Episode Details

Ruta's Closet tells the compelling Holocaust story of a Jewish family, imprisoned in the tiny Shavl ghetto in Lithuania, during World War II, written by journalist Keith Morgan. We are familiar with many of the great Jewish communities of the pre-war years and of their fate when they were turned into ghettos and became the scenes of mass murder and deportation. One such place that is less familiar is the Lithuanian town of Siauliai, known in Yiddish as Shavl. The few survivors of that once vibrant Jewish community have often expressed to me their sadness that it does not figure as prominently as it ought in most accounts of the Holocaust. This book redresses that balance.“The origins of Ruta's Closet trace back to 1997 when I wrote a newspaper column in Vancouver's Province about Holocaust survivor Ruth Kron Sigal, now deceased,” says Morgan.  “In my long newspaper career, I’d covered many chilling true-life crimes but her story was the most remarkable I had heard.”It is the true story of how Ruth's family sought to escape the deadly clutches of Hitler's Final Solution in Lithuania. Her parents’ determination to survive grew stronger as members of their Jewish family and good friends died at the hands of the Nazis and marauding armed collaborators.This important book records chilling accounts of mass murders, a cruel Nazi ban on births, forced attendance by young and old at a public hanging, the saving of a ruthless SS officer by a Jewish doctor and the transport of hundreds of ghetto children to their deaths in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz Death Camp. Such events will horrify readers but the bravery shown by the family and their neighbors make it a compelling read -- as intriguing as it is inspirational. While the narrative is fact-based, it reads like fiction, making it accessible to all generations of readers. 

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