Ruth Milgram, 94 year old survivor of the Nazi persecution, recounts her journey from the hell of Hitler’s Germany to the rebirth in the United States: “At 93, my homeland was returned to me”.

(From New York) “We arrived at Pier 52 in New York on the 1^st of April 1938. My father had 4 dollars and 35 cents in his pocket, but we were alive and wanted to stay that way.” Ruth Milgram was seven and a half years old when she arrived in the United States to escape Nazi persecution, along with her mother and father, leaving behind her homeland, Germany, as well as her grandparents and aunts, whom she would never see again because three of them would die in the fire of their city’s ghetto… Ruth, originally German-Jewish, 94 years old—an age she never thought she would reach—lives in a nursing home in New Providence, New Jersey, about an hour away from New York, where I met her just before Holocaust Remembrance Day. Born in October 1930 in Heidelberg, a German city home to one of the country’s most prestigious universities, which had among its faculty the philosopher Friedrich Hegel, the sociologist Max Weber, the scientist Dmitri Mendeleev and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, Ruth had breathed in the academic brilliance of her father’s colleagues: a Polish-Jewish man who taught physics at the university and spoke nine languages fluently.

The Milgram family lived in Mannheim in 1933 when they received their first visit from the Nazi police. In the mailbox of their building, a postcard containing particularly offensive epithets directed at Adolf Hitler had been found, and the first to be accused of defamation were her parents.

“They were taken from home at eight in the morning and brought to a barrack, where they had to copy the postcard hundreds of times before admitting that their handwriting was completely different from that of the author. They were locked up for a day and a half, and I was left alone at home. I was only three years old.”

In Ruth’s memory, the anguish of those moments is etched like on a block of marble. Then came 1935 and the racial laws that stripped her father and all of them of their citizenship. The German police, who respected him for his jovial and welcoming character, summoned the professor and advised him to leave the country.

Ruth’s father made the most difficult decision: to go to Israel and leave his wife and daughter in Germany, hoping they would be safer without his burdensome presence. Ruth recalls that in that year, food also became rationed: one kilogram of meat, two eggs, and four medium loaves of bread per month. “I don’t know how we managed to survive, but my mother was very skilled at making the most of what we had,” she tells me, before opening an extremely painful chapter that continues to accompany her.

“On my first day of school, I carried a bag with books on my back when a black-shirted man, wielding a club, began to hit me for no reason. They were everywhere. I was seven years old, and even today, at night, I wake up remembering that scene.” On that first day of school, Ruth did not just receive beatings; she also witnessed her teacher being arrested and shot in the courtyard. After that traumatic day, Ruth stopped going outside and playing at the fountain in the town square, where she used to enjoy collecting ladybugs so they wouldn’t drown.

It was her mother who became her teacher by day, while at night she cried and sewed the Stars of David onto the clothes of the entire family. “I remember it as if it were now,” Ruth tells me, her eyes recalling those moments.

A new Nazi raid in 1937 at their apartment saw soldiers destroy her mother’s piano and her father’s table, where he gave private lessons after being fired from the university. The sharp, merciless blade did not spare even the pages of the hundreds of books in their home library, which were reduced to shreds.

Germany was no longer a safe place for the two women, and for these reasons, Ruth’s father returned to Mannheim in 1938 with the idea of emigrating to the United States, where a cousin could sponsor their visa. “I remember Dad writing letter after letter to Stephanie, receiving constant rejections in response. I think he wrote more than 100 letters, getting back a standard phrase: ‘the streets of New York are not paved with gold,” Ruth explains, noting that the relative feared she would have to support them.

News of deportations and ghettos quickly reached the shores of the Atlantic, and the visa they had pleaded for finally arrived. Ruth’s father had borrowed $2,000 from the Hebrew Free Loan Society (HFLS), which at that time sent money to Jews determined to cross the ocean. “We had nothing. They had taken everything from us, and we used that money to pay for the ticket from Hamburg to New York,” this fragile yet incredibly resilient woman recounts with clarity.

“On the night of the Anschluss, when Hitler decided to annex Austria, we, unaware of what was happening around us, went to say goodbye to our grandparents for the last time at the farm where they lived near Heidelberg. We wouldn’t see our grandmother again until 1941, when, after our grandfather died of cancer, she managed to take the last ship leaving Europe for New York.” Their final journey in Germany was to Hamburg, where they boarded for the U.S., but first, they had to take the train from Stuttgart.

“I had a hat box, a small teddy bear, and an American flag. We spent a day in that station, on a very hard bench, unable to use the bathrooms and without drinking,” recalls Ruth. Along with her parents, she was then locked in a room, where a soldier repeatedly said that they were not a danger to Germany “because they were worth nothing.” Upon arriving in Hamburg, with the ship waiting to sail, there was a new line and a hours of waiting with Nazi soldiers arresting anyone who did not have proper documents.

“Dad wasn’t wearing the glasses he had been photographed with in the visa documents, and we were left for hours on the deck,” before they decided that Ruth and her parents could enter the hell of third class and sail to the United States. It was a horrible journey during which her parents became ill. Ruth recounts that her dance teacher, who had a first-class ticket, devised a plan for a dance evening to get her out for at least a few hours from that new floating ghetto. “We danced the Blue Danube waltz, and my parents watched me from beyond the bars that separated us,” Ruth tells me, still smiling at that rare moment of joy.

When they arrived in New York, they found Stephanie waiting for them. She had paid for their accommodation for one night, in a room with only one bed for all three of them and with so many bedbugs that they couldn’t even sleep. Ruth’s father found work as a teacher in Brooklyn, and in the evening, he attended a watchmaking and jewelry course to secure a new future for the family and a very poor apartment in the northwest part of Manhattan. Ruth’s mother became an expert seamstress and was hired in a curtain factory. Ruth, who arrived without speaking English, became a fabric designer, got married, had two daughters, and proudly boasts of her four granddaughters. In 2023, the German consul in New York restored her German citizenship, which Ruth had not requested for over 80 years. In a simple ceremony at the nursing home, regally seated in her wheelchair, Ruth returned to her roots, and at 93 years old, “my homeland was returned to me.”

The original and primary version of the article was published here: https://www.agensir.it/mondo/2025/01/28/ruth-milgram-una-vita-spezzata-dal-nazismo-e-ricostruita-in-america-a-93-anni-mi-e-stata-restituita-la-mia-patria/