SURVIVING SISTERS
Born in the village of Sinzenich, Germany, close to Cologne, Ilse and Ruth Scheuer were born three years apart. Ilse was the older sibling. They had a brother called Ernst.
The village was predominantly Catholic, although the Scheuers were devout Jews. The girls remembered how kind everybody was, with no evidence of prejudice.
Their parents were Jakob Scheuer, a kosher butcher who kept his own herd of cows, and Helene Daniel, a homemaker. Jakob had fought for Germany in the First World War and had won the Iron Cross.
After an idyllic childhood, things got worse for the family when the Nazis came to power, because they were Jewish. Ernst was sent to the Netherlands for his schooling.
Ilse and Ruth attended the village school which was run by nuns. They remembered in 1936, the crucifix was ordered to be taken down and replaced by a picture of Adolf Hitler.
In November 1938, Kristallnacht took place, and Jewish businesses were attacked. During the violence, Jakob was beaten up by the German police. He decided to move the family to the Netherlands, with the ultimate intention of emigrating to England.
It took months for the family to acquire all the necessary visas and permits, and they arrived in the Netherlands in September 1939.
Jakob had the foresight to send a trunk of family memorabilia and photographs, to a cousin in the USA, with the intention of picking them up at a later time.
As they arrived, the Second World War broke out. All immigration routes to England were closed. The Scheuer family were forced to stay in the Netherlands.
The Nazis invaded in May 1940. The family lost all their documents in the extensive Nazi bombing of Rotterdam on the 14th May 1940.
Jakob was immediately sent to Westerbork, a refugee / transit camp. Not wanting the family to be separated, the others chose to join him there.
They spent the next two years at Westerbork.
In January 1944, their brother Ernst was arrested for not raising his cap to a German officer. He was sent to the concentration camp, Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia.
Again, in an attempt to stay together, the rest of the family offered themselves up to the Nazis to join Ernst. It was Jakob showing his Iron Cross which got them on the train. Ilse was twenty and Ruth just seventeen.
The plan backfired. Within one month of arriving at Theresienstadt, the rest of the family were sent to Auschwitz. Ernst was left behind. He would die just a few days before the end of the war.
When they arrived at Auschwitz 2 (also called Birkenau), Jakob was immediately sent to the men’s camp.
The women were separated by SS guards. Ilse and Ruth’s mother, Helene, was taken off elsewhere and the girls never saw her again.
The group that the sisters were in was sub-divided into those who could work and those who could not. Everybody was told to strip. Ruth said, “I’m not going naked in front of the SS.”
Before they got to the front of the queue and were stripped, Ruth noticed the women on the left-hand side looked healthier than those on the right. She assumed they were the ones chosen for work.
Without being seen, Ruth grabbed her sister by the hand and joined the left-hand group. “We could have been shot right then – those were the chances you took to survive.”
Ruth’s job in Birkenau was to carry bricks for hours on end. Back breaking work. Although Ilse was occasionally assigned to join her sister, her main job was sewing gun covers and uniforms.
Ruth was working close to the crematory ovens. It was only when she saw mountains of shoes that she realised what was going on.
The girls did see their father once. He said to them, “You two are young. Maybe you will survive.” He gave them the address of his cousin in the USA and told them to contact him after the war.
Jakob then gave his daughters a traditional Hebrew blessing. “May God bless you and watch over you. May God shine his face towards you and show you favour.” He spoke to them with tears streaming down his face.
A few weeks later, the girls were transferred to Stutthof Concentration Camp in Poland, where they were forced to sleep out in the open.
Shortly after the girls left Birkenau, Jakob was gassed.
Ruth said later, “I didn’t know it at the time, but my father’s blessing would have to last a lifetime.”
The sisters were then moved to Praust camp, also in Poland. There, both were forced to shovel earth endlessly.
Ilse showed some kindness to a sick French prisoner. As a punishment she was horsewhipped on her naked back and then forced to stand for hours, at gunpoint, with her hands in the air, inches away from the electrified perimeter fence.
Ilse’s back gave her trouble for the rest of her life.
The following day, Ilse told Ruth she was too ill to work. Realising the consequences of not attending, Ruth forced Ilse onto the working party.
As well as her own quota, Ruth did all of Ilse’s work. “When the SS watched, Ilse would pretend to shovel.”
