Ruth Weiss: a Life Dedicated to Justice and Peace

9 – 16 August 2019 Celebrating Women SA JEWISH REPORT 9 Celebrating Women CHRISTINARuth STUCKY Weiss: a life dedicated to justice andto speak outpeace against prejudice. She has written 35 books and 46 unpublished manuscripts, he three girls put on their camera Ruth Weiss with including the children’s book My Sister Sara, smiles for the newspaper photographer, 1 000 Peacewomen set in South Africa. Many of her public talks cheeks glowing like polished red apples Across the Globe return to the roots of her activism. Audiences Ton the summer evening. They are pupils at often ask her about Nazi Germany or her the Ruth Weiss High School, named after thoughts as a Jewess about anti-Semitism in the diminutive woman sitting beside them, Germany. “The old prejudice against and lies who has just finished a two-hour talk. One about Jews, nurtured during centuries and of the girls is about 12, the same age Weiss reshaped to the extremes in the 30s, have was when she fled Nazi persecution to South never gone away. An old man said to me at Africa. In 1936, Ruth Weiss was a shy child. a lecture, ‘They filled our heads with certain Last month, the author, journalist, and notions that are impossible to get rid of.’” activist turned 95. That the Aschaffenburg school carries In 1936, the notion that a school in the her name has less to do with her than southern German town of Aschaffenburg with Germany’s history, she asserts. “It’s would one day be named after a Jewess would an honour for me, but I know my name have been preposterous. The 11½-year-old was chosen as a symbol of something that could not have guessed that she would meet no longer exists. It’s a reminder of the people like Nelson Mandela, or become once-thriving Jewish community that was friends with Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. completely eradicated.” She also could never have imagined that the apartheid government would bar her, and that • Christina Stucky is a freelance journalist based she would contribute to bringing about the in Bern, Switzerland, where she works part- end of apartheid. time for the non-governmental organisation All that was unimaginable for a Jewish child PeaceWomen Across the Globe. in Germany in the 1930s. The department store founded by her uncle in Aschaffenburg was seized under Nazi “aryanisation” laws. says. For Ruth Weiss’ family the injustice was Relatives were murdered, persecuted, or apparent because of the Nazi persecution of escaped in time. Among them her father, “non-Aryans”. Richard Löwenthal, who fled to South Africa When the first reports of the atrocities in 1933, after losing his job and following an arrived from Germany, she recalls feeling an invitation from relatives in Johannesburg. overwhelming sense of guilt. “We should have Her mother had a job, so she and Ruth stayed. been there,” she writes in her autobiography, Three years later, the Nuremberg race laws A Path Through Hard Grass. She also asked were in force, and her father urged them to herself, “Is it permissible that the plight join him. They made it out just in time. of the blacks touches me more than the Between 1933 and 1936, about 6 000 monstrosities that happened to Jews in refugees from Nazi Germany arrived in South Europe? In South Africa, I constantly had Africa before the ruling National Party barred the feeling that I shouldn’t be faring as well Jews from entering the country. “The Nats as I did. In view of the ever more obvious at the time were pro-Hitler and close to Nazi discrimination against blacks, I always had the ideology,” Ruth Weiss recalls. At first welcomed, feeling that I had failed.” the party eventually decided that Jews “had the She abandoned her plans to emigrate to right skin colour, but the wrong religion”. Palestine. Driven away by the increasing Having attended a Jewish school in Fürth, horror of apartheid, she left South Africa and living there with her religious maternal and embarked on a journalistic career that grandparents during her last years in took her from London to Lusaka, Cologne to Germany, she grew up as a “conscious Jewess” Harare, meeting Robert Mugabe, Mandela and in South Africa. “Partly because I had been other struggle stalwarts along the way. She made very aware of being one in the few was a business journalist, but reported equally years in Nazi Germany, partly because of the on social and political issues. In 1968, she South African situation in the 30s and 40s. was declared persona non grata in Southern It was natural for me that my parents joined Rhodesia, where she was working at the time, the German-Jewish synagogue founded by and denied re-entry into South Africa. a group of immigrants.” She also joined a In the 1980s, she was one of the founding Zionist youth group. members of the Zimbabwe Institute for Along with her religious beliefs, Ruth Southern Africa, organising secret meetings Löwenthal (later Weiss through marriage) with white and black South Africans and brought a clear understanding of injustice to representatives of the liberation parties. “We South Africa. On the boat to South Africa, she brought people together who had learned to and her sister played with African children hate each other, furthering understanding deck passengers picked up on the stops and forging friendships across the barriers.” along the coast. “We thought we had to learn Her dedication to building bridges led her to African languages and culture so we could be one of 1 000 women activists nominated live with them. But the first words I heard for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. when I arrived in Cape Town were from a After the end of apartheid, she visited white woman who said, ‘Oh, how lovely that South Africa several times in the early 1990s, the children have such fair skin.’ That was a but decided against returning. “It was the time shock. We arrived in this country ignorant.” for the young, the local, and returning leaders Twelve years later, apartheid became an and activists. I felt an old woman like myself institutionalised system of racial segregation. was superfluous to requirements.” “Other people had to work their way to the Today this nonagenarian uses her knowledge that apartheid was unjust,” she formidable memory and myriad experiences Europcar Jewish Report Aug 2019.indd 1 2019/08/05 09:13.

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