Five years ago, shortly before a celebration to mark her 100th birthday, Ruth Nussbaum of Delray Beach admitted she wasn’t overly thrilled with the occasion. “I wouldn’t recommend being 100 to anybody”, she told me.
Despite that, Ruth continued living independently in her home and turned 105 on Sept. 30th. Not long after that, however, she began having respiratory issues, and she suggested it was time to enter hospice care, which was set up at the home of her son Howard in Boca Raton. On Nov. 15th, she died peacefully, surrounded by family.
It was not only the end of a remarkable, long life; Ruth was also one of the last eyewitnesses who clearly remembered the earliest days of Nazi Germany.
Ruth Rozanski was born in Offenbach, Germany, a few miles from Frankfurt. By the age of five she’d learned how to knit, an activity in which she found enjoyment, meaning and purpose for the next century. After her father’s untimely death when she was 11, she lived with her mother Henriette and younger sister Ellen in a building owned by an aunt; her mom and aunt managed a small store downstairs from their apartment.
An exceptionally bright teenager, Ruth worked for three years as an apprentice bookkeeper until Kristallnacht in November, 1938. During that nationwide anti-Jewish orgy of violence, death and destruction, Nazi thugs ransacked her family’s store and residence.
Several months later, fearing what the ominous future might hold for German Jews, Henriette made the wrenching decision to send Ellen to safety in England on the now-legendary Kindertransport.
Ruth, however, was already past the 17-year age limit; it took more than a year of desperate attempts – and the help of the refugee organization HIAS – to make her escape from Nazi Germany, leaving her mother behind.
In late 1940, the 20-year-old, with only the clothes on her back, got on a train that rumbled through Russia for days, made her way to Japan, and boarded a ship that eventually docked in Seattle. Literally penniless, she managed to raise the one cent needed to send a postcard to relatives in New York City, who arranged through HIAS to bring her east.
In New York, Ruth was reunited with her fiancé Norbert (later Norman) Nussbaum. The couple met at a dancing school in 1935 when he was 17 and she 15; he fled Germany separately, and they married in 1942.
I am familiar with Ruth’s saga because Norman was my mother’s cousin, and our two families lived near each other for decades in Queens, New York.
After World War II ended, Ruth discovered that her 55-year-old mother Henriette had been murdered in Treblinka.
In 1956, tragedy struck again, when the older of Ruth and Norman’s two sons, Milton, died of leukemia at the age of nine. Although never fully recovered from that heartbreak, the Nussbaums carried on, moving to Delray Beach in the early 1980s; Norman passed away in 1993.
In the years since being widowed, Ruth kept busy by knitting blankets, hats and sweaters for children hospitalized with cancer and other illnesses at various local facilities, such as Quantum House in West Palm Beach. She created an item a day, and was recognized several times for her generous charity work.
When Ruth was 103, I told her that my sister Susan, who lives in Los Angeles but had visited Ruth in Delray several years ago, was about to become a grandmother. She immediately said she wanted to knit something for the upcoming birth, and even recorded a message for Susan and my niece Talia (the mom), saying, in part, “I’m very happy about the baby, and everyone only should be healthy. And the blanket – every stitch was made with love, and should keep the baby warm and healthy”.
Ruth enjoyed visits from her surviving son and two grandsons, Danny and Marty, along with Marty’s wife Nicole – as well as the children and grandchildren of her sister Ellen, who died in 2018.
One might think Ruth could look back at her life with some sense of contentment, peace and comfort, but that wasn’t the case. An avid follower of the news (a fan of David Muir on ABC in particular), Ruth despaired at what she saw happening during the first Trump administration, commenting “I’ve seen a lot in my 100 years, but I don’t know why I had to stick around for all of this. It’s awful.”
Her pessimism began in 2016, when we met at an Italian restaurant for dinner during the presidential election campaign. After sharing joyful memories of my parents’ wedding and gossip about various relatives, Ruth turned to politics.
The woman who was forced to listen daily to Adolf Hitler’s lunatic rants on the radio for seven years in the 1930s was blunt: “When I hear Trump speak, I hear Hitler again. When I see his rallies, it’s like what I saw in Nazi Germany.”
I pushed back against Ruth’s emotional comments. As a journalist who has interviewed dozens of survivors and reported extensively on Holocaust-related topics, and as the son of a mother who escaped the Nazis and a father whose aunts, uncles and ten first cousins were murdered by them, I had long believed that nobody and nothing can or should be compared to Hitler and Nazism.
So I told Ruth in 2016 I thought she was exaggerating, that the Holocaust was an event unique in its horror, that the unhinged diatribes of Donald Trump were not equivalent to genocide.
Nearly a decade later, I realize that Ruth was right. In his second term, Donald Trump still is not the Adolf Hitler of the 1940s. But he can be compared, I believe, to the Hitler of the 1930s, as he follows the same authoritarian playbook. Ruth’s opinion of him never changed, and the events of Jan. 6th, 2021, were no surprise to her. “Trump is like a dictator. He’s crazy like Hitler was,” she said at the time.
At Ruth’s graveside funeral, her grandson Marty – who held her hand as she passed away – spoke of her steadfast support of him throughout his life, adding “She lived through more than most of us can imagine and far more than anyone should ever have to bear. Despite all of it, she was never bitter. Instead, she poured her love into her family.”
That family included her nephew and niece, Jay Katz and Harriet Katz-Bassen, who grew up in the same house in New York where Ruth and her husband and sons lived (and who also visited her in her final days), as well as relatives such as me, who always viewed her long life as an inspirational example of triumph over tragedy.
Steve North is a longtime broadcast and print journalist who lives in New York and Oakland Park.
