Remembering Dr. Ruth Westheimer | USC Shoah Foundation

The USC Shoah Basis is saddened by the lack of Holocaust survivor, former Haganah Sniper, and famend intercourse therapist Dr. Ruth Okay. Westheimer. She was 96 years previous. 

Identified for her 4’7’’ stature, matter-of-fact attitudes towards intercourse and sexuality and her German-accented catchphrase “get some!,” Dr. Ruth dominated the Eighties and revolutionized the best way Individuals spoke about intercourse. Her candid, humorous discussions of taboo matters made “Grandma Freud” the nation’s official sexpert. 

Lengthy earlier than Dr. Ruth was a family identify, she was ten-year-old Karola Ruth Siegel, boarding a prepare to Switzerland from Germany to flee rising Nazi violence. That second in 1939 could be the final time she noticed her household. 

Ruth recorded her testimony with the USC Shoah Basis in 1998, at age 70. In 2020, the USC Shoah Basis, together with Delirio Movies and Neko Productions, produced Ruth: A Little Lady’s Large Journey, an animated brief about Ruth’s youth as a refugee. Ruth has additionally been featured in a number of USC Shoah Basis IWitness actions about braveness, id, and household tales. 

Karola Ruth Siegel was born on June 4, 1928, to Orthodox mother and father in Frankfurt, Germany. As an solely youngster, she recalled being “very effectively cared for” and even spoiled at occasions—with 13 dolls and a pair of rollerskates to point out for it. She spent summers visiting her maternal grandparents in Wiesenfeld. 

Her mom, Irma Siegel, labored as a housekeeper, and her father, Julius Siegel, was a wholesaler. In Ruth’s testimony, she remembered finding out together with her father as he took her to high school on his bicycle and attending the native synagogue each Friday evening. He all the time stored actual change in his vest pocket to purchase her ice cream on the best way to synagogue. Later Ruth would mirror on her completely happy childhood, citing that “early socialization was essential in [her] complete joie de vivre, [her] lust for all times, regardless of the sad occurrences.” 

In 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, Nazis banged towards the door of the Siegel residence and demanded her father dress. Ruth cried as her grandmother handed the Nazi troopers cash from the hem of her skirt to maintain her son secure. She watched her father wave and wink at her as he stepped into the lined truck, which might take him to Dachau focus camp. “I do not forget that wink and I assumed, you realize, he’s going to return again,” Ruth stated in her testimony. 

Informed that her father’s launch relied on her leaving, Ruth joined 100 different youngsters on a prepare to Wartheim, a Jewish Orthodox Youngsters’s Residence in Heiden, Switzerland on January 5, 1939. Ruth remembered her mom and grandmother operating to say goodbye and watch the prepare pull out. 

Between December 1938 and September 1939, some 10,000 Jewish youngsters have been despatched from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to security, largely in Nice Britain, in what grew to become often known as the Kindertransport. Ruth was on an identical transport to Switzerland. 

After just a few months, Ruth’s father returned residence to Frankfurt. She acquired letters from him within the type of poems to keep away from censors, together with letters from her mom and grandmother, reminding her to “stay woman” and “belief in God.” Ruth recalled not figuring out a lot concerning the present occasions of the conflict whereas at Wartheim. In 1941, the letters from her household ceased. Her six-month keep would flip into six years. 

“They stored a roof over my head and fed me for six years,” Ruth acknowledged in her testimony. However her time at Wartheim was removed from easy. Trying again, she remembered the “overwhelming feeling” of being advised to be grateful and by no means complain. The house was run by refugees from Berlin. Ruth later puzzled how the employees advised the kids that their mother and father have been mistaken for sending them, “as a substitute of recognizing their sacrifice.” 

She and different refugee youngsters taken care of the house’s paying Swiss youngsters, doing laundry and ironing. Whereas boys have been in a position to attend highschool, ladies might solely prepare to be housemaids. Desirous to be taught, Ruth borrowed her boyfriend’s schoolbooks and skim them at evening, finding out historical past and arithmetic below the staircase gentle.

Ruth prayed, realized a little bit of Hebrew, stored kosher, and noticed Shabbat at Wartheim. She studied Zionism and when younger Jewish emissaries arrived from Palestine to Wartheim, she determined she could be on the primary boat to British Mandate Palestine. In 1945, she acquired that probability, boarding a ship leaving from Marseilles.

There was “pleasure within the air” as Ruth traveled to Palestine, seeing the ocean for the primary time. Nevertheless, she frightened about touring farther from her residence and maybe her household, who she hadn’t heard from in practically 4 years—“how do I go away Europe with out figuring out the place my mother and father have been? How are they going to search out me in the event that they ever come again?” 

