For years, Ruth has been speaking to organizations, schools, churches and synagogues about the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism and horrific, evil abuses of power.

by Sue Ann Rybak

One of Ruth Kapp Hartz’ earliest childhood memories is of her older cousin Jeannette warning her not to use her own name in Nazi-occupied France in 1941. “Remember,” her cousin warned her, “your name is Renee, and you are French!”

In a recent telephone interview, the former Springside Chestnut Hill Academy French teacher (for 22 years) recalled her time as a hidden child of the Holocaust. The Jenkintown resident said that when war broke out, her parents, Benno and Elisabeth Kapp, were sent to a refugee camp, and her father joined the French Foreign Legion to protect his family from being arrested as Germans.

As German Jews, the Kapps were the main targets of France’s Nazi-allied wartime leader Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain, who was the President of the Vichy State Government of France. “France was the only Allied nation to sign the treaty with Adolf Hitler,” said Hartz, 80. “Petain had a Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, who was a virulent anti-Semite and staunch collaborationist. He handed over Jewish children that the Nazis had not asked for!

“The Gestapo was everywhere, and France set up 250 camps on the soil of France, and all were patrolled by French police, so it was extremely dangerous out in the open. All the Jews had to wear the yellow star, and ID cards were stamped with the letter J for Jew. If you didn’t do that, you were almost guaranteed to be arrested. That doesn’t mean everybody died, but a lot of them did.

“The name of my memoir is ‘Your name is Renee’ because an older cousin gave me a different name. I had a different first name, a different last name and a different address. My cousin Jeannette told me, ‘Don’t make any friends because it’s just too dangerous,’ and that’s all I knew. In my mind, no one was trustworthy; everyone lied.

“Unlike Anne Frank in ‘The Diary of a Young Girl,’ who remembered her childhood, I came of age during the war. I thought that was the way of the world. You couldn’t reveal anything about yourself. You couldn’t make any friends. You lived in small, narrow, dark places in total silence, because if you spoke up, the slightest noise could give you away. That’s the premise under which I lived.

“Like many hidden children of the Holocaust, I grew up in total ignorance of the war years. My parents, having suffered so much mental stress as a result of having their families obliterated, did not wish to discuss this painful subject with me. (Hartz’ father’s entire family — his mother, two sisters, a nephew, aunts, uncles and cousins all perished in the Holocaust.) History books in France after the war barely mentioned the Holocaust and the shameful collaboration of the French Vichy government with the Nazis.”

Hartz said writing the book with her former student, Stacy Cretzmeyer, a SCH alumna, allowed her to “face ghosts of her childhood.” In her memoir, “Your Name is Renee,” Hartz said, “After liberation Day, Papa told me that we were safe now, but I wasn’t even sure what that meant, or how to behave. I could not remember a time in my life when we were not hiding.”

Hartz said she and other Jewish children and their families were saved by the “actions of the righteous,” ordinary people in the south of France who risked everything to save the life of a stranger. “They are the unsung heroes of World War II,” she said.

People like Monsieur Lambert, a French civil servant who ran to inform the Kapp family about the roundup on Aug. 26, 1942. Ruth was just five years old at the time. In the book, she recalls laughing at her parents as they ran to catch a train before just barely escaping with their lives.

“I start laughing,” she writes in the book. “I have never seen my parents run before, and they are carrying heavy bags which weigh them down. “Hush, Ruth!” Maman says … Maman and I look for Uncle Heinrich one last time, through smeared windows. He’s still not here. There is no one… and I know Uncle Heinrich will be swallowed up in the dark. Maman and Papa just look at each other, saying nothing. If they talk about it, people around us will know we are Jewish, that we are running away.

“There is a lot of evil in the world, but they were the righteous,” Hartz said, referring to ordinary French families like the Fedous and the Valats, who helped hide her family during the war. “In fact, they were recognized by the Israeli Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem as righteous among nations.”

As the raids increased and the danger grew, Hartz and a few of her Jewish friends were placed in a Catholic orphanage in Soreze, near Castres in France. The only one who knew the children were Jewish was the Mother Superior. Hartz recalled one afternoon when Mother Superior came and quickly gathered the seven Jewish children and led them to a cellar chapel directly beneath the main chapel.

TO BE CONTINUED