HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR REMEMBERS THE HORRORS, PLEADS FOR PEACE

As a young woman, Marylou Ruhe struggled to stay alive in the Nazi death camps. For the Polish-born Ruhe, the horrors of war remain constant and painful memories.

Today, Ruhe is a freelance writer in St. Louis. She also works as a guide at the Holocaust Remembrance Museum there.

Ruhe recounted her war-time experiences during a lecture Wednesday at Southeast Missouri State University. The lecture was part of the school's noon-time Common Hour program in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Week.

The origins of World War II rest in the ashes of World War I, she said. Germany had to pay reparations to the Allies. They couldn't have an army. "They were humbled and humiliated," Ruhe said.

Adolf Hitler and other German leaders made Jews the scapegoat, she said.

Most Jews were well-to-do, educated and represented a religious minority. "It all started with burning books that had been written by Jewish writers," she said. "It just shows the mentality of racism."

Holocaust means "burning to death, sacrifice by fire," Ruhe said.

Hitler planned to wipe out the Jewish population. By war's end in 1945, the Nazis had killed about 6 million Jews or more than two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

The Nazis also killed Gypsies and other ethnic groups. In all, it is estimated the Nazis killed 11 million people.

Ruhe doesn't think the Holocaust would have happened had Hitler not come to power.

Ruhe grew up in Lodz, Poland, an industrial city of about 750,000, second only in size to Warsaw. The city was home to about 150,000 Jews.

For Ruhe, the nightmare began when Hitler's army invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Jews were arrested in the streets; businesses were confiscated by the Germans.

Ruhe's father was a Latin professor. Ruhe was an only child.

By April 30, 1940, the Germans had forced all of Lodz's Jews into the ghetto, a run-down area of the city. The ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire and German guards. Diseases spread quickly in the crowded ghetto. Her mother died in the ghetto.

She and her father lived in the ghetto for four years. Then the Nazis moved the Jews out of the ghetto and loaded them in boxcars "like so many cattle," she said.

They spent three days and three nights with little water and no food as the train made its way to the Auschwitz death camp. Ruhe was in her late teens then.

The Nazis separated the men and women. It was the last time she saw her father alive. She later learned that he died in October 1944 at the Dachau concentration camp.

She and the other women and girls were forced to parade nude in front of a team of doctors.

The elderly, sick and women with children were taken to the showers and killed with a legal gas. The bodies were then disposed of in a crematorium.

Ruhe and some of the healthier women were spared. Their heads were shaven and they were each given a simple dress. They were forced to live in crowded barracks. They survived on a daily ration of soup they ate out of tin cups.

All the Jews were numbered. "I had a military tag with a prisoner number on a string around my neck," she said.

Ruhe spent only a few weeks at Auschwitz before she and others were sent to a concentration camp in Germany. She ended up among the Jews who were forced to work 12 hours a day in a German munitions factory.

Ruhe said she and the other prisoners saw military aircraft and heard cannon fire in spring 1945. Allied bombing damaged the railroad line and the factory. With no food getting through, those in the labor camp had to survive on soup made of potato peels and rotten vegetables. Some women died of starvation.

On April 14, 1945, the starving prisoners crawled out of their beds and were greeted with silence. "The world stood still," she said. Suddenly, dark green tanks burst through the barbed wire. The American army had arrived to liberate the camp.

"We cried, laughed and screamed," she recalled.

Although they had been freed, there was no place to go. Eventually, British and American troops moved them to another part of Germany so they wouldn't fall into the hands of Russian troops.

Ruhe and other survivors ended up in a displaced-persons camp in Hanover, Germany. The man in charge of the camp, Stefan Ruhe, was a survivor too. She later married him.

But it took four years to secure the paperwork to leave the camp and begin a new life in the United States.

Marylou Ruhe said it is hard to forgive.

Last year she returned to Germany and Poland for the first time since the war.

Ruhe said she hopes the Holocaust is never repeated. "I think we should all strive for peace on Earth."