German-Israeli artist who designed books and wrote autobiographical works including Neun Monate in Le Sappey (“Nine months in Le Sappey,” 2001) and Vom Bauhaus nach Jerusalem (“From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem,” 2004).
Margarete Vallentin grew up in a family home that maintained close contacts with German revolutionaries, Russian exiles and European avant-garde artists, such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Ruth had four siblings, including Judith (1905-1944), who married married Erich Auer and became a noted anti-Nazi resistance fighter.
In 1925, Ruth Vallentin, along with her sister Judith, lived in Berlin-Wedding. In October that year, she married aspiring Berlin furrier Hans Citroen (1905-1985), the younger brother of Bauhaus student Paul Citroen, whose family came from the Netherlands. Later in Israel they changed their name to Cidor.
After the transfer of power to the Nazis in 1933 Hans Citroen had to sell his fur shop on racial grounds, and the couple emigrated to France with their daughter Charlotte (born 1926), where Hans Citroen went into business in Paris. Their son Vincent was born there in 1934 and their second daughter Eliane in 1939. Ruth Vallentin received orders for the design of children’s books from the Flammarion publishing house.
During the German occupation of France in 1940, the family fled to Vichy France, and several family members in Germany and the Netherlands became victims of the German persecution of the Jews. Ruth Vallentin’s sister Judith Auer, who printed leaflets in her basement with other activists, was beheaded in Berlin in late 1944 as a resistance fighter.
In the fall of 1942, the family made a dramatic escape across the snowy Alps to Switzerland, arriving in a refugee camp in Geneva. In 1952 they emigrated to Israel, where Ruth Cidor continued her artistic activities. Hanan Aharon Cidor worked for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was Israeli Ambassador to the Netherlands from 1957 to 1963.
Her husband died in early 1985. She died in Jerusalem on 26 February 2002 at the age of 95.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)