Ruth Rewald

Ruth's father, Artur Markus Rewald (1880–1957), was a businessman whose own father had come from Pomerania and who would end his days, following a further move west of his own in 1938, living in Willesden (London, England).

Sources differ as to the name of her mother, who is identified in birth records as Rose Wilhelmine Hirschfeld.

The family was of German-Jewish provenance, classified in the terminology of those times as “assimilated German Jewish”.

Ruth Rewald (1906–1942) was a German writer of children's books.

1925 was the year in which her mother died, following which, in 1933, her father married Lotte Erol, a stage-performer from Vienna.

It was also in 1925 that, despite her gender, she embarked on university-level studies in Jurisprudence, initially in Berlin and later at Heidelberg.

Ruth Rewald married a young lawyer in 1929, after which for many purposes she used her married name.

In 1929, finding her university studies unfulfilling, she dropped out of university and for several months worked in a children's day-care centre.

The abandonment of her university degree course came directly before Rewald's marriage, which took place in Berlin on 6 November 1929.

Her husband, Hans Schaul was a trainee court official whom she had met at university.

He would later emerge as a left-wing political activist and fighter in the Spanish Civil War.

She continued to write under her former name, however, and it was during the early 1930s that some of her most commercially successful books were published.

Sources may identify her either as "Ruth Rewald" or as "Ruth Schaul".

Ruth Gustave Rewald was born at Nachodstraße 4 in her parents’ apartment in Deutsch-Wilmersdorf, a densely populated former village to the southwest of Berlin into which it had been subsumed during the final years of the nineteenth century.

For Berlin the period was one of rapid expansion and social change as farm workers were drawn to the city, attracted by the growing differential between farm wages and factory wages.

The economic success of the city also attracted immigrants from further east, many of them escaping the acute austerity and politically driven repression that had become defining features of the Russian empire.

Ruth was her parents’ only recorded child.

More overtly political was her book "Müllerstrasse, Jungens von heute " (‘’loosely, " Müllerstrasse: Boys today”’’) published in 1932. In it the author described the oppressive conditions for working class children in Berlin who manage to overcome their aggressive urges thanks into creative group activities and finding “something meaningful to create”. This first full-length book, with its unmistakable echoes of the already much revered Erich Kästner, was well received by critics and, indeed, by book buyers.

By that time, however, her family home was a 50 m2 apartment in Paris to where, for reasons both of race and of politics, she had relocated following régime change at the start of 1933 in Germany.

At some point between 1933 and 1939 Schaul joined the (outlawed in Germany) Communist Party). Although there is no indication that Ruth Rewald ever joined any political party, her general political beliefs aligned with those of her husband.

Ruth Rewald's first published children's stories, which may have been triggered by her experiences as an assistant in the children's day-care centre, included "Rudi und sein radio" (‘’"Eudi and his radio"’’), "Peter Meyer liest seine Geschichten vor" (‘’"Peter Meyer reads out his stories"’’), and, for a series of children's books, "Sonne und Regen im Kinderland" (‘’"Sun and Rain in the Land of Childhood"’’).

Over the next couple of years there followed more children's stories, published in a few of the many regional daily newspapers produced during this period by the Social Democrats.

In January 1933 the National Socialists were able to exploit the parliamentary deadlock created by the polarisation of German politics to take power, a development that was rapidly followed by a switch to one- party dictatorship.

One of the first pieces of legislation passed following the abolition of democracy was the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service passed in 1933.

This was designed to remove Jews and political activists opposed to the Hitler government from public sector employment.

Hans Schaul was effectively excluded from his chosen career as a lawyer in the German justice system.

In May the couple relocated to Paris, which during 1933 became home to large numbers of political and race-driven exiles from Germany and indeed quickly emerged as one of three unofficial locations for the party leadership of the exiled Communist Party of Germany.

(The others were Prague and Moscow.) In July 1933 their book collection and other possessions caught up with them, or more precisely were delivered to "Maison Biblion", a bookshop where later, for a several months starting in July 1934, Rewald was employed.

Meanwhile, she continued to progress with her authorship work.

Schaul's first employment following their arrival in Paris was as a photographer.

Money was short and they were both obliged to take work where they could find it.

During 1933/34, their first year in Paris, they lived at four (or more) different addresses in succession, from which some commentators infer that perhaps they did not intend to remain in the French capital for very long.

They nevertheless quickly became well networked and closely integrated into the community of political refugees of which they were a part.

Their circle included other exiled German authors, including Käthe Hirsch.

In the spring of 1934, the couple made a plan to move on from France, contacting an uncle in the United States who was using the name Marcus Saul for help.

The plan developed so that Hans decided he would travel first to Palestine and meet up with another uncle, "Uncle Jean" whew s already there, and move on from there to America, while Ruth would relocate directly from France and re-join her husband.

The application papers were submitted to the U.S. consulate in Paris via the "Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society" (HIAS).

Her daughter, born in 1937, suffered a similar death slightly under two years later.

In 1938, after five months in Spain, with the publication of "Vier spanische Jungen" she became the first mainstream author to produce a German language book about the Spanish Civil War written expressly for children and young people.

She was deported to Auschwitz in July 1942 and is believed to have been murdered shortly afterwards.