As the war came towards its end, the Proust camp was shut and the prisoners sent on a forced winter march to the Baltic Sea.
Just as they reached their destination, Russian troops appeared and the SS guards scattered. Ilse and Ruth were liberated. Out of the 800 prisoners who set out on the forced march, only 50 survived, including both Ilse and Ruth.
The sisters walked to a nearby farmhouse and knocked on the door, hoping for help. To their horror, the door was answered by SS officers who were hiding from the Russian Red Army. They were pulled inside. Captives once more.
They contemplated suicide that night. “We didn’t want to suffer anymore.”
To their astonishment, when the sisters woke up in the morning, the SS guards had vanished. When the girls left the farmhouse, they were assisted by Russian troops.
Both of them weighed just 80 pounds. Ilse also had both typhoid and typhus. Ruth was suffering injuries from a severe beating from an SS guard. The Russians took them both to one of their own hospitals.
As the girls recovered, they were told they were now Russian prisoners. One night, they left the hospital and escaped, heading back to Germany.
Eventually, they were rescued by the Dutch army.
Reaching the Netherlands, the girls boarded a train but realised they had no money or papers. They lifted their sleeves to show the ticket collector their concentration camp tattoos. He said, “That is your train fare.”
In Utrecht, they were amazed to find their aunt and uncle (their mother’s siblings) had survived the war by staying hidden for the whole of the occupation. Ruth, and other family members, nursed Ilse back to health.
In 1946, the sisters set off to find their father’s cousin in the USA. They located him in Mobile, Alabama. The girls applied for American residency.
They took jobs in a glove factory and attended night classes to learn English. They watched as many movies as they could to help them pick up the language.
Both girls met and married fellow Holocaust survivors in 1949. Ilse married Walter Nathan and lived in Birmingham, Alabama, whilst Ruth married Walter Siegler. They stayed in Mobile.
Ruth had three children, Dan, Steven and Annette, whilst Ilse had two daughters, Sharon and Diana.
The sisters would phone each other every day and talk – primarily in German.
In 1951, after a court hearing, Ilse and Ruth were given naturalised American status. Ilse told the Birmingham News, “God helped me come to this country. Every morning when I awake, I can’t believe that I’m here.”
Ruth immediately started bearing witness to the Holocaust. She gave talks to schools, churches and other community groups. She did this for the rest of her life. Ilse only joined her for the talks in later years.
Ilse and Walter Nathan began their own clothing store in Homewood, near Birmingham, known as ‘Penny Palmer’.
In 1968, Ruth’s husband Walter (Siegler), a clothing salesman, died. Ruth immediately moved to Birmingham to be close to Ilse. She started working in her sister’s store as a saleswoman.
In 1986, Ilse’s business closed down. Ruth went to work selling shoes in the Gus Mayer Department Store.
Shortly afterwards, Ilse’s husband, Walter (Nathan), also died.
Both widows, the sisters spent more and more time together. They shopped together, went to the temple together and holidayed together. They became almost inseparable.
In 2007, the sisters went back to to their village of their birth, Sinzenich in Germany. There, they walked past their old house, visited the school and met up with some of their old friends.
In 2011, Ruth published her memoir. It was called, ‘My Father’s Blessing: A Story of Survival and Triumph’. The dedication at the front read, ‘To my children and grandchildren, so the suffering I endured, along with millions of others, will never be forgotten.”
Ruth said, “I have all these memories…I remember everything.”
She also said of the Holocaust, “You have to keep it alive. Prejudice is sad. It’s a bad thing. It can happen again.”
Both sisters, credited each other with their survival. Sharon, Ilse’s daughter said, “If I talked to my mother she would say ‘I never would have made it without my sister’, and if I talk to my aunt, she would say ‘I never would have made it without your mother.”
Ilse’s other daughter, Diana, predeceased her.
Ilse died in Alabama aged 98. Ruth was too ill to attend her sister’s funeral, so she watched it on the computer.
Ten days later, Ruth also died.
A friend said, “They were always together. When Ilse died, I think Ruth was ready.”
Dan, Ruth’s son said, “Aunt Ilse’s passing made my mother ready to go. She had a will to live but she was tired.”
Ilse’s words were read at both funerals. “I always say, have faith and hope. We leaned on each other and prayed together.”
RIP – Ruth (&) Ilse, Persevere
