Ruth David, Holocaust educator who came to Britain on the Kindertransport – obituary

Ruth David, who has died of Covid-19 aged 91, was one of the last children to flee Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport and spent the war in England, where she settled and became a teacher; she devoted much of her later life to the cause of Holocaust education, travelling the world to talk about the persecution her family endured.

In 2012 the German Ambassador in London, presenting her with the Cross of the Order of Merit, praised her contribution to Vergangenheitsbewältigung – the process of “overcoming the past” in connection with the Holocaust. “Germany can be immensely grateful to have won Ruth David back as a friend,” he declared. “I could not imagine a better one.”

Her reconciliation with her homeland was long and difficult. There was a general wilful amnesia where the Holocaust was concerned, she noted, and so for some 40 years after the end of the war she rarely spoke to anybody about the fate of her parents, who had been gassed in Auschwitz, and the other relatives and friends who had perished in concentration camps. (Her aunt Ida was rumoured to have been beaten to death by a guard.)

But attitudes slowly changed, and she discovered that in Germany the post-war generation, who had been told little about the Holocaust by their shame-filled parents, “wanted and needed to meet survivors”.

In 2003 she published Child of Our Time, a memoir of her early life, in order to “help break the conspiracy of silence in which both perpetrators and victims have colluded for half a century”.

Although initially she found returning to Germany painful, she eventually made dozens of trips there, speaking to hundreds of people. She also addressed many gatherings in Israel and the US, as well as Britain.

She particularly relished talking in schools, where she took special pleasure in meeting children who, like herself, had come to Britain as refugees. Among her most memorable sessions was one at HMP Leicester on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2018, the prisoners cheering her when she came to describe her escape on the Kindertransport.

Ruth Luise Oppenheimer was born on March 17 1929 in Fränkisch-Crumbach, a small rural town south of Frankfurt where her family were thought to have been the first Jewish settlers at the end of the 18th century. Her father, Moritz Oppenheimer, ran the family cigar factory and was one of the town’s principal employers and benefactors. Her mother Margarete (née Kraemer) was a university-educated mathematician.

The first serious blight on her privileged and love-filled childhood was the suicide of her maternal grandmother in 1934 – she threw herself into the Main – triggered by the increasing maltreatment of Jews that had followed Hitler’s assumption of power the previous year. Ruth David was grateful in later years that her grandmother had been spared the horrific persecution that came later.

Ruth and her siblings were gradually snubbed by their Gentile friends and, aged six, she was obliged to leave the village school and, with other Jewish children, travel several miles by van every day to a designated school. On one occasion a prominent local haulier blocked the road with his lorry and smashed the windows of the van while “we children screamed and cowered”.

Kristallnacht came to rural Fränkisch-Crumbach a day late, on November 10 1938, and Ruth David remembered cowering with her sister in her father’s car while their home was attacked and their furniture smashed up. Her father and brother were taken away to Buchenwald, and when they returned Ruth found she could not hug or show affection to her broken, prematurely aged father – “The shame of my behaviour is still vividly with me.”

Having left Frankfurt on the Kindertransport, as Child No 6295 she arrived at Liverpool Street station on June 7 1939. She initially spent the war with other refugee girls in a hostel in Tynemouth run by two mean-spirited Viennese matrons; later on they were all relocated to Windermere to prevent them spying on Tynemouth’s ports and airfields.

A clever girl, she was accepted at Oakburn, a prestigious school in Windermere. When she was 17, the hostel matrons told her she had to give up her education and earn her keep or find somewhere else to live; to her eternal gratitude, she was taken in as a non-paying lodger by Oakburn’s principals, Winifred Brett and Elizabeth Knox.

Ruth David was amused that as an “enemy alien” she had to have special dispensation to own a bicycle or an atlas even after the War. But she was profoundly grateful to Britain for taking her in – an “unparalleled gesture of goodness at a time when other countries turned a cold shoulder”. She was eventually reunited with her five siblings, who had all been evacuated to different countries.

In 1947 she was awarded British citizenship and chose not to join family members in the United States, deciding instead to swell the diminished ranks of Britain’s teachers and “let my skills help repay the debt I owed to Britain”.

She won a scholarship to Bedford College, University of London, and taught foreign languages at schools including Eltham Hill and, after she had settled in Leicester, Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys.

She was reluctant to return to Germany, noting that the mayor who had persecuted her father had died with his sins forgotten and been given a “splendid funeral”. She finally agreed to make a return visit so that she could be reunited with her old nanny and housekeeper Mina, a Catholic who had flouted Nazi edicts forbidding Gentiles from working as servants to Jews.

When they were reunited, Mina gave her a file that Ruth’s parents had passed on to her shortly before they were murdered, containing letters their children had sent them from around the globe, and copies of their replies. Ruth David later published this correspondence as a book, Life-lines (2011).

Among Ruth David’s friends was the eminent translator Anthea Bell, who drew on Ruth’s recollections for her masterwork, the translation of WG Sebald’s Austerlitz, about a refugee who came to Britain on the Kindertransport.

Ruth David married first, in 1958, Andrew Finch, a fellow teacher. The marriage was dissolved and in 1992 she married Herbert Aron David, who had also been a German-Jewish refugee and became Professor of Statistics at the University of Iowa. She moved to the US, but returned to Leicester after they separated.

Although latterly frail in body and mind, she continued to fulfil as many speaking commitments as possible. She is survived by the son and daughter of her first marriage.

Ruth David, born March 17 1929, died April 6 2020