Balint, Ruth (1926-2000): Family correspondence

Papers of Ruth Balint, 1938-1944, comprising correspondence from her family, dealing in the main with family matters but also organisational arrangements for emigration from Nazi Germany and a number of poems by Ruth's father.

Ruth Balint (nèe Neumann) was born in Berlin in 1926. She was sent to school in Schöneiche, Brandenburg, where she was one of very few Jewish children. In 1938 she was sent to a Jewish school in Berlin. Shortly after her father's return from 3 months in a concentration camp, in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, he wrote to a relative in Newcastle, Kurt Banski, a furniture maker, with regard to looking after Ruth. Ruth came to England circa July 1939 on the Kindertransport. She spent the following 5 years with an English Methodist family in Kendall, Lake District. She remained in contact with the family for the rest of their lives. Ruth died in 2000.

During the war years Ruth received the letters in this collection from her parents, who were eventually deported to Warsaw, then Treblinka in 1942 and grandparents to Theresienstadt in the same year. The only indication of concern about their predicament, which Ruth discerned in the letters after a re-reading of them many years later, was the occasional enquiry regarding news of relatives who had managed to flee to South America, and who had promised to help them also to emigrate.

Chronological

Open

Received from the family

Description exists to this archive on the Wiener Library's online catalogue www.wienerlibrary.co.uk

Copies can be made for personal use. Permission must be sought for publication.

Balint, Ruth Es f?llt mir schwer, mein Leben einfach so zu geniessen Unpublished memoir.