Auschwitz survivor shares horrifying tale

Second of two parts

Ruth Mermelstein, 84, has been a member of the East Meadow Jewish Center since she moved to the hamlet in 1955. She and her husband, Sidney Mermelstein, moved to North Bellmore 13 years later, where they raised two children, and have lived there ever since.

Ruth is a Holocaust survivor. Born in Transylvania, in northern Romania, in 1929, she was the second oldest of Blanka Davidovitz and Moritz Genuth’s six children.

Retelling her story before Yom HaShoah, Mermelstein described how she was sent to three concentration camps with her older sister, Elizabeth, including Auschwitz, where she was surrounded by death, sickness, starvation and torture. After stepping off a cattle car in Auschwitz in 1944, she never saw her family again, except for Elizabeth.

The emotion was clear in her eyes as she relived the experience, remembering parents and siblings she has not seen in 70 years. “I’m happy to be alive,” Mermelstein said, “even though I miss my family.”

A new identity

Growing up in Sighet in northern Romania, Mermelstein, then Ruth Genuth, was happy. In 1940 she was 10, Elizabeth was 12, and a brother, Imre, was two years her junior. Two other siblings, both girls, were infants. “My mother and father, they treasured us very much,” she said. “They wanted to have even more children. We had a nice life.”

Romania remained a neutral country at the beginning of World War II. But there was political upheaval across Europe, and northern Transylvania — including Sighet — was granted to Hungary, Germany’s ally and part of the Axis powers.

Ruth’s family was forced to adopt a Hungarian lifestyle. They had to learn to speak Hungarian, and switched schools. At first, the prospect excited Ruth, who thought it would be fascinating to learn a new culture. But, in reality, it was the start of a horrific series of events for the Genuth family, and millions of others in northern Romania.

By 1941, basic rights began being stripped from the now Hungarian Jews. They were forbidden from operating businesses or receiving higher education. Many young men were taken away by the Hungarian Schutzstaffel, or SS, to forced labor camps. The Genuth family was left alone because they had no young men, but Ruth’s uncles — and their families — disappeared.

The Genuths didn’t know what happened to them. Rumors of their fate spread around town, and one day, they finally heard a first-hand account from a local man who had escaped imprisonment. He said they were taken to the Ukrainian border, forced to undress, shot and thrown into a ditch. He survived because he fell into the ditch before being shot. Other bodies fell on top of him, shielding him from further harm.

It took him six months to get back to Sighet. “Nobody wanted to believe him,” Mermelstein recalled. “They said, he is a madman. This couldn’t happen to innocent, beautiful young people.”

Ruth’s family was heartbroken. She thought of her younger cousin on her mother’s side, Baby, who had won first prize in a Shirley Temple look-alike contest four years earlier. “My grandmother was crying every single day for the rest of her life because she missed her daughter and grandchildren,” Ruth said.

A year later, her father was taken to a forced labor camp with another 600 men, where he dug ditches, built roads and cleared mines on the Russian border. Her mother was left to take care of the family by herself. In Moritz’s absence, she gave birth to their sixth child, another girl. Ruth attended school sporadically, and spent most of her time helping her mother make ends meet.

In 1943, the family received a telegram from a Hungarian hospital, telling them to come and get Moritz. When they reunited they heard his story: Deciding that the prisoners had outlived their usefulness, the SS locked hundreds of Jews in a building and set it ablaze. Moritz, with two other men, escaped, and eventually crossed paths with Russian civilians, who gave Moritz a choice — go to Russia, where he would be safe, or go home, where it was a near certainty that he would be taken away once again.

“He said, whatever is going to happen to my family is going to happen to me, too,” said Ruth. The Russians escorted him to a hospital, and he sent his family the telegram.

After he returned, many villagers approached Moritz, desperate to learn the fate of their loved ones. “He never told what happened to them,” Ruth said. “He didn’t want to have to tell them these horrible stories.”

For about a year, the family, together again, returned to as normal a life as could be lived under oppression. But it didn’t last. In 1944, Adolf Eichmann, the lieutenant colonel in the German SS who was a major organizer of the Holocaust, ordered that Jews be registered and moved to ghettos. All of their valuables were taken away.

That May, the SS marched the Jews from their ghettos to a train station, where they were put on large cattle cars. There were about 90 Jews to a car, each equipped with two pails — one that contained small food rations, and the other a latrine. They rode for three and a half days. Some elderly people, who were already sick, died in the cars.

Whenever the train stopped at a station, people yelled at them. “You are going to die,” said Ruth, recalling what they said. “And [they] made motions with their hands — you are all going to die now.”

