Background
Ruth Altbeker Cyprys was born on May 28, 1910 to a Jewish family residing in Warsaw.
Ruth Altbeker Cyprys
Ruth Altbeker Cyprys graduated from the University of Warsaw.
Ruth Altbeker Cyprys graduated from the University of Warsaw.
(Recounts the experience of a Jewish woman in Poland, who ...)
Recounts the experience of a Jewish woman in Poland, who jumped from a train to save herself and her daughter from the Nazis, and their struggle to hide afterwards.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826410367/?tag=2022091-20
1997
lawyer teacher author governess
Ruth Altbeker Cyprys was born on May 28, 1910 to a Jewish family residing in Warsaw.
Ruth Altbeker Cyprys graduated from the University of Warsaw. she was taught German by her parents in childhood.
Ruth Altbeker Cyprys, one of the few women admitted to Warsaw's bar of the period, worked as a lawyer until the beginning of World War II.
Ruth Altbeker Cyprys moved to the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940 together with her young daughter, Ewa. Her husband who had been in eastern Poland was arrested by the Soviets and deported to Siberia. Expulsions of Jews from the ghetto began July 1, 1942. Ruth and Ewa managed to escape several selections but eventually were placed on a train to Treblinka.
By September 1942 Altbeker Cyprys knew the fate that awaited those being herded on to the trains for Treblinka. Her response was to acquire a pair of boots and a hacksaw blade. Daily she practiced sawing whatever metal objects she could find. In January 1943 Ruth and her daughter Eva, not yet two years old, were finally rounded up. As the train rattled its way toward the death camp, Ruth managed to cut through the bars. She jumped first - for fear, she writes, that her courage would fail her. Her child was thrown out after her into the snow. Their first night of freedom was spent in a freezing dog kennel.
After regaining consciousness and recovering her injured daughter, Ruth and Ewa returned to Warsaw. Ruth assumed the identity of Marianna Lukaszewska, an Aryan schoolteacher, and eventually gave Ewa to a farming family in Zakopane. Ruth often changed jobs and areas of employment in order to be able to hide her real identity in which Christian Poles helped her a lot. She, her husband Jerzy, and Ewa all survived the war.
After the war, Cyprys joined her parents and sister in Palestine. She was uncomfortable there, feeling that "being Jewish was like choosing to be persecuted, choosing death,". Together with her husband, she moved to South Africa, where their second daughter was born. But she was dissatisfied with the apartheid regime and eventually joined her brother in England. Ruth Altbeker Cyprys died on March 30, 1979, aged 68.
The manuscript of Cyprys' book written just after the war, was discovered by the author's daughter after her mother passed away.
(Recounts the experience of a Jewish woman in Poland, who ...)
1997Cyprys posed as a Catholic to conceal her Jewish identity during World War II.
Cyprys' exceptional powers of observation and memory, her phenomenal courage and tenacity, her remarkable ability to take breathtaking risks and make split-second decisions are the qualities that kept her and her daughter alive during the war.
Ruth Altbeker married Jerzy Jozue Cyprys on December 24, 1934. They had two daughters Ewa and Annabelle.
