Ruta’s Warning to the youth of today

By Keith Morgan

A summarized account of one of the late Ruth Kron Sigal’s addresses to high schoolers in 2001.

The silence that greeted Ruta Kron Sigal’s closing words was not the polite quiet in which she began to deliver her message to the high school students twenty minutes earlier.

Now it was a stunned silence. 

During the first few minutes, one or more of the 60 or so chairs occasionally creaked as its teenaged occupant restlessly shifted position. Less frequently, a stage whisper from the rear was faintly audible as it penetrated the front row of the large room in the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. 

Rapt attention

Nevertheless, Ruta’s dramatic story of her family’s escape from the clutches of the Nazis and her chilling recollection of how many fellow Jews they murdered during their bloody occupation of her native Lithuania soon glued the youngsters to their seats and tied their tongues. 

Brows furrowed while young fingers nervously stroked and tapped chins. At times, there were furtive sideways glances from boys checking to see how their friends were dealing with all this talk of real death and destruction. Strange, given the long hours many had undoubtedly spent unleashing death and destruction via electronic war games on their home computers. They noticed the girls with tears in their eyes and quickly looked away, perhaps fearing an errant droplet of water would leak from their eyes. 

A cough or a loud sigh might actually have provided a welcome break in the tension that now filled the room. There had not been a single auditory disturbance since the first five minutes had ticked by. Only the naturally amplified sound of Ruta, nervously swallowing to lubricate the lump in her throat punctuated her shaky delivery. As the head of a large university women’s program, she had frequently spoken with confidence and directness to much larger audiences. This was different. Her personal story, no matter how many times she told it, never got any easier to tell. 

Ruta’s Shavl home

“Just before World War Two, in Siauliai where I lived – which we knew better as Shavli or Shavl – was a thriving, small city in the north of the country. And at that time the Jewish population was 5,360,” Ruta informed them, in the same straight forward, just-the-facts-manner, a social studies teacher might address this same group back at school.

The vivacious grandmother, whose attractive appearance belied her painful past, even smiled as she talked about the richness of Jewish family and cultural life. For her father Meyer Kron, mother Gita and little sister Tamara lived a blessed life prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

The horror

Nevertheless, the sentences she spoke a few minutes later wiped a  smile from her face that would not reappear until much later when she spoke lovingly about those who risked their lives to hide her and save her parents.  

 “The Jewish population grew to 6,500 as Polish refugees and other Jews from elsewhere tried to outrun the advancing Nazis. About 1,000 of them fled into Russia a few days prior to the German takeover of Shavl on June 25, 1941. In the first two weeks of the occupation, 1,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis and many of our own neighbours.”

Almost a month later, the Nazis ordered the remaining Jews to move to two ghettos in the poor part of the city, while that shabby neighbourhood’s former residents helped themselves to the homes of the displaced Jews. 

 “A further 1,000 Jews, who were sent to nearby Zhager, were killed there over the last four months of the year and another 750 Jews who were forced work in other nearby villages were also wiped out.”

Ruta continued teacher-like: “If you are good at math you will have figured out that by the end of the year more than half of the original Jewish population was murdered.”

Not unique to Shavl

The story throughout Lithuania was the same; she told them with a despairing sigh. At the beginning of the war, more than 200,000 Jews called Lithuania home. By the time the last shot of the war was fired around four per cent of them remained and it no longer felt anything like home to those that survived. 

Ruta’s voice grew a little louder and the words came a little quicker as she 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.”

Bravery and betrayal

She went on to tell some of the stories of bravery and cowardice recorded in the chapters that precede this one. At this point, many fellow Holocaust survivors would have stepped back and asked if there were any questions. Ruta pressed on. She had something to say about why the young audience before her should care about this piece of history from the previous century.

“I’m sure you must think my story is horrific. I do too. It happened many years ago so perhaps you think it means nothing today but if you do you would be wrong.”

“I saw the sickening TV footage of the genocide in Rwanda and later in the Balkans,” she explained. “Ethnic cleansing is the new phrase coined to describe the slaughter of one particular race or tribe of people. The term sounds a little too ‘clean’ for me. Let us call this form of cold-blooded mass murder by the dirty word it is – genocide.

“It wasn’t the Jews that were victimized this time but I have to ask how long will it be before somebody comes after us again? Anti-Semitism is on the rise again, even here in Canada where we pride ourselves on being liberally minded and tolerant of others. ”This was not just a ‘feeling’ or a pet theory it was the truth. And even today, almost 25 years later, her words are sadly echoed in today’s headlines. A strong motivation for the publication of the the third edition and the creation of the Ruta’s Closet Podcast.