An elderly California woman found new life talking about the death and deprivation she saw as a child in Nazi concentration camps.
Ruth Sax shared her life story with her daughter, Las Vegan Sandra Scheller, who was taking care of her seriously ill mother. Their conversations resulted in a book, “Try to Remember — Never Forget,” that details the family’s struggles and triumphs during and after World War II.
Sax died last week, but not before becoming something of a celebrity in the two years after the book's publication. She visited classrooms, senior centers, and even Comic-Con.
“After I wrote the book, my mother was stronger as a person physically, and whatever ailed her was gone,” Scheller said. “She had a reason now because she was an advocate for Holocaust awareness.”
Sax enjoyed an idyllic childhood growing up in Czechoslovakia, but that changed in a day — March 14, 1939 — when the Nazis invaded. The family was eventually separated and sent to concentration camps where they endured indignities such as using newspapers to keep their feet warm in the snow and scrubbing off lice with the dregs from the soup kettles in the camp kitchen.
Sax and her parents all survived the war and reunited outside the gates of the Terezin concentration camp near Prague after Soviet troops liberated it. Today, Sax lives in Southern California, where her family settled after the war.
"To hand her that book and to have her look at it and go through it and see it and physically hold it, that was the real goal," Scheller said, "Anything else is just icing on the cake."
In June, Scheller will share her mother’s story at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She donated a garment to the museum that her grandmother had worn.
On the dress:
The dress was given to my grandmother in Auschwitz. And as they left Auschwitz, they were supposed to go to an extermination camp but the extermination camp was very – how would you say – busy. So what they did is they ended up going to Oederan. Oederan means thread factory. So, they went to this work camp, a concentration camp, and in that camp my grandmother wore that same dress for two years straight.
On why the dress is going to be donated to the Holocaust Museum:
When I decided to write this book, I knew that it wouldn’t be fair to give [the dress] to my children, if something happened to me, and that my nieces and other relatives would not be able to enjoy it. By having the dress eventually go to the Holocaust Museum, it would allow everybody to see the dress.
(Editor's Note: This discussion originally aired March 2017)
Sandra Scheller, Las Vegas author