Ruth Scheuer Siegler (1927–2022)

Ruth Scheuer and her older sister Ilse were born to a Jewish family in the small town of Sinzenich, Germany, near Cologne. Their father Jakob Scheuer raised cattle and was a kosher butcher, and their mother Helene was a homemaker. The family fled to the Netherlands in August 1939, following the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht. However, after the start of World War II a month later, and the Nazi occupation of the country in May 1940, further emigration became impossible. In 1942, Mr. Scheuer was seized and sent to the notorious transit camp at Westerbork. His wife and children joined him there to avoid being separated. Two years later, they were deported to the labor camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia before being sent on to the death camp at Birkenau, in the Auschwitz complex. Ruth and Ilse were selected for forced labor but their mother was killed. They saw their father once, when he gave them a blessing and the address of a cousin in the USA. The sisters were sent to concentration camps at Stutthof and Praust, Poland. Ruth and Ilse had always had a deep bond, and they helped each other survive under the harshest conditions. In February 1945, near the end of the war, they and 800 other female prisoners were sent on a death march eastward as the Red Army approached. In mid-March, the Nazi guards abandoned the group and the small number of survivors were liberated. Ruth and Ilse recovered in Poland and returned to Holland for a year before emigrating to the USA. In 1949, Ruth married Walter Siegler, a fellow Holocaust survivor, in St. Joseph, Missouri. In 1960, the Sieglers moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where the two sisters spent the rest of their lives together with their families. Mrs. Siegler and her husband had three children. After his untimely death, she went to work as a saleswoman for her sister and brother-in-law at their clothing store. Both sisters were active in Holocaust education for decades, speaking to school and community groups. Mrs. Siegler wrote a memoir, My Father’s Blessing: A Story of Survival and Triumph, published in 2011. She died at age 95, 10 days after the loss of her sister Ilse Scheuer Nathan.