Ruth Rack looking at photos

Holocaust survivor helped by nuns to honour parents

Child Holocaust survivor Ruth Rack is full of praise for the “lovely nuns” who helped her fulfil a long-held quest to pay tribute to her parents, who were murdered by the Nazis.

Sydney-based Ruth, 88, had been searching fruitlessly for information about an art project called Stolpersteine in which cobblestones carved with biographical details of Holocaust victims are installed in footpaths across Europe. Ruth passionately wanted to commemorate her parents but had been unable to find out how to get in touch with the project organisers from her home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

German artist Gunter Demnig began the project in 1996, installing the first 55 “stumbling stones” in Berlin to allow passing pedestrians to reflect on the individual lives wiped out in Nazi Germany. In what has become the largest decentralised monument in the world, there are now more than 60,000 Stolpersteine installed in 1400 locations in 22 European countries.

“It was something I had been looking for. I knew it was around but I didn’t know how to contact it or how to do it and the lovely nuns helped me,” she tells Eternity.

Ruth met two sisters from the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary after performing a solo at a senior citizens concert at Chatswood Synagogue in 2014. Ruth is a singer with Emanuel Synagogue Church in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra.

Read the full article by Anne Lim at Eternity.