In Palestine, she switched her first and center names, turning into Ruth Okay. Siegel, protecting Karola as her center identify in case her mother and father got here searching for her. Later in her life, Ruth would discover out that her father, paternal grandmother, and maternal grandparents have been despatched to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz focus camps and killed. Her mom was marked as verschollen, which meant “disappeared.” 

Ruth settled in Kibbutz Nahalal within the nation’s north, the place she labored selecting tomatoes and olives, then moved to Kibbutz Yagur on Mount Carmel, the place she organized to review in a seminary for kindergarten lecturers in Jerusalem. She then grew to become a member of the Haganah, Israel’s nascent protection pressure, the place she skilled to be a sniper, studying how you can throw hand grenades and put collectively a STEN gun together with her eyes closed. 

On Ruth’s twentieth birthday in the summertime of 1948 in the course of the conflict that led to Israel’s independence, she was headed to a shelter after listening to sirens when a cannonball shot via the wall, killing two ladies subsequent to her. Shrapnel from the cannonball went via her legs, practically inflicting her to lose her ft. 

In 1950, she married David Bar-Haim and traveled to Paris the place he started medical faculty. She entered the Sorbonne to review psychology, which she described as a “unbelievable alternative.” David finally gave up his research and returned to Israel, however Ruth stayed in Paris to proceed finding out with a bunch of Israeli buddies and the wedding ended. Throughout this time, she didn’t converse of the orphanage or the Holocaust. “It was too quickly, even 10 years later, too uncooked—distance was essential to reside a full life.” 

In 1956, she acquired a examine from the German authorities for five,000 marks, despatched to everybody pressured to cease their education in the course of the conflict. The identical yr, she got here to New York Metropolis with a Frenchman, Dan Bommer, whom she married and had her first youngster, Miriam, loosely named after her mom Irma. She rented a room in Washington Heights and acquired a scholarship to the New College for Social Analysis to review sociology. She and Dan divorced a yr later and he or she and Miriam stayed in Washington Heights, a German-Jewish neighborhood the place she felt she slot in, and the place she would reside for the remainder of her life. 

Ruth targeted her grasp’s thesis on the refugee youngsters who had left Germany together with her in 1939, and the significance of early socialization. “Engaged on my thesis helped me hold a part of the previous alive whereas being in a model new atmosphere, [with a] model new language, [in a] model new nation,” she stated in her testimony. 

She met her husband, Fred Westheimer, in 1960 they usually married a yr later. They’d their son Joel in 1963 and Fred adopted Miriam. 

Ruth went on to work in analysis at Deliberate Parenthood in 1967. “These individuals have been loopy. They solely speak about intercourse, not the climate, not literature,” she stated in her testimony—however she discovered it very intriguing. She acquired her doctorate in interdisciplinary examine of the household and began to show at Lehman School in 1970. 

Ruth was accepted right into a sexuality program at Cornell Medical College the place she studied to be a intercourse therapist below Dr. Helen Singer-Kaplan. In 1981, she appeared on WYNY radio station giving intercourse and relationship recommendation below a mandate to cowl group points. The section was so common she earned her personal weekly present, Sexually Talking. Quickly after, “Dr. Ruth” shortly shot into stardom: showing in commercials, motion pictures, and even a chat present. 

On the peak of her profession within the Eighties and 90s, Ruth spoke about sexuality like nobody had earlier than, drawing from her life and previous experiences to make an influence. She confirmed help for the homosexual group in the course of the AIDS epidemic, later saying in her documentary that “due to [her] background, [she] had a sensitivity to those who have been handled as subhuman.” She linked her Jewish religion and tradition to sexuality in her e book Heavenly Intercourse: Sexuality within the Jewish Custom and expanded her viewers together with her different books Intercourse After 50, Intercourse for Dummies and Dr. Ruth Talks to Children. 

In 1997, Ruth misplaced her husband Fred. She continued to coach by talking, lecturing, and publishing books effectively into her 90s. Ruth ended her USC Shoah Basis testimony by proudly displaying images of her life and household—from portraits of her mother and father to smiling child pictures of her grandchildren. 

“I’ve a powerful feeling that Hitler and the entire Nazis didn’t need me to have grandchildren. In order that’s an overriding, very sturdy feeling of triumph…of claiming, you see? With all of the disappointment, there may be no person that has grandchildren like mine.”

Ruth is survived by her youngsters, Miriam and Joel, and her 4 grandchildren. 

Watch Dr. Ruth’s full testimony.