Ruth Gruener - Out of Hiding: A Holocaust Survivors Journey to America

To my children and grandchildren

Imagine that to save your life, you had to sleep curled up inside a trunk for twelve hours a day.

Or spend hour after hourfor yearssitting perfectly still in a corner, never speaking, never moving a muscle, for fear that someone would hear you or see you and send you to your death.

Imagine staying hidden away for so long you forget what trees look like. What the sky looks like. You even forget how to walk.

Imagine being in so much danger that you would plan your own execution to save the lives of the people hiding you away.

All thatand morehappened to Ruth Gruener when she was a child in the Holocaust.

I first met Ruth when I was asked to help her husband, Jack Gruener, write the story oflife as a boy during the Holocaust. When I began to work on Jacks book, my family and I flew to New York City to meet Jack and Ruth. They were two of the kindest people I ever met. We spent the morning at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where Ruth worked as a docent and had donated some artifacts (a pair of socks she wore from her time in hiding during the war). Then we went back to Jack and Ruths home. There, while I interviewed Jack for the book I was writing, he and Ruth plied me and my family with more food than ten families could eatin defiance, perhaps, of the years they had both spent starving during the Holocaust.

The book I wrote with Jack,Prisoner B-3087, tells the story of how he survived ten different concentration camps during World War II. Toward the end of Jacks book, he meets a young woman named Lunciawho changes her name to Ruth when she moves to the United States, and eventually becomes Jacks wife.

Jack shows up halfway through this book,Out of Hiding. So for all the readers who write to me begging to find out what happens to Jack once his book ends, now youll know!

Ruths story echoes another novel I wrote calledRefugee. That book is not about RuthJackat least not specifically. But like the characters inRefugee, Ruth is driven from her home, and with her family must cross stormy seas on their journey to another country, where they will have to learn a new language and a new way of life to survive. Ruth and her family, like millions of others before them and since around the world, were refugees.

Roughly 250,000 European Jews were displaced by World War II, and many of those refugees, like Ruth and her family, hoped to immigrate to America after the war. But the application process wasnt easy. The American government kept changing the rules, sometimes from day to day. Ruth and her family persisted, though, and were lucky to eventually end up in the United States. And the United States was lucky to have them.

As I remind students when I tell them about Jacks story, unfortunately, the last generation of Holocaust survivors is passing away. Thats why its more important than ever that we hear their stories directly from them, while we still can. Ruth Gruener understands this. I hear her voice loud and clear in every sentence of this book, as though Ruth is right here in the room telling me everything that happened to her. Now her story will live on for generations in her own words.

Silence is dangerous, Ruth tells us. If you dont tell your own story, someone else will tell it for youand maybe not the way youd like it to be told. This book, and the decades Ruth has spent telling people her story in schools and gathering places around the world, is a testament to the power of speaking up, speaking out, and speaking your own truth.

Alan Gratz

Asheville, NC

2019

IT WAS A LATE morning in the spring of 2018, and I was standing in a classroom in front of a group of eighth-grade students. I was there to tell them about my life. I am a Holocaust survivor. As a Jewish person born in Poland in the 1930s, I bore witness to the Nazis attempt to eradicate all the Jews of Europe during World War II. At the start of 1939, there were about seven million Jewish people living in Central and Eastern Europe. By the wars end in 1945, an estimated six million of them had been killed, many in concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, and in death camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I survived the Holocaust because I was hidden by non-Jewish families who risked their lives to save the lives of others.

Though that part of my life happened many years ago, the memories are still fresh. I have made it one of my lifes missions to tell my story, and to speak about the importance of tolerance, so that the atrocities of the past do not happen again. I travel across the country, speaking to students and teachers, at schools and synagogues, and meeting people from all different backgrounds. I also work as a gallery educator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City. There, I give tours to groups of people and tell them my story too.

Whenever I talk to young people about my experiences, I find that all my memories from the past come back even strongermy memories of suffering during the Holocaust, as well as the hope and joy and struggles that followed when the war ended and my family and I immigrated to America.

That spring day, standing in front of the eighth graders, I realized I wanted to write a memoir about what happened to me during the war but also about what happened when I came out of hidingand slowly but surely, began to come back to life.

I hope that my story will help people understand the importance of remembering, and of treating each other with kindness and humanity.

I SUPPOSE ITS FITTING that Ive had seven names, considering how many times Ive had to restart my life.

On my birth certificate, Im Aurelia Czeslava Gamzer. My Hebrew name is Rachel Tcharne, which I was given to honor both my late grandmother and great-aunt. During my early childhood, I was called Rela (short for Aurelia), then Relunia, then Lunia, and finally, Luncia, my favorite nickname, which stuck.

Luncia Gamzer was my name throughout my childhood and adolescence. Many years later, in a new country, my name would change againto Ruth Gruener. But, of course, I didnt know it then.

I was born on a warm August morning in the early 1930s, in a house on Wolynska Street in the city of Lvov, which at that time was part of Poland. When I was six weeks old, I caught pneumonia and almost died. I was unconscious, but the doctor revived me by dunking me in basins of cold and warm water. That was the first time I escaped death. It would not be the last.