Letters from Ruthie was originally published on March 4th, 2023 in The First Person, by my dear friend, journalist and poet Michael Judge.

Michael was kind enough to republish it, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, and it was released yesterday.
If you didn’t see it the first time around you can read my essay in The First Person here.
Backstory of a Story
My mother Ruthie, had she survived the first terrible pandemic year, would turn 100 this March 14th. In 2020, the prolonged unknowns kept us from being together for 9 months as NY State, in an attempt to protect the elderly, forced nursing homes and assisted care facilities to close residents in their rooms and the solitary confinement was confusing and hard on residents. Her confusion about why we left her there was palpable, as we watched from windows and FaceTimes as my mother let go.
When I read it again, I realize it was a piece about what linked one mother and one daughter, a complicated relationship made impossible even with a then new version of communication. It was about my guilt, a list of more than 100 things I could have done differently, the sorrow and decisions to leave her alone all that time and trusting a threadbare hope that she’d be cared for better by strangers we’d met via FaceTime than us, three grown children made illegal to the system she was caught in, talking ourselves into this is the right thing. And finally it was the demand as if by ghost that I inhabit her imaginings with my own: her own worst memories from the beginnings and middles of her life showed up in the cracks at the end of her life, without family or anyone familiar there to help her understand what was happening.
It was about losing oneself, losing a mother, losing the foundation of what I thought was real and true and abandoning or… maybe simply not fighting hard enough for what I felt deep in my heart was right. Ultimately, it became about the impulse toward strength and fortitude at any cost in that end, in the moments of truth others have described became clear finally, became a clear fight, in all its complications, about what we put on the line to show up in our humanity, what we do because we love the human if not their foibles and mistakes, some way of freeing them from indignity by any means necessary, which feels familiar right now and is being tested on a global scale.
For now Letters From Ruthie was a true beginning for me.
When Michael first published it, I had never had anything published before. He encouraged and inspired me to keep writing and I am forever grateful to his resolute belief in this piece, in art and poetry and truth, to move and challenge our deepest wells of humanity into action, to dust off the hurry and greed of life to get to our hearts again.
And finally, Magie
My mother’s first cousin, who was like her sister and who we called Aunt Magie mentioned in the story is now 95.
Magie has been a speaker at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum in Dallas telling her story so future generations understand the brutality she and my family faced and endured in Nazi occupied Europe. She teaches empathy and resistance in the face of tyranny and is the true inspiration.
My mother didn’t want to recall what happened most of her life. She couldn’t get the words out. Magie’s vow is to only remember.
I think of this as we watch governments scapegoat and fail people around the world. The leaders who make countries out of lies and use stories as propaganda to deride and divide and erase indigenous cultures that are inconvenient for their aims, I remember it’s an old story. It’s a story anyone could get caught in. A story can be a web, a story can be a fight, a story can be the word democracy or anything with holes.
But are there holes in one’s truth? Maybe we are looking for a story without holes to fall through and falter and hide. One with light in its truth and sadness and love and liberation for all at its heart. For liberation from the same old story over and over and over again.




Finally, Michael, who re-published my lament for my mother’s last months and days, read these words by Zbigniew Herbert to me again from his poem The Envoy of Mr. Cogitoto:
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dustyou were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimonybe courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important
I am working on telling another part of her story, which is also my grandparents story, which is now becoming one part of my story, digging out the roots from the dirt, trying and failing and trying again to move boulders out of its way which is the only way.
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Michael Judge, a poet and freelance journalist, is a former deputy editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal, deputy editorial page editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal, and more recently a contributing editor at The Dallas Morning News. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Politico Europe, NPR, Wire, The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune, The Japan Times, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Literary Review, The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, and Smithsonian magazine, among other publications.