"...one of the finest Holocaust memoirs"-- Sir Martin Gilbert

Ruth Kron Sigal was motivated to tell her family's story by news reports in 2002. On the anniversary of Hitler's birthday on April 20th, swastikas were found painted on almost all of the gravestones of Jews in the Kristijonas Donelaitis cemetery in her hometown of Siauliai [also known as Shavl], Lithuania. The following year, in January, neo-Nazis disrupted the town's Hanukkah celebrations, pulling down a menorah. Supporters of the country's main neo-Nazi party staged a rally with anti-Semitic signs and slogans.

Co-written with Keith Morgan, Ruta's Closet (Vancouver: Shavl Publishing, 2008, Unicorn 2013) is the survival story of the Kron family and their neighbours during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, beginning in 1941. The story concerns the murder of an estimated 190,000-195,000 Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust, roughly 90% of the Jews in the country.

Ruth Kron Sigal was born on July 28, 1936. Her father Meyer Kron was a chemical engineer. Her mother Gita had a law degree. About half of the townspeople were Jews. When the Nazis invaded Lithuania in 1941, the Kron family hid in the fields. Ruth’s grandmother was the first to die, due to a bomb blast. The family returned to their home and found it was occupied by two Germans officers. The well-educated Krons managed to befriend the officers who temporarily protected them so they were not rounded up with others. But on August 24, 1941, Ruth Kron, her parents and her sister, Tamara, born in 1939, were forced into the burgeoning ghetto of approximately 5,000 Jews gathered by the Nazis at Siauliai. Inside the ghetto, her father's essential work in the leather industry prevented them all from being selected for culling and being sent by trainloads to Auschwitz. The local Jewish Council kowtowed to Nazi dictates that there were to be no more babies born.

The Krons succeeded in smuggling food into the ghetto. Ruth Kron later recalled: "My parents' determination to survive grew as members of our family and good friends died or suffered at the hands of the Nazis or the Lithuanian fascist collaborators. They became more inventive and daring in their bid to keep our family together. No matter what our tormentors did we were not going to allow them to beat us into submission..." But eventually Ruth, too, was apprehended by the Gestapo and placed onto the last truck, with her sister, during a round-up of Jewish children on November 3, 1943. Ruth recalls her uncle pleaded with one of the guards to spare the girls. She was reprieved because she appeared old enough to work. In his book, Child Holocaust Survivors, Robert Krell reported in 2007 that it was Dr. Wulf Peissachovitz, a first cousin, who pulled her off that truck. The other 823 children in the convoy, including Tamara, were sent to Auschwitz.

Thereafter, Ruth, as the precious child who was spared, was taken secretly to the farm of a Catholic family, giving rise to the title of her memoir. At age eight, she remained hidden in a closet for between three and four months. She had to remain in hiding, for her own safety and the safety of the host family, until she could speak Lithuanian fluently. With hair dyed blonde, she became known as cousin Erika. The transformation was more complete than hoped. She became a devout Catholic.

The ghetto was liquidated and all inhabitants were sent away on the trains with the rare exception of her resourceful parents, who had escaped into hiding just a week prior. Ruth was reunited with them when the Soviets liberated Lithuania in September of 1944. This reunion did not go smoothly. It took several months of parental visits before she would agree to leave her Catholic home. Strong-willed, Ruth negotiated the terms of their reunion. Her parents had to agree not to speak Yiddish at home and she must be allowed to continue to attend Catholic services.

Not long after this rapprochement, Ruth switched her belief system from Catholicism to Communism. Her father was arrested as a Zionist but he managed to evade prosecution and escape with his family to Poland where Ruth's brother was born. The Krons had planned to forge a new life in Israel but were instead granted immigration to Canada.

