Ruth Westheimer, who taught generations to talk about and enjoy sex, dies at 96
She wound up there the same way as the other 300 children: as part of the Kindertransport, an effort to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis—put on a train to that Swiss boarding school by her mother and grandmother, shortly after her father was taken from their home in Frankfurt. It was January 1939. She was 10 years old and would spend her entire adolescence at that bleak way station for young refugees.
Later, she would call the place in which they all grew up an orphanage, but at the time it was still possible to hope that most of their parents weren’t dead. She was immeasurably lonely, but couldn’t stop yapping, couldn’t sit still. Being a girl, she wasn’t allowed to participate in schooling, so she busied herself looking after the younger children instead.
From time to time, she helped steer straight the older ones, too. She had once climbed up to steal a look at a particular book that her parents kept out of reach in their apartment—a sort of manual, with illustrations of sexual positions. This alone made her worldly.
She passed on what she knew. It didn’t occur to her to be squeamish. “Everything in nature is so fantastically well-organized," she wrote in her diary, “one can’t possibly think that anything about it is dirty." And she seemed to take great satisfaction in correcting the wildly mistaken ideas of her peers—“because I know how bad it is when one is given wrong information about these things." Her name was Karola Ruth Siegel.
But she was, in a sense, already Dr. Ruth. Ruth Westheimer, the unrelentingly chipper, 4-foot-7 broadcaster, author and educator whose frank and nurturing style of communication helped generations of Americans better understand and enjoy their sex lives, has died at 96.
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