Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz (1929–2009) was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her father, Isak, ran a store, and her mother, Hanna, raised Ruth and her younger brother, Wolfgang. Ruth’s family faced intensifying anti-Jewish measures after Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. Isak’s business was taken over, and Ruth’s Jewish school was later closed. In April 1943, the family was deported to Auschwitz. Ruth, Hanna, and Wolfgang were separated from Isak. At one point, Ruth became ill and barely survived being sent to a gas chamber during a selection in the camp. In November 1944, Ruth and Hanna were taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. They were housed in a tent camp for several weeks. From there, they were transferred to the Malchow subcamp, where they worked in a munitions factory. Ruth was liberated from a death march in May 1945. Ruth and Hanna reunited with Wolfgang, but Isak did not survive.
The crematorium was just a uh few minutes away. We could see the chimneys from uh...uh wherever we were and of course we could smell the uh first the gas when it was left...let out from uh the gas chambers, and, and then we could smell the burning of the bodies, the human flesh burning. And then they cleared the grates and we could hear the grates uh being cleaned, and it's similar to what your own oven would be like when you move the grates around except in a much, it was much noisier that we could hear it all the way in the barracks. And, uh, to this day when I clean my own oven, I am reminded of that noise of the cleaning of the grates in the crematorium.
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