The Kron family arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia on March 11, 1951 and continued to Montreal where her father Meyer spent three months in hospital with infectious hepatitis. Her mother Gita started a new career as a teacher by attending the Jewish Hebrew Teachers' Seminary. Meyer left Montreal in March of 1952 to operate a government-run tannery in Regina; he was joined by the rest of the family later in the year--but the factory burned down in May of 1953. A client in Winnipeg offered Meyer work at the J. Leckie Company, in New Westminster, near Vancouver, where he stayed until 1964. Gita obtained a teaching post at the Beth Israel Religious School and Talmud Torah Day School, in Vancouver. Meyer died October 10, 1986 and Gita died on November 10, 1994.

As an expert in the stresses of being a hidden child, having been one himself in Holland, Robert Krell, a psychiatrist, has a sympathetic understanding of Ruth Kron's story. He writes, "Ruth, a thoroughly indoctrinated Christian by the time she was returned to her parents, would probably have remained a Christian, had they [her parents] not survived. Slowly, she was brought back into the fold. Her personal recovery, while guided by her parents to a large degree, came from a renewed sense of community offered through school friends in Feldafing and Munich. It was there she received toys and candy, Baby Ruths and Butterfingers. She returned to school and studied Hebrew with teachers from Israel. It was her friends of these previous years of recovery and recuperation that she sought out at the First International Gathering of the Hidden Child in New York in 1991. She found one, and through her, others."

Ruth Kron married Dr. Cecil Sigal in 1957. In 1995, as Ruth Kron Sigal, during her visit to Lithuania and Latvia, revisiting her birthplace at Siauliai, she recorded a documentary about her family's experiences. The rise of anti-Semitism in the 21st century made her feel obliged to record her family's story for posterity, on paper. More than a half-century after leaving Lithuania, Ruth Kron Sigal produced her memoir, co-written by Vancouver Sun journalist Keith Morgan. Born in Blackpool, England in 1954, he moved to Vancouver in 1980 where he became a columnist on cars and motoring for The Province and Sun newspapers. According to Morgan, "The late Meyer Kron left behind a substantive unpublished memoir entitled 'Through the Eye of the Needle' from which the basic story outline was drawn. Similarly, members of the Peissachowitz, Gotz-Ton, Luntz and Perlov families graciously provided unfettered access to unpublished memoirs and personal documents, enabling a better description of events and even the inclusion of near contemporaneously recorded conversations." A diary of Shavl ghetto life, kept by Eliezer Yerushalmi, a teacher of the ghetto's Judenrat, was also published by Yad Vashem in 1950, in Hebrew.

Ruth Kron Sigal graduated from UBC in Bacteriology. After doing research and social work for ten years, at 39, she went back to UBC and got her second degree in Counselling Psychology. She was also a founding member of the Vancouver Crisis Centre and of SAFER. As a Registered Psychologist, she was the founder and Director of UBC's Women's Resources Centre for 25 years. She was a co-founder of the Vancouver Hidden Children of the Holocaust group and was active in Holocaust education.

Among the many honours she received were the YWCA Woman of Distinction Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, UBC AMS Great Trekker's Award and the UBC President's Award. Shortly before the publication of her memoir, she died at home of kidney cancer on December 16, 2008, whereupon the $500 Kron Sigal Award for Excellence in Holocaust Education, established in memory of her parents, Meyer and Gita, was renamed to include Ruth Kron Sigal. It is presented annually to an elementary or secondary teacher in any discipline who has shown a commitment to teaching students about the Holocaust and its lessons for humankind.

"... My story was locked away in a mental closet of my own making for many years," Ruth Kron Sigal told children when she gave talks in schools. "Our elders told us: 'You did not suffer. You were safe. You were hidden in the homes of rescuers.' We, 'the hidden children', as we are known, were left feeling that our stories were not as important as those told by older people who had survived Hitler's concentration camps."

BOOKS:

Ruta's Closet (Shavl Publishing 2011) 9780969871019, (Unicorn Press, 2013) 9781906509262

[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit

Photo shows Ruta Kron Sigal at the site of the Ezero-Traku ghetto entrance, on Trakai Street, Siauliai, marked with a memorial stone, in 2002; visiting a memorial stone for murdered Jews buried in trenches at Panevezys.