Ruth David (neé Oppenheimer) grew up in Nazi Germany, and although she was spared from ever having to step inside a death camp, her life was to be forever altered due to the Holocaust.The title of the book, "Child of Our Time," is from British composer Michael Tippett's oratorio about 17-year-old Herschel Grynspan, a Polish Jew. Grynspan asked the German embassy in Paris to help his parents, who were caught in the border between Germany and Poland, rejected by both countries. The embassy personnel laughed at the situation, and as protest, Grynspan returned with a gun and fatally shot a Third Secretary of the nazi party. In Germany, it was hastily and venomously decided that all Jews were responsible and would pay for Grynspan's actions. And thus, the plan for what was to be known as Kristallnacht moved into operation on 9 November 1938.
As a child, Ruth David was caught in the midst of not only Kristallnacht, but the perpetual persecution of herself and her family by the nazis, later the separation from her parents, and the effects of emigrating solo to a foreign country (Britain) as a nine-year-old, where she spoke nary an English word.
Mrs. David was one of the nearly 10,000 children who was brought to England via the kindertransport system, enacted by Parliament to offer sanctuary to children under the age of 17. Most children either initially or eventually settled in with families who would become their foster parents during WW II. However, young Ruth was one who was to be raised in what was called a hostel (an orphanage for refugee children) financed by a Jewish group in Newcastle. The hostel was run by two Viennese women who knew almost nothing of raising girls but took the job as a way to escape persecution themselves. They fully expected that within six months, the parents of each of the almost two dozen girls would arrive and take their daughters home. Nine-year-old Ruth arrived in June 1939. She emerged a young woman, in 1946.
The war years spent in the hostel were nearly an incarceration all their own. The two matrons responsible for the girls seemed to despise their young charges almost as much as the situation which stole them from their flourishing and respectable careers as a chef and cinema owner in Austria. Mrs. David's stories are compelling to read, as she writes with a confident, polished, yet congenial manner that genuinely serves us slices of her young, but often anguished life.
The girls with whom she shared her life were to become her foster family. Ruth was witness to the almost daily beatings of a six-year-old girl named Lore whose crime was enuresis. When another girl responded to the question, by one matron, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" with an answer that she would like to be an artist, she was subjected to a sharp slap across the face and the insult of being called a bohemian. At various times, the matrons seemed to adopt one girl as the enemy child, and she became the focus of harassment and harsh, undeserving punishment until another unsuspecting victim was chosen. Throughout the years, Ruth suffered not only the rath of the matrons' inexperience and malice, the separation from her siblings and parents, and the isolation in a foreign land and tongue but also through the humiliation of a head shearing during a lice outbreak, a simultaneous dose of diphtheria and scarlet fever, a near drowning in a lake, and the eventual knowledge that, although all of her siblings had physically survived the war, her parents had been slaughtered at Auschwitz.
Never overbearing but always captivating, "Child of Our Time" chronicles Ruth David's life from the mid 1930s -- when her innocent, joyous life began to change as a result of Nazi rule -- to just after the war, when she surfaced from her experiences much older, wiser, and bearing her own scars. Her story is one not often told, but it needs to be heard. Fortunate are we that a woman with courage and talent for the written word is here to tell it. This review is being written on Yom HaShoah, 27 Nisan 5764 (Hebrew year), which is the Holocaust Remembrance Day, based on the anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Let us never forget.
Jennifer Metcalf