Ruth was born in Hrubieszow ans was called then Regia Hodes.”

“…I didn’t have any particular problems, and it was all thanks to my Christian teacher and mentor, Mr. Schidlovsky. I owe a great debt to that teacher who risked his life for me when he volunteered and promised my father to take me under his protection when the Germans broke into and occupied the city.

Mr. Schidlovsky assumed full responsibility for my day-to-day upbringing and education, despite all the risks involved. To this day, I still hear his words from that day when he came to my father and offered to take me with him: ‘It would be such a shame for a talented girl to stop studying…’ And so, I went to live in his house.

Even though, in my childish foolishness, I ran away from him twice and the second time I never returned. I eventually joined the Bitkova Jews, for I had learned that my dear parents, along with my brother, had been taken in the final Aktion and brutally murdered. I saw no point in continuing to fight in secret…”

…”In this place stands, alone (at the cemetery gate), a skinny little girl, hiding behind wild plants, peering in fear and witnessing, witnessing the enormous mass graves, humorously nicknamed ‘bathtubs’ by the gravediggers. I saw the entire Aktion, saw the horrors during the massacre of men, women, and children.

It was winter, with pure white snow. Along the entire path from the cemetery, there were trails of human blood,Jewish blood, the blood of innocent, tender children. And I saw these horrors, they slowly rise in my memory, accompanied by suffering and agony, and now again I feel the terrible pain that chokes my throat just as it did then…”

Over the years, after many years of repressing the horrific events she experienced, Ruth began sculpting and painting her memories of the Holocaust.