At first, I didn’t know what to say. The woman in front of me could have been someone I brushed past at the pharmacy or supermarket: long hair streaked with silver, pulled back without fuss. Her face was lined with a lived life. Then the silver cross at her collarbone caught the light, and my attention, before I looked back into her gaze. My heart picked up the tempo.
She asked again, apologetically. This time, I didn’t hesitate. But was that forgiveness really mine to give? Or should it have belonged to my grandmother, Ruti?
Hours earlier, I had been in Poland. It was the last day of the Australian March of the Living program, and I had taken off to board a plane to Stuttgart, Germany, where a tall man named Thorsten was waiting to drive me an hour to a small German village, Geislingen.
Geislingen. Until late 2024, it had been nothing more than a tiny dot on a map. I first heard the name in my grandmother Ruti’s Holocaust testimony – whispered, almost swallowed – a recording I had never known existed, made in 2014, two years before she passed away. I stumbled across it by accident in 2020, while compiling a family tree. There on the screen, she was as polished and composed as ever, but her skin was sallow, her eyes colourless. Her voice was crackly with age as she spoke of her life – details there, but disjointed. It took me four years to piece her story together, and four years to realise that Geislingen wasn’t a Yiddish-like word. It was a place. A concentration camp.
For my family, it was a shocking discovery. Growing up, Ruti spoke of those years rarely, and when she did, it was in glimpses. We knew she had grown up in Sighet, a small town in Maramureș County; that in 1944 the Hungarian Nazis deported her family to Auschwitz; and that, on arrival as a thirteen-year-old, she assumed a false identity to appear older, fit for work, spared from the gas chambers. But never once did she mention Geislingen, nor that she had been selected on the Appelplatz in Auschwitz to be sent to another camp.
I threw myself into research, a familiar pursuit, because after uncovering Ruti’s testimony, alongside my grandfather Mordechai’s, I resolved to write their survival stories into a book. Tracking every detail became a necessity. And here it was: the missing piece in her story.
A quick Google search led me to the Geislingen Concentration Camp Memorial website. I contacted the team immediately and heard back from two kind German Christian women, Rosemary and Eva, who lived in Geislingen. They welcomed me like kin. Together, we tried to piece together Ruti’s hidden story: every second of her time there had been dominated by hostile, violent female SS officers. The hunger. The cold. The disease. The torture. The sheer, precarious chance of survival. Ruti was one of hundreds of Jewish women forced to work twelve-hour days in the WMF factory, once famed for luxury cutlery, now retooled to churn out munitions for the Nazi war machine.
Even after weeks of correspondence, still, I could hardly believe the memorial foundation was run by two Christian women. Not Jews. I had assumed, naively, that all memorials would be run only by our own people. Even more astonishing was the work Rosemary and Eva had put into remembering and honouring those women, as well as educating the community to ensure ‘never again’.
In 2015, together with survivors and their families, they unveiled a memorial site on the very street where the Geislingen camp once stood: steel posts with barbed wire stretched across panels of the original fence, and two pairs of wooden clogs fastened to the ground, the same kind Ruti had worn, tearing her skin and leaving her with infectious boils. They also unveiled a golden stumbling stone outside the still-standing WMF building, honouring the women who had marched through the village every day for work. Nearby, a memorial wall listed the names of every Jewish woman on the deportation roll in April 1945, when the camp was liquidated and the women forced onto a train to Allach, a subcamp of Dachau in Munich. Ruti’s birth name was not among them.
Many of the women who attended the unveiling had recorded their testimonies; some had even retold their stories in published books. Studying their voices closely over six months, and reaching out to some of their families, the fragments in Ruti’s own testimony began to make sense. I gained a clearer understanding of what she went through and could finally thread it into my own book.
When I told Rosemary and Eva I’d be joining the March of the Living in Poland in April 2025 to witness the atrocities for myself, they wrote back almost immediately.
“You must come to Geislingen. We are holding a two-day commemoration for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the 800 women from Geislingen concentration camp. You must come as our special visitor!” their email read. The details followed: we would meet the Mayor, visit the WMF factory, and spend time with other survivors’ families. The next day, I would honour Ruti by telling her story to secondary students at the local school.
At first, the timing felt like a coincidence. It wasn’t. It was God’s design.
The memorial event had already begun when I arrived in Germany. Eva arranged for her husband, Thorsten, to drive me straight to the Mayor’s office where he spoke of his commitment to educating his community about tolerance, moral responsibility, prejudice and discrimination. Afterwards a photo was snapped outside, and I met the four other families of survivors and various members of the foundation. Though we hugged and cried, I felt the weight of that moment, that Ruti had been in the camp alongside their mothers and grandmothers.
