Ruth Tulchinsky

South Bend's Own Words

Ruth Tulchinsky was a young Jewish woman living in the shadows of the Holocaust. At the age of 16, fortunately, she and members of her immediate family managed to escape Nazi Germany and arrived in South Bend.

Ruth had experienced life in Hitler’s Germany, but did not expect to see elements of it here. Yet, she did. The divisions between white and black were eerily similar to those she saw between Jews and non-Jews back in Germany.

In 1944 she met and married South Bend native Maurice Tulchinsky, who also recognized and fought against the racial divisions here. Maury became a white ally in the fight to integrate the Engman Public Natatorium, speaking in front of the South Bend Common Council alongside lawyers J. Chester and Elizabeth Fletcher Allen, Zilford Carter, and Charles Wills.

In 2008, Ruth sat down with interviewers from the Indiana University South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center. Ruth read items from a memory book she created including, what she calls, “The Natatorium Incident.” There’s a link to it in the description of this episode. Here’s Ruth, telling her life story.

Created and produced by Kevin Tidmarsh; hosted and co-created by George Garner.

Want to learn more about South Bend’s history? View the photographs and documents that helped create it. Visit Michiana Memory at http://michianamemory.sjcpl.org/.

Title music, “History Explains Itself,” from Josh Spacek. Visit his page on the Free Music Archive, http://www.freemusicarchive.org/.