In 1941, eleven-year old Ruth had become a helpless witness to the agonizing death of her father, then of her only brother, and finally of her mother - all within three weeks. They perished in Bershad, the largest and most infamous of more than 100 concentration camps in Transnistria. This geographic area, almost forgotten in Holocaust accounts, became the graveyard of nearly 250,000 Jews.
Following her rescue, Ruth became a nomad, wandering from foster homes to makeshift orphanages to refugee camps. She fled postwar Romania on a freighter that was shipwrecked in the Aegean Sea en route to Palestine. Rescued by the British, she was taken to a detention camp in Cyprus. One year later Ruth reached Palestine and was finally able to put down roots.
After the birth of Israel in 1948, Ruth participated in the building of a kibbutz in the Judean Hills near Jerusalem. She became the commune medic and later studied nursing. At age twenty-eight she met and married a fellow Romanian and uprooted herself again, this time to his adopted country of Colombia, where they lived for fourteen years, raising two children. In 1972 the family emigrated to Miami, Florida. Following a twenty-year hiatus, Ruth returned to nursing at age fifty.
Two years later she was widowed.
Ruth's journey hadn't ended. Her husband's death released an outpouring of grief for the family she had lost forty years earlier. In 1988 she returned to Bukovina, the Ukrainian province that was part of Romania during her childhood, to her hometown, Czernowitz, and the villages she knew, and to the camp at Bershad. She was hoping to find a way to connect with her childhood and to pay homage to the victims of the camps.
Instead, she found dilapidated cemeteries, unmarked mass graves, and a wall of silence that shrouded the massacre of Jews in the region. Combining historical events with intensely personal narrative, Ruth Gold has created a memorial to the Jews of Transnistria. Moreover, the courageous spirit of her life, despite her shattering psychological and physical traumas, conveys a message to those who contemplate meaning in the Holocaust.
