Ruth David was 4 years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933.

Growing up under the Nazi regime, there was one word that became a part of David’s daily vocabulary. It was a word whispered and longed for by Jewish families across Germany in the 1930s — “Auswanderung.” Emigration.

As the months and eventually years under Nazi rule crept by, the desire for auswanderung became deeper for David, her parents and five siblings.

“Life changed because my father lost his work,” she says. “There were new laws every month. They had signs saying ‘Jews not welcome here.'”

At the age of 6, David was expelled from school because of her religion.

“Things got worse and worse,” she says. “Children didn’t play with us anymore who had always been our friends.”

David would make her auswanderung, but she made the journey alone, not knowing the odds those she left behind were up against.

It took decades before she was able to share her World War II experiences with others, including her own children. Recently, David compiled her memories of escaping Nazi Germany in a book titled “Child of Our Time: A Young Girl’s Flight from the Holocaust.”

“My children have always wanted me to do this, but I never had the time,” David says.

The prospect of reliving the past was not easy.

“I was really quite unwilling to put myself through this,” she says. “At first, it was just for my family.”

Even today, after years of living in England and the United States, David’s voice still hints of a German accent. Her very soft, thoughtful words sometimes disappear into the hum of ISU students darting through the Memorial Union on a fall afternoon.

She pauses for a moment before telling of her escape that occurred nearly 65 years ago.

With growing concern about the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, the British Jewish Refugee Committee appealed to certain members of the British Parliament.

Great Britain agreed to admit an unspecified number of Jewish children into the country, says Margarete Goldberger, member of the Kindertransport Association.

The program that resulted became known as the Kindertransport, a train system that whisked Jewish children away from Germany into the arms of the British.

In June of 1939, 10-year-old Ruth David was one of the children aboard the Kindertransport.

She arrived in Liverpool Street Station in London with no close relatives and no knowledge of the English language.

Soon, war broke out, and she and the other Jewish children were called “enemy aliens” — treated kindly, but with some degree of suspicion.

“They wondered a bit, what we were doing here, we German kids, when Germans were the enemy,” David says. “I’m deeply grateful to Britain, because they saved our lives.”

Most of the children lived in large same-sex group homes or hostels, growing up as sisters or brothers. Others were taken in by British families, or if they were lucky, British relatives.

Nearly 10,000 children were saved by the efforts of Great Britain and the Kindertransport.

“We don’t have an exact number, but it’s very close to 10,000,” Goldberger says.

More than 2 million Jewish children perished in the Holocaust. David was one of the few survivors.

“At least 90 percent of German Jews were killed,” says Barbara Pleasants, adjunct assistant professor of ecology, evolution and organisimal biology. Pleasants teaches Iowa State’s class on the Holocaust, Liberal Arts and Sciences 385.

She says although the United States considered aiding Jewish children, only Great Britain successfully established a program to evacuate children from Nazi Germany.

“Similar legislation in the U.S. didn’t get anywhere. This country was very anti-Semitic at the time. Antisemitism in this country peaked in the early 1930s, 1940s,” Pleasants says.

The goodbye at the train station in Mannheim, Germany, before boarding the Kindertransport was the last time David saw her parents, Moritz and Margarete Oppenheimer. Years after the war ended, she learned of their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

But while growing from a lanky 10-year-old into adolescence in Great Britain, she and the other refugee children at the hostel in Windermere, Great Britain, had no idea what happened to family and friends who were left behind in Germany.

“We all longed to see our parents again,” David says. “We all hoped that ours would be the exception, that they would survive. All of us had our parents killed.”

David’s five siblings managed to survive. An older brother, Werner, escaped to Argentina before the war began, and her other older brother, Ernst, found his way to the United States. Ruth’s older sister Hannah also made the journey to Great Britain on a different Kindertransport.

“My older sister came after me, but we were never together. It didn’t occur to anyone that sisters might want to be together,” David says.

The two youngest siblings, Michael and Feo, were sent with their parents to the Camp de Gurs in France, before they were smuggled out and eventually taken in by French families.

“[Camp de Gurs] wasn’t a death camp, but people died of

hunger. Old people died very quickly. So did children,” David says.

David, who was especially gifted in mathematics, attended college at Oakburn School in Great Britain and later taught French to high school students.

After marrying her second husband, Herbert David, distinguished professor of statistics at Iowa State, David moved to Ames 11 years ago.

She often volunteers her time as a guest speaker in ISU classrooms, especially Pleasants’ class on the Holocaust.

“She’s very eloquent, very charming, and students just warm up to her,” Pleasants says.

“They’re always very curious. She brings out a lot of empathy and interest on the part of the students.”

Pleasants says David’s message is applicable to current events.

“We still see hate, ethnic hate,” Pleasants says. “I think anyone who speaks up against these kind of things when they see them is important.

“The living witnesses [to the Holocaust], she’s among the younger of them. Soon there will be no living witnesses to this event.”

David says her survival of the Holocaust was purely by chance.

“I survived,” she says. “A lot of Jewish kids, kids from Poland, from the Soviet Union, they had no chance.”

David says there is one lesson she would like others to learn from her book.

“Just learn to tolerate people, whomever they are, and accept them all as human beings.”