"I can tell you that once I quit a job and prior to taking up teaching at the university, I sat down with my mummy and together we wrote fifty documents containing the names of fifty of our relatives who hadn't survived war. It was for Yad Vashem - you know what that is. Most of them were killed either in Auschwitz or - as my grandpa from mummy's side - transported to Mauthausen. He was fourty-six years old."
"I remember it very well when it comes to kids. When you ask whether they bullied me for being a Jew, it was like this. Usually, everything was fine, I had a good standing in my class and felt good. But sometimes kids argue and when we did and it escalated, they would first say: 'you are stupid,' then they would say 'you are fat,' - because really, I was - and when this was said, they would call me a Jew. So this was the order of things - first the regular insults, then the personal ones, and finally that I am a Jew."
"Mummy heard about three or four families which were given a certificate allowing them to move out. So she said she'd like to go too. But my mummy was a housewife and she never had to deal with the authorities. My father said: 'Let me tell you something. I will go to the District Office of National Health and ask them whether they let me leave. If you want to, you visit all the other bureaus.' It took about nine or ten months during which mummy was going from one office to another. In spite of never dealing with them in the past, she managed it successfuly, we received the certificate and arrived to Israel."
"In Israel, it was all very different from Czechoslovakia, that's for sure. But I decided - perhaps that's a quality of mine - I decided that since I was already here, everything had to turn out alright. So I decided it would be alright."
Ruth Landau, née Goldbergerová, was born on 9 December 1946 in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. Her father was from a family of Slovak Jews which in the 1920s resettled to Transylvania, her mother was from a Romanian Jewish family. Both her parents were Holocaust survivors - her father was interned in a labor camp and her mother in Auschwitz. In 1948 the Goldbergers moved with their daughter Ruth to Sládkovičovo, Slovakia, where her father worked as a dentist. She attended elementary school and the first year of grammar school in the town of Galanta. In April 1961 the family moved to Israel, joining the sisters of Ruth’s mother. She graduated from grammar school there and then went on to study sociology and political science at a university. She worked as a social worker, got married and started a family. In the 1980s she and her husband spent several years in the USA where she continued in her studies and defended a doctoral thesis. At present, she teaches social work at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and works on her second dissertation about the Holocaust in Slovakia. Ruth lives in Tel Aviv.
