Ruth Margot Stein was born in Posen/ Poznan on December 3, 1905 as the daughter of the merchant Hugo Kantorowicz and his wife Betty, née Lissauer. Her mother came from Lübeck. Initially, Ruth grew up well protected with two younger siblings with her parents in Posen and attended the “Below-Knothesche Lyzeum” till class 4. In the first year of World War I, the family moved to Berlin. There Ruth attended Augustaschule, a secondary school for girls, and later Fürst-Bismarck-Schule where she graduated with her “Abitur” in 1925. She seems to have been a rather confident person who was appreciated by her classmates. She wrote a song for the celebration of their Abitur in which she makes fun of their teachers with a good sense of humor.

In March 1928, Ruth married Dr. Fritz Stein, the son of the owner and general manager of the firm “Basaltstein GmbH Schweinfurt”, which several basalt works and quarries in the Rhön hills and in Switzerland belonged to.

After the marriage, the young couple moved to Bad Kissingen in May 1928 and lived in “Villa Julia” in Schönbornstrasse 19 there. Then the Steins moved to Schweinfurt into the stately residence of Ruth’s parents-in-law in Schultestrasse. In August 1929, their first son Ernst Wolfgang was born there. In the summer months of 1930 and 1931, the young couple was again registered in Villa Julia from May to September or August respectively. The reasons for this stay in the Franconian spa are not known. In the registration files can only be found that Fritz Stein lived with his wife and child in Bad Kissingen but went to his firm in Schweinfurt every day.

Since Autumn 1931, the family lived in Schweinfurt for the whole year. In 1931 and 1935, the younger sons Heinz Thomas and Uriel Adolf Michael were born there. After the death of Adolf Stein in 1932, Ruth’s husband and his brother Jakob took on the management of the firm as directors. Max Stein, their younger brother who was a lawyer represented the firm as a syndic.

It is no wonder that the Nazis were critical of the wealth of this Jewish family. In the following years, the National Socialists tried everything to “transfer the Jewish shares (of the firm) into Christian hands” (Alfred Saam, Das Basaltwerk Oberriedenberg). In July 1933, Fritz Stein and his brother were taken into “Schutzhaft” (protective custody) for some days and till 1936, the Steins had lost all their firms one after the other and were politically and economically forced to hand them over to non-Jewish owners.

In contrast to her husband, who was very attached to the Jewish religion and tradition, Ruth was not very religious. Unlike her husband, she did not go to synagogue, but after the marriage adapted to her husband's expectations and organized the Shabat celebrations on Friday evenings and the festivities at the Steins' house on Jewish holidays with great dedication and enthusiasm (Memoirs of her eldest son Wolfgang, USC Shoa Foundation, Visual History Archive, interview with Wolf Stein).

Ruth Stein committed herself to the Zionist Movement, in which her husband was also active as the founder and chairman of the “Zionist Local Group of Schweinfurt”. Till 1936, she taught Jewish young people in the rooms of the Cultural Community, organized “Heimabende” (home evenings) and gave lectures there, e.g. on Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig. She also guided the Schweinfurt group of the Jewish boy scout organization “Makkabi Hazair”.

After Fritz and Jakob Stein lost their power of representation for Basaltstein GmbH, the Stein family moved to Hamburg in May 1936, where Fritz had found a job and the situation seemed less dangerous than in Schweinfurt. Ruth and her husband disagreed where they should go in the long term. Her husband Fritz, who was a convinced Zionist, would have liked to emigrate to Palestine, where two younger siblings had already emigrated in 1931. He toyed with the idea of setting up an industrial company on the Dead Sea. Ruth, on the other hand, found life in Palestine less attractive for a woman. And so they visited Palestine in 1936 to get a first-hand impression. They then decided against emigrating to Palestine and emigrated to Amsterdam in September 1937. There, Ruth's uncle Meno Lissauer owned a company ("Metals and Minerals Association") that imported/exported metals and minerals, where Fritz Stein found employment. Over the next few years, the Stein family lived in quite secure financial circumstances, and in the summer months they even spent family vacations together on the North Sea coast in Zandvoort.

The supposed safety of the Jewish emigrants in the Netherlands proved to be deceptive, and Ruth Stein and her family were once again exposed to persecution by the National Socialists after the German invasion. When the German Wehrmacht invaded Holland on May 10, 1940, it became clear how differently Ruth Stein and her husband reacted in such exceptional situations. The Dutch authorities had imposed a curfew on all Germans and Fritz Stein, who was always law-abiding and compliant, hesitated to do anything. Ruth, on the other hand, considered it necessary to flee to England immediately. On May 13 or 14, Ruth finally convinced her husband Fritz to flee from their apartment to the coast and take a ferry to England. They had organized a car and the closer they got to the coast, the more intense the bombing by German planes became. When a roadblock a few kilometers from the coast made it impossible to continue their journey, they tried to reach the ferry with their children on foot. However, Dutch soldiers finally made it clear to them that their attempts were outright suicide in the face of the German bombardment. As a result, they returned to their apartment in Amsterdam on May 15, the day of the Dutch surrender(USC Shoa Foundation, Visual History Archive, interview with Heinz Thomas Stein).