Finally they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was the last time Ruth saw most of her family. The SS separated the prisoners first by gender, then by age. Ruth, 14, and Elizabeth, 16, stayed together, but Ruth recounted, “We hardly had the chance to say goodbye to our parents.”

A swift separation

She still remembers their last words. Her mother yelled, “Try to stay together, girls,” and her father, back in the train, had told her, “I have confidence in you. You are a strong girl. You are going to make it.”

That final message from her father is something Ruth never forgot, even in the darkest hours of what lay ahead. “Those words were so precious to me that I had to live up to their expectations,” she said.

Ruth and Elizabeth, who were among about 50,000 people in the camp, were told to undress, and had their heads shaved. They were put in a barracks with 1,000 girls, and shared a small compartment with 10 of them.

If someone tried to escape, they were taken to the crematorium. When Ruth asked an officer when she would see her family he said, “You’re going to see them when you go up in smoke, like they went up in smoke.”

The girls worked, using their bare hands to chop rocks to build a road through Auschwitz. The work earned them an extra slice of bread per day. For months they labored for hours each day under the hot June and July sun, and grew malnourished and emaciated.

Three months later, all the girls who were capable of doing hard labor were put on cattle cars, including Ruth and Elizabeth. They were taken to a camp in Christianstadt, to work in an ammunition factory. Compared with their living conditions in Auschwitz, Ruth called this camp a “paradise” — they received a pint of milk and a half loaf of bread per day, and shared barracks with only a dozen girls, each with her own straw mattress. They were also allowed hot showers.

Months later, word spread that Russian troops were nearby, liberating camps. The SS received orders from Berlin to evacuate Christianstadt and its 1,000 prisoners.

For five weeks they marched, the SS officers leading the way on horses. Every night they slept in a different barn, with the officers asking the owner to give them food. “They were giving us the same food they gave their pigs,” Ruth said.

They marched through Czechoslovakia, to Germany, trying to beat the Russians. Even in her misery, Ruth said, she remembers walking through beautiful mountain areas.

Anyone incapable of marching was taken to the side of the road and shot. Ruth estimated that one in every 10 of the Jews were shot along the way. “We were not human beings anymore,” she said. “They just killed whoever couldn’t walk anymore.”

Loaded back into cattle cars, they eventually reached the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Stepping off the cars, they saw groups of men who were already imprisoned there. “But you couldn’t recognize if it was your father, your brother, your sweetheart or anybody, because all the men, they were skeletons,” she said. “You [could] count their teeth through their skin …

“It was the worst camp you can imagine,” she added. “It was Hell on earth.”

They were there for four weeks, surrounded by the sick and the dying. Every day, trucks came to take away bodies.

When the trucks didn’t come, the prisoners were forced to carry the dead themselves. When she and Elizabeth dragged one girl, Elizabeth pointed out that her eyes were still open. She said to Ruth, “She wanted to still live,” to which Ruth responded, “We all wanted to live.”

On April 18,1945, British troops liberated the camp. But “we couldn’t be happy anymore,” she said. “We said, we are never going to be human beings anymore. They had dehumanized us so much.”

The British tried to feed the emaciated prisoners, many of whom were barely clinging to life. Ruth and Elizabeth shared a tent with three other girls. They took turns closing the tent at night, but Ruth was so sick that she couldn’t muster the energy to do it. She was ordered to return to the barracks.

‘We’re all human beings’

Elizabeth finally found Ruth three weeks later, in a hospital tent. Each day, she went into a nearby village and came back with vegetables for her. It took Ruth two more weeks to get back on her feet.

Then the Red Cross took about 7,000 people to Sweden, including Ruth and Elizabeth. Ruth remained there for 10 years, attending school from time to time and working as much as she could. But her nightmarish experiences during the war left her in poor health, and she spent a great deal of time in hospitals over the years.

In Sweden she met Sidney Mermelstein, another Holocaust survivor. Miraculously, his five siblings had all survived. Sidney, who had first come to the U.S. in 1948, received his American citizenship, and brought Ruth to the States. The couple had two daughters, Bernice and Heidi, who both graduated from Mepham High School in Bellmore. Sidney died three years ago.

That she and Elizabeth were able to remain together throughout their ordeal, Ruth said, was a miracle. Elizabeth later married a Polish man in Sweden, and also ended up in the U.S., first in Brooklyn and then in California. She died 35 years after the war, at age 53, of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos from the forced labor, her sister said.

Ruth often speaks to students about her experiences. She was interviewed by director Steven Spielberg, for the Survivors of the Shoah Valley Foundation, twenty years ago.