Born July 21, 1921   |   Düsseldorf, Germany

Died October 18, 2004   |   Winnipeg, Canada

Kind and gentle, Rudy was fiercely proud of his heritage. On his headstone are the triumphant Hebrew words “Ivri Anochi” (“I am a Jew”).

The Lowensteins were a middle-class Düsseldorf family. Rudy was a good student, active in sports. After the Nazis came to power, he and his father Chaim were arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. Rudy was released when he and his younger brother Kurt (later Kenneth) were sponsored by the Huttons, a Quaker family in Cambridge, England, allowing them to travel to England on the Kindertransport (a humanitarian effort that rescued 10,000 Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1938 and 1940). Though Rudy and Kurt were spared, their parents perished—Chaim in the Lodz Ghetto and Johanna at Auschwitz. All but two of the boys’ aunts and uncles were murdered together with their children.

Rudy worked in the kitchens at Cambridge University until Britain, fearing a fifth column,  interned all German nationals over the age of 18. Unlike Kurt, who was a minor, Rudy was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Wight. When the British opted to expel German nationals, Rudy was shipped to a Canadian internment camp in New Brunswick and then another in Ile-aux-Noix, in the St. Lawrence River. Eventually released, he worked for German-Jewish farmers near Winnipeg, applied for Canadian citizenship and enlisted in the Canadian army, serving from 1944 to 1947 at Camp Shilo, near Brandon. Rudy settled in Winnipeg where he worked in the garment industry, eventually purchasing Crown Cap headwear factory with a fellow survivor and internee. Rudy met his wife Paula at a Zionist youth mixer; they married on September 19, 1948, later welcoming three sons—Arnie, Jeff and Howie—and, in the fullness of time, eight grandchildren. A much-sought-after speaker, Rudy often shared his family’s Holocaust experiences at the Asper Jewish Community Campus, Winnipeg high schools and beyond.