By Nicholas Boyack on STUFF…

Ruth Filler: b March 15, 1929; d March 5, 2021.

If Ruth Filler had been consumed by hatred, she could have been forgiven, considering how she and her husband, Sol, , were treated by the Nazis.

Instead, Ruth led a happy and fulfilling life, all the time reminding people not to ignore the lessons of history.

Filler died aged 91 in Auckland, where she was influential figure in the Jewish community, after arriving in New Zealand in 1938 with her parents, Marguerite and Phillip Adler, and sister Inge.

She was born in Hildesheim, Germany; her father was a proud German who won an Iron Cross in World War I. “He was a proud nationalistic German. He saw himself more as a German than a Jew,” Ruth said in later life.

Finding it deeply traumatic that his beloved Germany had turned against him, he fled to New Zealand, taking 9-year-old Ruth with him.

The family was not wealthy, and Ruth later recalled that her father’s sister, Gertrude Meyer, was not so lucky. “She was wealthy and didn’t want to go. In the end, she committed suicide. Her husband was murdered at Auschwitz.”

Read the full obituary on STUFF here.