CityLife

My sister, love and Auschwitz

Judith and Ruth before being parted in 1938

FOR Judith Suschitzky, the Holocaust was – until recently – a distant, painful memory.

The sister who died in Auschwitz, while not forgotten, was pushed to the back of her mind as Judith made her life with husband Hans, her husband of more than half a century, and the son they brought up on a leafy street in Hale Barns, Altrincham.

But as she approached her eighties all that changed, with the discovery in 1995 of the wartime diaries of Ruth Maier, Judith’s older sister.

“For 10 years I couldn’t read them,” she admits. “We were so close. I knew they were going to upset me. But once British publication was on the cards, I felt I had to check and correct the English translation.”

As Judith admits admitted over a cup of tea overlooking her peaceful suburban garden, their discovery came as a total shock, at a time when she was not ready to confront the bittersweet memories they would were bound to evoke.

“I haven’t been able to read anything about the war or watch any films,” she explains. “I never even read Anne Frank’s diary.

“And when I did read what Ruth wrote since I last saw her in 1939 there was nothing wonderful about it, except it maybe brought Ruth back to life a little bit.”

The diaries, published here on Friday, have been compared provoked are bound to cause a sensation, provoking comparison with those of more famous war diarist the much more famous Holocaust diarist, Anne Frank.

Both girls started keeping diaries in their early teens – Ruth writing of her life in the comfort of a happy middle-class family home in Vienna, Austria.

Both Ruth and Anne Frank were taken aback by the brutal curtailing of their freedom as their homelands fell to the Nazis. They shared a sharp intellect, a preoccupation with their unfolding sexuality and a desire to leave their mark on the world with their writing.

And Both would eventually achieve this aim, years after they perished in the camps.

However, While Anne Frank was hiding out in an Amsterdam attic, Ruth’s experience was altogether different.

The Maier family – Judith, Ruth and their mother fled Austria in 1938.

But Ruth elected not to go to join her family in the kindertransport to England with her family so she could complete her education in Norway.

She was offered a place at a high school in a small town outside Oslo – a safe option at the time, but the country would fall to the Nazis by 1940, placing Ruth in mortal danger.

Even now, there is a distinct sense of anger from Judith – which this elegant and very controlled 86-year-old hides behind a charming smile – about the fact that Ruth’s death was so needless.

Education

“She could have followed my mother and me to England – but she would have had to come in as a parlour maid, and she was determined to finish her education.” she explains. “I came in on the kindertransport, but Ruth was 17 months older, so could only enter England as a domestic servant. And she was determined to finish her education.” 

Their mother - who would also escape to England - did what seemed best at the time.

The girls’ father, who died before the war, had been the general secretary of an international postal workers' union, so their mother wrote to union leaders to see if they could help us.

Telegraph employee and family man Arne Strom offered to act as Ruth’s host and guarantor in Norway, and would eventually get the 19-year-old a place in a Norwegian high school. They would enjoy a passionate friendship before he stepped back from the potentially dangerous relationship, leaving Ruth to discover boys – and girls – nearer her own age.

“He kissed me on – wait, I’ve got to check my diary – 11 April,” she wrote to Judith in May 1939. “At the time he was frightfully nice to me.

"He would often stroke me and there were lots of ‘cuddles’. And sometimes now, when I’m feeling a bit soppy, I long for his cuddles.”

A year later, she wrote: “I’m alone ... In the evenings I get this mad desire for a man … any man.”

But although, Like Anne Frank, Ruth did, briefly, explored her passion for a boy close to her own age but she eventually rejected him as not her intellectual equal. It was a girl who was to steal Ruth Maier’s heart.

“I can’t describe the warmth between myself and Gunvor,” she wrote of Gunvor Hofmo, whom she met at the Women’s Labour Service at the start of 1941, nearly a year after Norway had fallen to the Nazis. I so love her deep eyes... Gunvor is a precious human being. There is so much I would sacrifice to make her happy.”

But Ruth was also preoccupied with what it meant to be a Jew – she entered a synagogue for the first time in June 1942, just months before she was captured.

Stranger

“I didn’t feel as if I belonged there. I was a stranger. The Jews had black hair, they were short and dark. I saw them as Jews and myself... as... a non-Jew.”

But these feelings bothered her - far from distancing herself, she was keen to embrace her race.

“I’ve come to the remarkable conclusion that I don’t know the Jews after all. It’s very sad. I’d like to be with them again.”

But it was the fact she had proudly declared herself Jewish in a ‘Questionnaire for Jews in Norway’ which was Ruth’s undoing. On November 26 she was captured in a round-up and clearly understood her fate.

One of the girls in the same hostel remembered her being told by friends: “We’ll look after your gold bracelet until you come back.”

Ruth replied: “I’m not coming back again, ever.”

Her last known written words were in the letter she smuggled out to Gunvor from the transport ship which delivered her to the cattle trucks for Auschwitz, where she was gassed immediately on arrival, aged just 22.

Judith, by contrast, enjoyed a charmed life. On arrival in England, She was taken in by a nurse in Brighton, where she attended Brighton and Hove High School and went on to secretarial college.

More than 65 years ago she married Hans Suschitzky, whom she had known in Vienna and met again in London, and moved to Manchester.

Now in his '90s, he was a chemistry professor at Salford University.

They had one child, John, and Judith later trained as a teacher - but unlike Ruth, never embraced her religion.

“I don’t think I’ve been in a synagogue more than once,” she admits.

Gunvor tracked down Judith in London in 1947, by which time she was living in London and working as a trade union secretary, and told her of Ruth’s deportation.

“We had tried to find her, but not known of her fate,” admits Judith.

The diaries were never mentioned. The first Judith heard about them was from Jan Erik Vold, author of a biography of Gunvor, who became acclaimed as a modernist Norwegian poet. biographer of Gunvor, a famous Norwegian poetess.

He discovered them among her the personal effects of Gunvor when she died upon her death in 1995.

“He didn’t need my permission to publish the diaries, and he didn’t ask what I thought about them,” recalls Judith.

“I went over to Oslo for the Norwegian publication and made a little speech. But I refused to go to Vienna for the German language publication, even though I have been back many times since the war.

"I was so utterly shocked that very right-wing parties have captured 12 per cent of the vote there.”

She will go to the Norwegian Embassy for the launch of the British publication on March 5, a poignant date: “It was my mother’s birthday – and she never stopped agitating about what had happened to Ruth.”

Ruth Maier’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life Under Nazism will be published by Harvill Secker. Meet the editor, Jan Erik Vold, at Borders, Cheetham Hill Road, tonight (March 4) at 6.30pm. Call 0161 833 0208 for a free ticket.