Lady Esther Gilbert speaking at Vancouver City Hall April 8, when Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim proclaimed Ruth Kron Sigal Day in the city. (photo by Keith Morgan)
Ruta’s Closet, the Holocaust narrative of the late Vancouverite Ruth Kron Sigal, is being reissued for a new generation of audiences – and the book’s author is ensuring the survivor’s inspiring story of survival and resilience reaches the widest possible global audience.
Vancouver journalist Keith Morgan, who completed the book shortly before Kron Sigal’s passing, at age 72 in 2008, has updated the publication – and created an extensive range of multimedia projects to expand the impact of the written volume.
First issued as a fundraising initiative for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Ruta’s Closet was later published in the United Kingdom, with distribution there reaching new audiences.
The book recounts the harrowing survival story of the Kron family, imprisoned in the tiny Shavl (Šiauliai) ghetto in Lithuania, through the eyes of the youngest daughter, Ruta (later Ruth). Their survival against Nazi persecution hinged on the courage and resourcefulness of her parents, Meyer and Gita Kron, as well as the bravery of non-Jewish rescuers. Depicted with novel-like narrative power but rooted in rigorous research and eyewitness testimony, the memoir vividly portrays atrocities such as mass murder, a Nazi ban on Jewish births and the deportation of children to Auschwitz, while also shining a light on courage, compassion and human resilience amid the evil.
Kron Sigal didn’t live to see the book in print but she saw the final draft.
“She said to me shortly before she died, ‘You are going to carry on telling my story, Keith, aren’t you?’ And I said, of course I am,” Morgan told the Independent. “So, I took that on as a mission.”
Surveys indicating widespread ignorance of Holocaust history, combined with skyrocketing antisemitism, motivated Morgan to launch a series of Ruta’s Closet-related projects.
“We updated the book and decided it was time to go basically worldwide with this,” he said.
In addition to the re-release of the hard-copy, Morgan and his small team of colleagues recorded an audiobook and released an ebook. They revamped the existing Ruta’s Closet website and made it more interactive.
Working with Bill Barnes, a local radio producer, Morgan developed a 25-segment podcast.
“We are doing Zoom interviews with people around the world who are a part of a driving force behind an imaginative, creative initiative in spreading Holocaust awareness and education,” he explained. “I’ve got Ruth’s kids – Michael, Marilee and Elana – each week doing an introduction for book clubs.”
The VHEC has produced a downloadable guide for book clubs, as well as a teacher’s guide to the book, which makes it additionally relevant as British Columbia’s education curriculum mandates Holocaust education this year for the first time as part of the Social Studies 10 coursework.
“The beauty of it, for British Columbia, is it’s technically a local story,” Morgan said. “It’s about Ruth. It’s about somebody who came here and did a lot for her adopted society.”
Morgan, who spent many years as the crime reporter at the Province newspaper, met Kron Sigal when his editor asked him to take on a more uplifting assignment and begin a series about people doing good works at home and abroad.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh, you should talk to Ruth Sigal,’” who was sharing her Holocaust story with students. “I went to meet her. I was very impressed. She told her story and it had an amazing impact on me. I just knew this was an important story to tell.”
He found immediate support from Dr. Robert Krell, the founding president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
“Robert Krell kind of took me under his wing – he was a close friend of Ruth – and he said, ‘I’ve got just the guy to introduce to you, who will be really helpful to you for pulling the story together.’”
The person was renowned historian Sir Martin Gilbert.
“The British schoolboy in me thought, ‘How do I curtsy?’” Morgan joked.
Morgan met Sir Martin in London and got a one-on-one master course in writing about the subject.
“He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘You have to tell the story as though you were writing it for your newspaper and make it accessible to all people,’” Morgan recalled. “Sadly, Martin died [in 2015], but Lady Esther Gilbert took up his mantle and, since then, she’s been an ally and was very important in this edition in terms of going through it, adding bits here and there.”
She spoke at a ceremony at Vancouver City Hall on April 8 this year, when the mayor proclaimed Ruth Kron Sigal Day in the city.
Kron Sigal’s story resonates profoundly with people, according to Morgan.
“We can all relate to what happened to Ruth and her sister Tamara,” he said. “It also tells us compelling stories about how, through their own devices, they basically survived and helped others along the way. We also see what other members of the family did to help the broader community.… We get this family story, which, in itself, is very dramatic, but we also get this wider picture of how a community in the ghetto work with each other, help each other.”
Morgan sees Kron Sigal’s narrative as an inspiration not only because of her survival against the Nazis but in all she did after becoming a Canadian.
“Ruth came here, an adopted country, and spent 25 years at the Women’s Resource Centre and the VHEC Child Survivors Group,” said Morgan. “That’s an example to everybody: come into a new society, an adopted country, and just roll up the sleeves and get working. Isn’t that an example to anybody that comes in?”
No less a triumph, Morgan said, is the family Ruth and her husband, Dr. Cecil Sigal, created.
“You look at that family and you think, ‘Victory!” he said. “Because they beat Hitler.”