newsHappy birthday Ruth Weiss – A valiant woman celebrates her 101st in Denmark with family and friends
Today, Saturday July 26, 2025, marks Ruth Weiss’s 101st birthday. Her life is a shining example for all of us. Ruth is a highly respected author and novelist and a courageous relentless opponent of dictatorship whenever- and wherever -it shows its face.
By TREVOR GRUNDY
On the afternoon of 5 July,2022 a handsome Jewish woman of 97, stood in courtroom 600 at the Palace of Justice in Nuremburg.
Ruth Weiss was waiting to be honoured by friends and fans from around the world.
As she waited to receive an 800-page Festshrift (German for a liber amicorum, or book of friends), waves of memory washed over her.
Later, she told me she found it hard to breathe in a courtroom that was the venue for the trial of so many prominent Nazi leaders in1945/1946.
For Ruth Weiss. that took her back to the beginning once again.
She said- “In this court, the accused had to defend their dead Fuhrer’s totalitarian autocratic ideology, that had led them to perpetuate cold-blooded massacre of many millions. How often had I shuddered at their names, the enormity of their unspeakable crimes. I had never understood how they had been able to draw their people into accepting – no much more than that – into participating in their crimes. I found it impossible to envisage the scene with those murderers seated on benches in this room, listening to their lawyers. These had forcefully defended the totalitarianism of their rule, the crime and belief in the Final Solution, the extermination of people of Jewish faith.”
From outside the courtroom Ruth said she heard a summer-time brass band in the street outside playing songs from My Fair Lady.
Ninety years before, it would have been music more strident from the Nazi hymn book, with special emphasis on one that marked the canonisation of a Nazi street-fighter called Horst Wessel.
For a while as she tried to stay calm and breathe properly Ruth Weiss was nine years old again, a pretty Jewish girl in a flowery dress and summer hat waiting with her mother and sister at a bus-stop in a small town called Furth close to Nuremburg (venue for Hitler’s most spectacular rallies and speeches), all of them and wondering what dad was up to in a new place that Ruth had found in a school atlas, a place called South Africa.
On 28 April 2023 Ruth Weiss received an Order of the Companion of O.R. Tambo. President Ramaphosa spoke of her contribution to the liberation struggle and for “shining the light of injustices in South Africa.”
On 28 April the following year, Ruth Weiss sat next to Cyril Ramaphosa, this time finding it much easier to breathe properly.
She waited as the President of South Africa, stood up and half-bowed in her direction as he bestowed an Order of the Companions of OR (Oliver)Tambo on her “for her contributions to the liberation struggle” and for “shining the lights of injustices in South Africa.”
Melannie Boehi, who has written widely and well about the life and times of Ruth Weiss, said the award stands out because it is the first time the author, journalist and novelist was publicly recognised in South Africa.
Boehi, a research assistant at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, wrote: ”Although South Africa has been a central focus throughout her career, she was not widely known in the country. This is because she mostly worked for international media, her publications were often in German and most of her books were published by small publishing houses with limited distribution. Nonetheless, some of them captured the attention of the apartheid state’s censors. Women Against Apartheid, a 1980 book she edited, was declared undesirable because several of the women activists featured in it had been detained among them Helen Joseph and Winnie Mandela. Because of her critical reporting about apartheid, Weiss herself was considered an undesirable immigrant and consequently refused re-entry into South Africa after she left in the 1960s.”
She added: “Women’s contributions to these struggles (for freedom and social inclusion at all levels) have never been recognised widely enough and even less so the contributions made by women journalists. Hopefully, this award will make Weiss and here exceptional work – reportage, fiction, non-fiction and an extensive journalism archive – known to a wider public.”
Ruth Weiss speaking at an economic forum in Harare, Zimbabwe soon after Independence in 1980 (Picture: Trevor Grundy)
Ruth Weiss’s many books – fiction and non-fiction – are well known among African-watchers, the sort of people who might read what I write on this very slowly (very) growing website.
So it is not my intention to write a lengthy article about a woman I have come to know and respect over the decades.
This is not a synopsis of her life.
See it more as a verbal birthday card.
She and her many friends and her dear son Alexander (Sacha) will gather at Aschaffenburg on 26th July to mark 100 years of full and creative life.
Melani Boehi outlines several of the highlights of Ruth’s extraordinarily rich and diverse life and I hope one day she writes a book about a writer we have come to admire and in some cases love.
To those who want the full story (rather, the story as told by the author) should get hold of Ruth’s autobiography “A Path Through Hard Grass” which has an interesting foreword by the late Nadine Gordimer.
There is much about her on various websites and also an excellent article about her life in The Rift -The exile experience of South Africans by Hilda Bernstein (Jonathan Cape, 1994).
Since the 1970s, Ruth Weiss became known as a Zeitzeugin in (historical witness) and she speaks regularly in Holocaust seminars and before thousands of schoolchildren in Germany about her experience of growing up in Nazi Germany, leaving homer for South Africa, her life there, rise as a journalist and as an anti-apartheid activist and novelist.
Her best book-writing is, in my opinion, the novel My Sister Sara and two non-fiction works, The Women of Zimbabwe and (if you read German) Frauen Gegen Apartheid.
Ruth Weiss – travelling light but with a heavy message to the world about the need to fight apartheid, racism in all its many forms
An 800-pages Festschrift (book of friends) on the the life and work of Ruth Weiss was published in 2022. It contained the article ( below) by Trevor Grundy about how he first met Ruth Weiss shortly before Christmas in London in 1973.
Women played a key role in the struggle for Zimbabwe but they were often overlooked by their male counterparts and former comrades. Journalists like Ruth Weiss worked hard to change their image and applaud their achievement.
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