We continued through the village, turning onto the street where the concentration camp had once stood. Houses loomed behind the memorial and the wooden clogs fixed to the ground. Neighbours hung out their laundry above soil that still held its dark memory. We walked on to the WMF factory grounds, which were enormous. I felt disbelief staring at the space where Ruti had endured those unimaginable shifts, just thirteen, doing the work of adult men under conditions no human should ever face. Now, the grounds were filled with employees going about their day, perhaps unaware of its previous history.
WMF acknowledged the part they had played during the war by constructing the wall of names outside their building for all to see. Just as I was about to press my nose to the steel and read each name, Rosemary and Eva said they had something to show me. It was an extraordinary act of kindness: Ruti’s name etched into the memorial wall, Ruti Mendelovits, replacing the false identity we had never known. I FaceTimed my parents. They were as emotional as I was, equally unsure how to process it. It felt comforting to share that quiet, powerful moment of connection across time and distance, even though I was so far away on my own.
That evening, in the WMF event hall, I sat among survivors’ families and 400 residents of Geislingen, watching a memorial I could never have imagined. Speeches about reconciliation and remembrance. Poetry by local students. A story from a survivor’s grandchild. The church choir performed Jewish and Yiddish songs, all a moving tribute to the 800 Jewish women. Afterwards, drinks and nibbles were shared in the foyer. Many people approached me with kind words of resolution and acknowledgement, some asked about how I felt with the rising antisemitism in Australia they had seen on the news. The parallels between what had happened eight decades ago and what was unfolding now in my home country overwhelmed me. I needed a break, stepped back into the empty hall, and allowed myself a quiet, necessary cry in the corner.
All the things I had prepared myself mentally and emotionally for before the trip hit me at once. I was a young woman in an unfamiliar, remote German town and everyone was a stranger. I walked through streets that seemed ordinary, yet I knew they once carried the weight of Jewish suffering. I felt guilt for “going back there”, wondering if Ruti herself, were she alive, would have wanted me to. I was afraid of the people mingling in the foyer, but most of all, about meeting the older residents of the town. Perhaps eighty years earlier they had peered through gaps in their curtains to watch the unusual sight of hundreds of women in striped prisoner dresses and wooden clogs clattering along the stone paths to work.
Yet, what I hadn’t prepared myself for at all was the scenario in which someone might approach me and ask for forgiveness for their family’s involvement in the Holocaust. For what happened to Ruti.
Then, there I was, speechless when the older woman asked me that question. Time had stopped, and the woman noticed.
“I’m so sorry, Esther. This is your night, I shouldn’t have asked,” she gently said apologetically, taking a few steps back. I asked her to wait.
“It’s okay. We can talk. What’s your name?” She told me her name was biblical.
“Do you mind if I ask what your family did?” I tried not to sound like I was prying, because she seemed embarrassed and I felt a pang of sympathy.
“I don’t know exactly, but I know they were Nazis,” she said, pausing, nodding knowingly. “They kept what they did a secret from me, but I know they took part.” She then briefly told me that after the war, many kept quiet to avoid prosecution. Her family never uttered a word.
I told her she had my forgiveness, even though in my mind I knew it wasn’t really mine to give. I explained to her that she couldn’t be blamed for the past, though I could see she still bore its weight. Now, she might move forward with a clearer conscience. We leaned into a hug and she let out a tiny cry into my shoulder just as others began to approach.
That night, after I’d locked the hotel room door, I stood at the window, staring at the village clock and replaying that moment in my head. Forgiveness, I realised, is never simple. Yet it is essential. In that quiet, almost ordinary exchange with the German woman – decades after unimaginable Jewish suffering – I saw the courage it takes to face the past, and the quiet grace it takes to let it go.
Rosemary and Eva, along with so many others in Geislingen, have spent their lives remembering the lost, honouring the survivors, and building bridges of understanding. Their tireless work with preserving history, fostering reconciliation, educating generations, is a living testament to tikkun olam, repairing the world. Rosh Hashana asks the same of us. We should look inward and acknowledge our mistakes, seek forgiveness from those we have wronged, and to grant it to those who ask. Carrying the weight of that small act of reconciliation, I realised that in the new year we are all called to carry compassion, responsibility and hope, healing our own hearts, and, in turn, the world around us.
