In 1927 Ruth's parents withdrew from the Vienna Israelite Community (IKG). Nevertheless, according to the 1935 Nuremberg Racial Laws, which took effect for annexed Austria on May 20, 1938, Irma Maier and her daughters were still considered Jewish. To the public attacks by Viennese antisemites, were added bureaucratic harassment and the denial of citizens' rights.

Ruth's diaries document how – although grown up in an assimilated and nonreligious family – she developed a "We feeling" in response to the antisemitism in her surroundings and eventually decided for herself to be part of a kind of shared destiny.

The night of the "November Pogrom" of November 9-10, 1938, when also in Vienna Jewish shops and buildings were looted and pillaged, thousands of Jews maltreated, incarcerated and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, demonstrated the alarming situation for persecuted people in the Third Reich.

10/9/1938, Vienna
"I am amazed that we can endure it. That in spite of everything we don't turn up the gas tap or jump into the Danube. [...] To be away from here!" | HL-senteret

11/11/1938
"We've been attacked! Yesterday was the most awful day
of my life. Now I know what pogroms are, I know what human
beings are capable of; human beings: made in the likeness
of God." | HL-senteret

>> "Eviction Reason: Non-Aryan" – Expulsion from the Apartment

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