoolmates as an agent of the German enemy.
Eventually, however, Cyzner excelled in her studies, rising to the top of her class and receiving high praise from her school’s headmaster by the age of thirteen. When he encouraged her to apply to university, the ambivalence of her host family toward this endeavor convinced her to begin preparing to leave her life with them behind and start anew.
Cyzner travelled to New York City at the age of fifteen. She married at nineteen in 1950, moving with her husband to the Long Island suburbs in order to start a family. After joining the marketing department of a healthcare company based in the area, she climbed the ranks over several years.
In 2002, Cyzner returned to Germany for the first time. During her visit, she was able to dedicate a “Stolperstein” (stumbling block) plaque in commemoration of her father’s life and death. Some time later, a matching plaque honoring her mother was installed beside it. During her speech at the unveiling of the paired memorials, Cyzner found herself moved to tears.
“Seeing them there, side by side, was very emotional. It was the closest thing to gravestones they ever had. It was the closest they got to being buried together.”
Cyzner ended her lecture by expressing her grave concerns about the future of democracy in the United States. She emphasized the chilling familiarity of Trump’s immigration policies and antisemitism on the new American right, calling on students to ensure that the fascism she once escaped does not return to the world.
“Terrible things are happening to people just because of who they are. It’s really up to your generation to do something for them. You have to speak up. Speak up.”
