Ruth Posner obit

Holocaust survivor and husband announce Swiss suicide in email

‘So sorry not to have mentioned it’, wrote the actress Ruth Posner and her husband Michael as they told loved ones they had taken their own lives

 

He was not on the list.

A Holocaust survivor who became an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company announced in an email to family and friends that she and her husband had taken their own lives in a suicide clinic.

Ruth Posner, 96, and her husband, Michael, 97, wrote that they would have “shuffled off this mortal coil” by the time the message was read after travelling to the clinic in Switzerland.

The couple, from Belsize Park, north London, did not have terminal illnesses but decided that they wanted to die together because they could not bear to be separated after almost 75 years of marriage.

In an email addressed to “Dear family and friends” on Tuesday the couple wrote: “So sorry not to have mentioned it but when you receive this email we will have ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’.

“The decision was mutual and without any outside pressure. We had lived a long life and together for almost 75 years. There came a point when failing senses, of sight and hearing and lack of energy was not living but existing that no care would improve.

“We had an interesting and varied life and except for the sorrow of losing Jeremy, our son. We enjoyed our time together, we tried not to regret the past, live in the present and not to expect too much from the future.

“Much love Ruth & Mike”.

Posner escaped the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto using a falsified passport and spent three years on the run with her aunt posing as a Catholic schoolgirl. The rest of her family were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.

She arrived in the UK aged 16 and trained initially as a dancer and later as an actress. One of her most recent roles was the Polish princess Katya in the BBC comedy series Count Arthur Strong.

She married her British husband in 1950. He worked as a chemist for Unilever and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), which meant they lived in countries around the world. Their son died aged 37 while recovering from a heroin addiction. They are survived by a grandson.

Sonja Linden, a playwright and artistic director who knew the couple for 30 years, said Posner was “frail” and her husband had macular degeneration and poor hearing but both were “intellectually very well” with no serious illnesses.

“This was a decision they made together some time ago that they wanted to die together,” she said. “They made an arrangement to go to Switzerland a year ago. We did not know they had actually gone until we received the email, which is sad as we wanted to say goodbye.

“They had such a lovely flat packed with art and books and I can’t imagine them not being there.”

Linden said the Dignitas clinic in Zurich would not help the couple die because they did not have a doctor’s confirmation that they had less than six months to live so they went to the Pegasos clinic near Basel.

“They were exhausted and felt that the time had come,” Linden said. “They did not want to live without each other, so they decided to die together. They thought this was a positive decision and it helped them in their later life. I did not try to stop them. I understood and supported their decision, but it was still a shock to receive the email.”

Linden worked with Posner as she re-enacted her experiences during the Holocaust in a theatre production in 2014 called Who Do We Think We Are?

Posner had described how she did not discuss her Holocaust experience for years after finding sanctuary in the UK. “I didn’t want to be a victim, and I didn’t want to tell anyone because I was afraid they wouldn’t believe me,” she said. “It was too dramatic.”

She later became prominent around the world for her account of the horrors of the Holocaust, telling the Hollywood Reporter in 2016: “Now when I talk about it, it seems like I’m describing my role in a play.”

Ruth Posner was awarded a British Empire Medal in the 2022 new year’s honours list for services to Holocaust education. The following year she appeared in Britain’s first national billboard campaign against antisemitism.

“I don’t want to talk about it, I want to scream about it,” she told a podcast by the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

She did not speak English when she moved to the UK but later studied dance and drama at college and joined the London Contemporary Dance Theatre as a performer and teacher.

Posner went on to study theatre arts at Hunter College in New York and became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her film work include roles in Leon the Pig Farmer and Love Hurts. Television roles included The Ruth Rendell Mysteries and Casualty.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism said it was “heartbroken” to learn of the couple’s deaths. It said Posner spoke “publicly of her experiences during the Holocaust, educating future generations and never shying away from taking part in the fight against antisemitism”.

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