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Karola Ruth Westheimer, better known as Dr. Ruth, understood better than most how intolerance and extremism destroy lives. She never forgot the evil of Nazism, which killed her parents, and she counted herself very fortunate to have survived the Holocaust. She seized the day every day until passing away this 12 July at the grand old age of 96. Hers was a truly exceptional life: surviving genocide, marrying three times, fighting for Israel as a sniper in the late 1940s, becoming America’s most famous sex therapist in the 1980s, and campaigning in her final years to combat the epidemic of loneliness afflicting so many societies.
She looked like your favorite aunt – huggable, warm-hearted, trustworthy, wise, someone who would always have your back. Yet beneath the cuddly exterior was an inner steel born of enormous tragedy. Above all, she was a survivor, and a joyous one at that. Born in 1928 to Orthodox parents, she later recalled feeling spoiled as a young child, the proud owner of a pair of roller-skates and thirteen dolls. Her mother, Irma Siegel, was a housekeeper. Her father, a wholesaler, took her to school on his bicycle, buying her ice-cream when she went to synagogue with him each Friday night. Decades later - at the height of her fame, a talk show favorite - she said “early socialization was crucial in my whole joie de vivre, my lust for life, despite unhappy occurrences.”
Those unhappy events began on Kristallnacht – the “Night of Broken Glass” - in November 1938 when the Nazis launched vicious attacks, burning down some 10,000 Jewish homes, shops and synagogues. Her father, 38, was arrested by the Gestapo not long after. Never would she forget the banging on her front door and her father being told to get dressed, and her sobs as her grandmother tried in vain to buy her father’s freedom with money hidden in the hem of a skirt. Nor would she forget seeing her father get into a truck which took him to Dachau. He winked at her lovingly as he was led away: “I remember that wink and I thought, you know, he’s going to come back.
Dachau was the first of Hitler’s concentration camps, established shortly after he came to power in 1933, and where by war’s end over 50,000 people are thought to have perished – victims of disease, overwork, and execution. After her father was sent there, Ruth’s mother and grandmother decided it was best if Ruth went to Switzerland. In January 1939, she became part of the so-called “Kindertransport”, an organized rescue effort that saved some 10,000 Jewish children’s lives. Ruth was just ten when she arrived in Switzerland. She was never again hugged as a child.
Ruth went to an orphanage along with 300 other children, some as young as six. By 1945, most were actual orphans, losing their parents in the Holocaust. Ruth cleaned and helped care for the younger children, staying at the orphanage for six years, studying in secret from textbooks loaned to her by a local Swiss schoolboy. She managed to learn some Hebrew and eventually became interested in Zionism. She wrote to her mother and grandmother until 1941 when her letters met with no reply. She later learned that her father was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. She would never learn of the exact fate of her mother – to this day, her mother is classified as “verschollen” - “disappeared/murdered” - in a database held by Yad Vashem in Israel. None of her relatives survived the Holocaust.
The Second World War utterly forged Dr. Ruth. She said it took many years before she stopped living with “irrational guilt” – the belief that she could have saved her parents had she stayed in Nazi Germany. After the war ended in Europe, with more than six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, she decided to go to the British Mandate Palestine, leaving from Marseilles in September 1945, aged 17. She had not heard from her family for four years.
“How do I leave Europe without knowing where my parents are?” she asked herself. “How are they going to find me if they ever come back?”
Ruth lived on a kibbutz and picked olives and tomatoes. When the Israeli War of Independence broke out, she joined Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary force, training as a sniper and scout, standing just 4 ft 7 inches tall. She learned to lob grenades and would always remember how to put together a STEN gun – still being able to do so, eyes closed, aged ninety.
On her 20th birthday in 1948, artillery fire killed two women close to Ruth, and she was hit by shrapnel, almost losing her feet. She recuperated slowly and then moved to France with her first husband who studied medicine at the Sorbonne. She divorced in 1955 and began yet another new life, in the United States, the following year, settling in Washington Heights in New York, where she would live until her death this month. She worked as a maid, somehow got by as a single mother and finally gained a doctorate in education aged 42, and then trained as a sex therapist.
The rest is, as they say, history. In 1981, she began to work in radio and quickly became so popular that she soon had her own weekly show, Sexually Speaking. Dr. Ruth, as she became known, would spend the following decades as a bona fide celebrity, a household name in the US, gracing both television and radio, offering advice, destigmatizing public discussion of sexuality. Notably, she supported the gay community during the AIDS epidemic. Her childhood had left her with a “sensitivity to people that were treated as subhuman.”
She never wasted a moment of her life, squeezing the maximum joy and impact from it, writing over fifty books, scrupulously attending synagogue, garnering many honors, and was utterly devoted to her children and grandchildren to the day she died. “I have a strong feeling that Hitler and all the Nazis did not want me to have grandchildren,” she said. Her life had been a victory over evil. Indeed, being able to love four grandchildren gave her “an overriding, very strong feeling of triumph.”
