Ruth Barnett

Ruth Barnett, née Michaelis, was born in Berlin, Germany, to Louise Marie (Ventzke) and Robert Bernd Michaelis. She had an older brother, Martin. Their mother was Protestant and their father was Jewish. At the age of eight months, Ruth was stripped of her German citizenship under Nazi law. In 1939, aged four, she and Martin, aged seven, traveled via Kindertransport to England. The words "person of no nationality," were written into her travel document. This was her legal status until she was 18, when she became eligible to apply for British citizenship; she later used it as the title of her autobiography. Her father fled to Shanghai, China, to escape the Nazis, but her mother stayed in Germany and went into hiding. Between 1939 and 1949, Ruth lived with three sets of foster families. In 1949, at age 14, she was repatriated to Germany by court order. She could no longer speak German, and did not adjust well to life there. A year later, she returned to the UK. She studied at the University of Reading, where she met her future husband, Bernard Raymond Barnett. The couple married in 1958. After working as a teacher for 19 years, Barnett became a psychotherapist. A 50th anniversary reunion of Kindertransport children and their families from all over the world in 1989 inspired the second phase of her career. She began to talk publicly about her own experiences and other genocides, discrimination, war, and trauma. Her writings include her autobiography, Person of No Nationality: A Story of Childhood Loss and Recovery (2010); Jews and Gypsies: Myths & Reality (2013); Quality and Inequality: The Value of Life (2017); Why War? A Memoir (2019); and the play What Price for Justice? (2018), about her father's struggle to return to his position as a judge. She contributed the article "Therapeutic Aspects of Working Through the Trauma of the Kindertransport Experience" to the book, The Kindertransport to Britain, 1938/39 (2012). Her story also has appeared in other books, including I Came Alone: The Story of the Kindertransports by Bertha Leverton and Shmuel Lowensohn (1990). The 2012 German novel Landgericht by Ursula Krechel fictionalized the story of Ruth's family. Barnett was named an MBE in 2020 for services to Holocaust education.