Sara Rus’s loved ones remember her as a woman who loved to dance. Cheerful, musical, and full of an infectious verve, she always animated those around her. Yet her joy was a story of survival, transcendence, and triumph of the human spirit.

After surviving the horrors of Auschwitz as a young woman, she sought refuge in Argentina in 1948 and started a family. There, in 1977, the civic-military dictatorship took her son, Daniel. Rus joined the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, marching around the square outside the Casa Rosada to demand the safe return of Daniel — and all those disappeared by the regime.

Rus passed away on January 24, age 97. At a recent celebration of her life at the Anne Frank Argentina Center in Buenos Aires, her family, comrades, and prominent members of Argentina’s Jewish and human rights communities paid tribute to how Rus forged unfathomable suffering into a life force that inspired those she met.

“We all thought, how can it be that this woman so full of love can have gone through........

© Buenos Aires Herald