Renowned Holocaust survivor Ruth Posner and her husband Michael died last month in Switzerland by assisted suicide. Ruth, a survivor of Treblinka, was 96. Michael was 97. Both were mentally sharp and healthy for their age; neither were suffering from a terminal illness.
The U.K. couple died at the Pegasos clinic in Basel, Switzerland, on September 23, predeceased by their only son Jeremy, who died in 1998 while recovering from a heroin addiction. The couple told their remaining friends and family about the decision in a posthumous email, obtained by the Times:
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.
Ruth Posner had an extraordinary story. The only child of Moshe and Anna Wajsberg, the Polish family was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto by the Gestapo after the invasion of Poland; her father managed to facilitate her escape in 1942 by arranging for her to work with her aunt at a factory outside the ghetto. She was nine years old when she escaped, living the remainder of the war posing as a Polish Catholic girl.
After the war, Ruth fled to England, where she met and married her husband in 1950. Her parents died in Treblinka. She became a successful author, dancer, actress, and Holocaust educator.
“Although then in her eighties, she made it her mission to speak to as many young people as possible about her experiences during the Holocaust. She hoped that the leaders of tomorrow would learn the lessons of the past,” said Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Educational Trust. “Ruth was one of a kind. Full of charisma and warmth, she left an impression on everyone she met. We will miss her.”
The fact that a Holocaust survivor chose to die with her husband in a Swiss suicide center has been shocking to some. In 2019, abortionist and euthanasia provider Ellen Wiebe caused an uproar by stealing into a Jewish nursing home in Vancouver to deliver a lethal injection to a patient; the head of the nursing home stated that the Holocaust survivors in the facility were particularly disturbed by what had happened. The history of euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the Holocaust are, of course, inextricably intertwined.
But the double suicide of Ruth and Michael Posner is becoming a disturbing trend. On February 5, 2024, former Dutch Prime Minister Dries van Agt died holding hands with his wife Eugenie in his hometown of Nijmegen. Both were 93; the elderly couple chose to die by euthanasia. Neither was terminally ill; like the Posners, they had simply decided it was time to die.
As the New York Postreported recently: “Duo euthanasia, or two people receiving a fatal injection simultaneously, is still relatively rare in the Netherlands but is slowly gaining more popularity … Twenty-nine couples opted for the paired death in 2022, up from 16 who chose it in 2021 and the 13 pairs the year before.” In 2018, a Canadian couple opted for “duo euthanasia”; they did blasé interviews about the decision a week before they died by lethal injection, also hand in hand.
With each highly publicized instance of double suicide – from a Holocaust survivor and her spouse to a former Dutch prime minister and his wife – assisted suicide and euthanasia are further normalized. What begins as an individual choice will inevitably become a cultural expectation.
