To Hell and back

Second of two parts.

Ruth Mermelstein, 84, has been a member of the East Meadow Jewish Center since she moved to the hamlet in 1955. She and her husband, Sidney Mermelstein, moved to North Bellmore 13 years later, where they raised two children, and have lived there ever since.

Ruth is a Holocaust survivor. Born in Transylvania, in northern Romania, in 1929, she was the second oldest of Blanka Davidovitz and Moritz Genuth’s six children.

Retelling her story at the Jewish Center last month, just a few days before Yom HaShoah, Mermelstein recounted the hardships that she and her family encountered during World War II. As a young girl, she was taken away from her home and incarcerated in three concentration camps with her older sister, Elisabeth, including Auschwitz, where she was constantly surrounded by death, sickness, starvation and torture. After stepping off a cattle car in Auschwitz in 1944, she never saw her family again, except for Elisabeth.

The emotion was clear in her eyes as she relived the experience, remembering parents and siblings she has not seen in 70 years. “I’m happy to be alive,” Mermelstein said, “even though I miss my family.”

A new identity
   
Growing up in the town of Sighet in northern Romania, Mermelstein, then Ruth Genuth, was happy. In 1940 she was 10, Elisabeth was 12, and a brother, Imre, was two years her junior. She also had two younger sisters. “My mother and father, they treasured us very much,” she said. “They wanted to have even more children. We had a nice life.”