feet didn’t reach the floor. (She asked me to push her chair closer to the table so that she could eat her soup.) It turned out that she did have something to add. Her high, cheerful Frankfurt accent is as familiar in its way as Kissinger’s sombre Bavarian gutturals, but she began quietly, almost apologetically, as if she didn’t want to claim too much authority on a subject that had nothing to do with the orgasm.

She told us the story of the Evian Conference, held on Lake Geneva, in July, 1938, where countries from around the world gathered to debate the plight of Germany’s Jews. In the end, only one country—the Dominican Republic—agreed to take in a substantial number of Jewish refugees. All the others, including the UnitedStates, made excuses.

“If not for the Kindertransport, I would not be here today,” Dr. Ruth said. Photograph by Imagno / Getty

Four months after the failure of Evian, in November, came Kristallnacht. At the time, Karola Ruth Siegel was a ten-year-old Jewish girl living with her parents in Frankfurt. Nazis showed up at their apartment to arrest her father, a salesman. As they marched him off into a covered truck, he turned around and looked at Ruth, who was watching from the window. She waved, and he waved back. Then he smiled, so that she wouldn’t cry. She never saw him again.

Two months later, in January, 1939, Ruth’s mother placed her on a train with other German Jewish children bound for Switzerland—part of the Kindertransport. Her mother hugged her