Who was Ruth Posner? Holocaust survivor and actress dies at 96 at a Swiss suicide clinic

Ruth Posner passed away on September 25, 2025, at a Swiss euthanasia clinic after living a long life that started in wartime Poland. When she and her husband traveled to Switzerland, they sent an email to family and friends stating that their decision was mutual and free from any outside pressure.

The couple used a clinic near Basel after being turned away by another provider that requires strict medical confirmation. As a child, she escaped the Radom Ghetto by working outside the ghetto and later passing as a Catholic girl.

Those experiences shaped the rest of her life, influencing her reflections on memory and providing the foundation for the plays and lectures she later shared with students and audiences. Her visit to Britain in her mid-teens, after the war, introduced her to English, dance, and theatre.

Throughout several decades, she worked as a dancer, teacher, and actor, both with big companies and on stage and screen. Her social activity involved lectures about the Holocaust and the work against antisemitism.

Ruth Posner’s early life and wartime experience

Ruth Posner was born in Warsaw in 1929 and grew up in a family that identified as Polish. As Nazi policies intensified, her family moved to Radom, and she attended a Catholic school before the ghetto was sealed.

In 1942, her father arranged for her and an aunt to work outside the ghetto at a leather factory; that move opened a way for them to slip into non-Jewish society. She spent the rest of the war using a false name and avoiding capture while most of her wider family were killed.

Theatre, dance, and teaching across decades

After the war, Ruth Posner settled in Britain and trained in contemporary dance. She spent years with the London Contemporary Dance community, later retrained as an actor, and taught physical theatre at institutions in the UK and abroad.

During her career, she appeared in plays that sometimes drew on her own history and worked to pass on what she had seen to younger people. Her professional path combined movement, acting, and education.

Family life and losses

Ruth Posner married Michael Posner in 1950; he worked in chemistry and for international organisations during his career. Their only son died in middle age after struggles with addiction, a loss the couple described as profound.

In recent years, both partners were described by friends as mentally alert but physically frail. They said failing senses and low energy shaped their view of what life would look like if they were forced to be apart.

Legacy and what people have said

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Ruth Posner’s life was often presented to the public as a mix of witness and art. She used theatre and talks to explain her wartime experience and to remind audiences of what happened in Poland.

Colleagues and students remember her for teaching, for performances that drew on difficult material, and for speaking against denial and hate. Her last act has prompted discussion about ageing, care, and the choices people make at the end of life.

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