By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Ruth and Carl Kline, photographed in their Louisville home (photo by Andrew Adler)
On the evening of Monday, April 13, Louisville’s Jewish community will mark Yom HaShoah with ceremonies at Congregation Adath Jeshurun. The remembrance will include remarks by Holocaust survivor Ruth Kline, whose family emigrated from Germany to China just weeks before World War II began in September 1939. The family’s archives now reside in Washington, D.C.’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Sponsored by distant relatives in Kentucky, Ruth Kline, her brother and parents immigrated to Louisville in 1947. Recently I had the honor and pleasure of speaking with Ruth and her husband of nearly 70 years, Carl Kline, at their Louisville home. What you see below is the story of a woman who has not merely survived, but has flourished.
It was 87 years ago – the summer of 1939, to be precise – when 2-year-old Ruth Charnitzki left her small town in Germany for a destination on the other side of the world: Shanghai.
Despite being under Japanese occupation, China’s second largest city was a haven for Jews seeking refuge from Nazi persecution. America had largely closed its doors to Jewish immigration, and countries like England and Switzerland could absorb only a trickle of displaced persons. A modest proportion of European Jewry had made its way to British Mandate Palestine, but for most German Jews, that was an unattainable goal.
Little Ruth, however, was luckier than most. Months earlier her father had travelled to Shanghai, bearing memories of his arrest on Kristallnacht the year before and a determination to save his family from imminent catastrophe. His advance arrangements allowed Ruth, her brother and their mother to escape Germany just weeks before the Nazi regime closed the nation’s borders and set the Holocaust in murderous motion.
Her mother had grown up in Alt Ukta, a small village in what was then East Prussia and is now northern Poland. Her father lived nearby. “My mother was 35 and my father was 30 when they had a matchmaker make a match because there were no Jewish families,” present-day Ruth Kline recalled.
Her father made a living working in the wool goods business; her mother’s family owned a property that functioned as a kind of bed and breakfast. It was a peculiar reality being the only Jewish family in the village, which numbered about 600, mostly Protestants. But neighbors helped one another – including the day Ruth was born in the family home.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the village’s relative isolation shielded it from the initial excesses of Nazism. That changed on Nov. 9, 1938 amid the terror of Kristallnacht. A yellow Star of David was painted on their home’s front door, with Ruth’s father released from jail on the condition that he “get out of the country immediately,” she said.
Various of Kline’s relatives had already begun to disperse. Her mother’s sister secured a visa enabling the sister, her husband and their two children to travel to England. Her mother’s brother made his way to Argentina.
Kline’s parents faced obstacle after obstacle. America – a haven for so many European immigrants – had strict quotas that prevented most Jews from entering the country. As door after door was closed, Shanghai – which didn’t mandate entry visas until August 1939, evolved as a prime destination for Jews fleeing Germany.
With Ruth Kline’s father as the family’s advance man – Ruth, her brother and mother joined the close to 20,000 European Jews who built a new life in China’s second-largest city. The vast majority lived in what was essentially a Jewish ghetto, jammed into an area of approximately two square miles.
Still, as a small child who had scant memories of her former life, Ruth quickly adapted to her new normality. “I didn’t feel like I went through anything,” she says now. “It was my parents who went through it. When you have the love of a family, a mother and father who protect you, you don’t know what you’re missing.”
Two years old when she arrived in Shanghai, Ruth says it wasn’t until she was six that began to make sense of her unusual circumstances. She recalls walking to the English-language school she attended alongside her brother and neighboring children, threading their way among people living – and dying – in the unkept streets.
“The poverty was unreal,” she says. “The Japanese were horrible to the Chinese.” Her parents found work outside the Jewish ghetto, with permits required for them to go to and from the single room they called home. She told of a Japanese administrator named Goya, a slightly built fellow whose idea of recreation was to tease and torment the Jewish residents waiting on long lines to obtain the necessary paperwork.
“You never knew what he was going to do,” she says, “whether he was going to hit you with a whip, or one person in front.” One time “I was with my father and there was one person ahead of us – an older gentleman who wore very heavy, very thick glasses. Goya didn’t like his looks, so he knocked his glasses off. I remember that vividly.”
Hardscrabble as was her family’s existence in Shanghai, they were better off than many of their fellow refugees. “We were the lucky ones,” Ruth says, “because we got a room to ourselves. There was a mass kitchen where you could get food, and a mass bathroom, but my parents wouldn’t let me use it because there was so much disease and filth – diphtheria and typhoid.”
In that single room there was no electricity, only a solitary window. “I remember my mother, when air raids came and the sirens would go off, she had this thing she’d hang in front of the window, and then we sat in a corner. My father had me on his lap, and he’d put his arms around me while these bombs were exploding all around us, and you never knew if we were going to be hit” – even though the ghetto was on the Allies’ official “no bombing” list.
There were additional horrors – some abstract, others all too real. Toward the end of the war, “one of Hitler’s Gestapo commanders came to Shanghai,” Kline said, explaining that “he wanted to get rid of those 20,000 Jews. There were two plans on how to get rid of us. One plan was to build a gas chamber right next to the ghetto, but the Japanese said ‘no.’ The other plan was to put us all on ships without food or water, and put us out to sea, That could have been it for us had the war lasted a little longer.”
Meanwhile, some 5,000 miles away, the Holocaust was decimating European Jewry.
In the Shanghai ghetto “there was a bulletin board that every afternoon would post names in messages from Germany,” Kline says. “ ‘This one was killed in Auschwitz; this one was killed in Dachau; this one in Theresienstadt. And this one made it out.’ So everybody would rush to this wall and would look to see if they knew anybody’s name. That’s how my parents found out that nobody in my family (who’d remained in Germany) had survived.”
Kline’s grandmother, who’d refused to leave her home behind, perished in Auschwitz. An aunt was sent to a labor camp – the SS took her children, ages 1 and 2, “and shot them in front of her,” Kline says. “It would have been better if they’d shot her at the same time. Can you imagine?
“My mother was never the same after that,” Kline recalled. “She always felt like, ‘Why didn’t they come with us?’”
Indeed, “close to a million children were killed during the Holocaust,” said Carl Kline, Ruth’s husband. “When we went to the Holocaust Museum, I was walking through the halls thinking, ‘You know what? That could have been Ruth. That could have been her parents and my brother-in-law, had they not been brave enough to find Shanghai.”
Besides the presentation by Ruth Kline, the 6:30 p.m., April 13 Yom HaShoah program at AJ will include contributions from area students, the lighting of 11 Memorial Candles, plus remarks from Luis David Fuentes – Publisher of El Kentubano and Vice President of the Cuban American Association of Kentucky.
There will also be music from bassoonist Matthew Karr, flutist Kathy Karr, and the Floyd Central High School Orchestra. AJ Cantor David Lipp will chant El Maleh Rachamim (a traditional prayer for the souls of the departed), a special Yom HaShoah Mourner’s Kaddish led by local rabbis, and the singing of Hatikvah led by KI Cantor Sharon Hordes.
Register for this event at jewishlouisville.org/yh2026.