At first, life seemed to go on as normal, but with the German occupation came a constant stream of new restrictions and bans for Jewish citizens: they had to wear the Jewish star in public, were no longer allowed to visit public parks, had to hand in their bicycles, cars and radios and were no longer allowed to use public transport. And between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., Jews were also banned from going out. Their two older sons had to leave public school and go to a Jewish school. According to Heinz Thomas, Anne Frank also attended this school and was in his older brother Wolfgang's class. Gradually, more and more Jewish acquaintances disappeared, either because they went into hiding with the help of the Dutch underground organization or because they were picked up and deported by the Germans.

In the summer of 1943, they were warned by an acquaintance in the middle of the night. He said they had to leave the house immediately, otherwise they would be arrested the next day. They managed to leave their house unnoticed and go into hiding for a few days in the former offices of the company where Fritz had worked. As they were likely to be picked up every day, Dutch helpers took them to a second apartment, where they stayed until September. Fritz Stein was finally dissuaded by her and also by the Dutch helpers of the underground movement from his absurd idea of voluntarily going into a camp and agreed to split up the family.

Their three children were gradually taken into hiding in the countryside by members of the Dutch underground movement: Their youngest son Michael came to live with a Christian family in Nijmwegen and survived the war there, their second son Heinz Thomas found shelter with a Catholic farming family in Swolgen near Limburg in southern Holland. (He describes his spectacular survival story in the above-mentioned Shoa Foundation interview). Their eldest son Ernst Wolfgang was hidden by the helpers in East Holland, most recently in Sassenheim. He was betrayed there, captured in February 1944 and deported to Bergen-Belsen via the Westerbork collection camp, where his parents had also been deported to (more details in his short biography and in his Shoa interview).

Ruth Stein, her husband and her son survived the terrible camp conditions. When British troops approached the concentration camp in the last weeks of the war, about 6,800 prisoners were selected for being transported to Theresienstadt on three transport trains. The last of those three trains, the so-called “Lost Train” or “Train of the Lost Ones”, however, didn’t reach its destination and ended up in Tröbitz in Brandenburg after an odyssey through still un-occupied Germany. During the journey, 198 people died: Some were killed by machinegun fire and bombs from low-flying planes, others died of diseases and hunger. Underway, an epidemic of spot typhus had broken out because of the terrible hygienic conditions, which was a death sentence for many of the weakened prisoners. The train had to stop again and again in order to unload the dead bodies and inter them next to the railway line. On April 20 or 21, 1945 respectively, the train arrived at Tröbitz between Torgau and Cottbus. The bridge crossing the Elster had been blown up, which caused the train to stop. On the morning of April 23, 1945, soldiers of the Red Army freed the surviving passengers who were lying among the dead bodies in many of the wagons. For the Steins it meant salvage, 320 other prisoners, however, were beyond help. They died in the following weeks from the effects of the typhus epidemic and the transport (See: Wikipedia article “Verlorener Zug” hinted at by H.-J. Beck).

The Steins were able to return to the Netherlands on June 22, 1945. They had survived, but were completely exhausted, in poor health and traumatized. Ernst Wolfgang, who was suffering from tuberculosis, was initially admitted to a clinic and Ruth and her husband were taken to a farm by the Red Cross to regain their strength. It was not until the fall of 1945 that they were able to move back into their own apartment in Amsterdam. Their son Heinz Thomas (Tom), who had survived in hiding in the south of the Netherlands, now lived with them again. After British troops moved in, he made his way to Eindhoven in February 1945, was then briefly accommodated in a DP camp and later with a Jewish family that his parents knew.  Ruth's youngest son Michael, who had survived with his Christian foster parents near Nijmwegen and had been raised as a Christian, initially stayed with his foster parents before he too returned to the family. He no longer recognized his parents when they returned to Holland, so the transition was not easy for him.

The entire Stein family survived the Nazi era under dramatic circumstances and Ruth's younger sister Lieselotte, who had emigrated to the USA, was also able to escape the Nazi terror. She became a famous violinist and later married the violinist Jakob Glick. After the war, the whole family reunited in Amsterdam. There are beautiful photos in Ruth Stein-Kantorowicz's estate that show her sister Lilo and her three children making music in their Amsterdam apartment.

According to her son Heinz Thomas, Fritz Stein's health never really recovered from the consequences of camp life. From Amsterdam, Ruth's husband tried to get compensation from the successor companies in Germany. For the basalt work in Billstein he got 30,000 DM compensation by the firm “Franz Carl Nüdling”. For the basalt work Sodenberg he got 75,000 DM by Hans Leimbach (Wikipedia article “Leimbach & Co). He died in Lugano on December 30, 1956 at the age of 57.  

Ruth's eldest son Ernst Wolfgang suffered throughout his life from his traumatic experiences during the Nazi era and in particular his impressions of Bergen-Belsen. He died in March 2020. Heinz Thomas Stein emigrated to the United States in 1949. He was about to turn 18 at the time and wanted to avoid being drafted into the Dutch army and thus running the risk of being drafted as a soldier in the Dutch war to reconquer the East Indian colonies. In the 1950s, he moved to San Francisco, where he became a psychiatrist. He died there in October 2014 (Information on the members of the family by “Joods Cultureel Kwartier”). Michael, the youngest member of the family, later became a journalist and was an extremely committed Middle East correspondent of „NRC Handelsblad“; he died in Amsterdam in June 2009.

(Obituary by Steve Winter, NRC Handelsblad/

Ruth Stein outlived her husband by almost four decades, dying in Jerusalem in October 1993 at the age of 87 (according to "Joods Cultureel Kwartier"). The Genicom database, however, gives September 7, 1993 as the date of death.

From the photo album: