Writer and journalist Ruth Weiss dies at the age of 101

Ruth Weiss may have lived for more than a century, but has never fallen into injustice. The anger she felt in the inhumane she saw around her fueled her effort to continue writing challenging oppression during her long, walking life.

Weiss was a productive writer and journalist who testified to some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century, from Nazi Germany’s anti -Semitism to Apartheid South African racism.

“The simple opportunity took me close to Nuernberg in Johannesburg to escape the Holocaust and get confused through life in exile,” she wrote in her memoirs, A path through the hard grass. “Why this is the only permanent thing in my life: that I am a constant stranger.”

He has died at the age of 101, said Thomas Jung, mayor of Furth’s homeland on Friday.

“A little unwanted girl”

Ruth Loewenthal was born in 1924 in Furth, near Nuremberg, the daughter of Richard Loewenthal, a toymaker who became a shopkeeper and Selma (Née Cohen), who worked in the store with her husband.

A boy named Heinz was in Ruth’s sister’s class. Ruth’s best friend was named Leah. Heinz would eventually change his name to Henry and become the United States Foreign Minister – Henry Kissinger. Leah, meanwhile, will be deported to Poland and die in a gas chamber.

A “little unwanted girl in Hitler’s Germany”, “as she wrote, Ruth left with her Jewish family in South Africa in 1936. They arrived shortly before the government of Afrikaner stopped Jewish immigration, realizing that although the new ones had” the new ones “.

Apartheid will come to South Africa in 1948, but racial segregation, hatred and oppression of black people and ethnic minorities were already around it. One hour after Weiss’s mother, the baby of her new black housekeeper, four women Afrikaner fell to inform her that it was not the custom to touch black children.

Weiss found other German exiled and uniform liberals with whom she could sharpen her anger. She fell to journalism – initially ghostwriting articles on behalf of her much older husband, Hans Weiss, Africa’s correspondent on German newspapers, which she later broke up after his infidelity.

But she had found her call. Journalism fits in with its erotic mind and its innate ability to move in all areas of society and to inspire people to trust it. Her work followed the liberation movements of South Africa. The reference to its economic growth allowed it to expose rights violations, inequalities and sanctions.

Reported Persona Non Grata from South Africa and what was then southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), worked in London for The guardian. The long hours of work were a fight for her as a single mother of a young son, Alexander, her only child.

In the early 1970s he returned with him to Africa, this time to Zambia, worker for the Times of Zambia, and occasionally for the Bbc and Reuters.

Comrade Ruth

Returning to Germany, to work for the Deutsche Welle news agency in Cologne, faced it with anti -Semitism and the refusal still latent to post -war German society.

He moved to the recently independent Zimbabwe in 1982. It was where he joined the Zimbabwest Institute for South Africa, which brought with them black and white and white South Africans to illegal meetings and workshops to talk about a democratic future.

The Africans took her seriously despite her sex, she said. As a mature woman she was treated with the respect that was typically shown to the elderly in Epirus.

“How lucky I was to live through the turmoil in South Africa during the second half of the 20th century, to be present in some of the events during this turmoil and to meet many of the actors,” Weiss wrote with a typical modesty in her memoirs.

He met with Nelson Mandela in a kitchen of a friend over the soup before his prison in 1962. Zambia’s first president Kenneth Kaunda nourished her Comrade Ruth And she told her she was “Zambia in the Spirit”.

“The luck, the luck, the accident of the birth and the drama of history – they call it what you want – you have knitted her life in a pattern that belongs especially to our century, a part of social history,” wrote South African writer Nadine Gordimer, a friend of Weiss.

In 2005, Weiss was designated as a group of thousands of women for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee recognized women who work quietly and relentlessly for peace around the world.

“I was surprised at appointment,” Weiss wrote. “Moreover, the courageous women whose names I knew had served humanity had struggled for women’s rights and abuse, such as female circumcision, which caused a huge hassle of countless women, others were imprisoned.” It wasn’t worth the prize, he said.

In 2023, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa made her a companion of his class or tambo, a distinction awarded to prominent foreigners who have shown friendship in the country, for its contribution to the liberation struggle and to shine a light on injustice.

“I did what I could”

In her last decades she wrote fiction and children’s books, as well as her memoirs. This, as well as a new appetite in Germany to face the Nazi past and hear from her victims, made her a very sought -after speaker about the violence and violence she faced.

Gordimer described Weiss as a moderate, compassionate and generous – not for her the big houses and pools of some foreign correspondents and expatriates.

In the capital of Zambia Lusaka, “the apartment was too small for a dinner, but nice for a self -care buffet,” Weiss wrote. “I am involved in visitors: Ministers of Government, expatriates, members of the liberation of various countries, foreign and local journalists.

Weiss wondered if he should return to New South Africa, without apartheid. Eventually he felt that, as an old woman on her own, he would have to live behind security fences, an existence that could not be able to withstand. “But most importantly, I was too old to join the reconstruction it needed. This was a task for the young and intense,” he wrote.

Nobel’s candidacy described her as a war in her words. “I can’t claim that my pen was stronger than a sword, because in the context of the opposition of racism in all its forms, that would not be right,” he said in response. “I can only say. I did what I could, given my circumstances.”