Dr. Ruth made ‘orgasm’ a family phrase. However her actual ardour? Dollhouses.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer smiles through the window of one of the dollhouses she has collected over the past 20 years. Her passion for her arises from her childhood in National Socialist Germany. (Chris Sorensen / For the Washington Post)

NEW YORK – Ruth Westheimer was 10 years old in 1939 when she and 300 other Jewish children boarded a train that was leaving Germany. She brought a doll, a favorite named Matilda. But a younger child was crying inconsolably, so Westheimer gave the little girl her doll. Because she says, “She needed it more.”

Today Dr. Ruth, America’s Favorite Sex Therapist, 88 years old. She lives in a New York apartment full of books, photos, and degrees.

And dollhouses.

Space for miniature rooms lovingly furnished with liver-stained hands. They give her joy and comfort and slivers of innocence that she lost so long ago.

Westheimer was in her late 60s and already a celebrity when a friend started building dollhouses in her building. She asked if she could have one. Now she has two plus several square “rooms” in bookshelves and a collection of other boxes and tissue holders that double as dolls houses.

It asks for its content. They are Jewish houses with menorahs and other religious symbols. The dolls and furniture are from England – she bought them mostly on trips to London and Europe – and were made between the First and Second World Wars. “I’m only interested in those years that were good years,” she says during an interview in her Washington Heights apartment.

“This one is good luck,” she says, proudly holding up a tiny chimney sweep figure in a doll’s house near the apartment entrance. “You can touch it!”

The faces on her dolls, she explains, are expressive and wise. “Not like the Barbie doll,” she insists. “Because you can’t tell your problems to a Barbie doll. She has a stupid face. She’s very fashionable – lots of clothes – but you can’t tell her your problems. You can tell these people your problems. “

Westheimer, who will speak about her collection at the National Building Museum on Monday evening to celebrate the museum’s dollhouse exhibition, has four grandchildren. But she says the houses were never meant for her. These are yours.

Because what they give her most of all is control. “I had no control over my life,” she says. “But I’m in control of it.”

Dr. Ruth’s dollhouses are Jewish houses with menorahs and other religious symbols. (Chris Sorensen / For the Washington Post)
The front door of a doll’s house with a sign that reads Dr. Ruth Westheimer, sex therapist. (Chris Sorensen / For the Washington Post)

Karola Ruth Siegel was an only child. Her parents were lower-middle-class Orthodox Jews in Frankfurt. But her childhood was charmed. She remembers roller skates, strollers, 13 dolls and the undivided attention of her paternal grandmother.

Every Friday her father, a salesman, took her to the ice cream and then to the temple. Time and again he impressed her with the value of education. “The most important thing for my father was studying,” she says. “Because nobody can take that away from you.”

She remembers how a neighbor warned in autumn 1938 that he had to leave Germany. Her parents tried to protect her from worry, but “I just knew terrible things were happening,” she says.

After the night of the broken glass – she doesn’t use the word “Kristallnacht” because it sounds too beautiful and diluted – the Nazis came to the door of their apartment on the first floor. Westheimer watched from the window as the men marched their father to a covered truck. Before climbing in, he turned and looked at his daughter. She waved and he waved back. Then he smiled.

“Because he didn’t want me to cry,” she says.

Weeks later, a postcard came in from her father who was in a labor camp. She was supposed to get on a Kindertransport – a train that saves Jewish children from the Nazis.

The note said: “This is the only way he could leave the labor camp and return to Frankfurt,” she recalls. “So I didn’t have a choice.”

Frightened and sad, she hugged her mother and was loaded onto the train in January 1939. As he drove out of the station, she began to lead the other crying children in familiar songs. The texts that you will remember today are: “God does not sleep. . . no sleep. ”

She knew that she had to distract the children from their tears, she says, “because I remembered my father turning around and smiling.”

Most of the Kindertransport passengers went to the UK, but she was en route to Switzerland, where she and 50 others ended up in a children’s home that became an orphanage.

She exchanged letters with her parents for almost two years. She knew they had both ended up in a ghetto in Poland. But then the letters stopped.

Only a few years later did she find out with certainty that her father had died in Auschwitz. Her mother was listed as “missing”. Disappeared.

The orphanage was “a good place”, except that girls are not allowed to go to school. But she had a friend who went to high school in a neighboring village, so every night she co-opted his books and taught herself history and English.

At the end of the war at the age of 17, Westheimer moved to Palestine to help build a Jewish state. She worked in a kibbutz for a while, then moved to Jerusalem and joined the Haganah, a Jewish defense organization. Westheimer, 4-foot-7 and full of energy, was trained as a sniper. A few months after their service, a grenade ripped through the girls’ dormitory during the Israeli War of Independence, severely injuring both legs.

She trained as a kindergarten teacher, met a man and moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. When her husband wanted to return to Israel, they divorced, but they remain good friends.

In 1956 she came to the United States to visit an uncle who had survived the war and moved to San Francisco. “I wanted to find out if he was as small as me,” she laughs.

She settled in Washington Heights, which became an enclave for many German-Jewish refugees. She remarried, had a daughter, and divorced when her second husband returned to Europe.

Westheimer had long dreamed of going into medicine, but without a scientific background it seemed impossible. So she got a job in public health research at Columbia University and then became a project manager at Planned Parenthood. There she met the 2,000 women who would form the basis of her doctoral thesis on the use of contraceptives.

After a few years as a single mother, she met Fred Westheimer, a telecommunications engineer, to whom she would be married for almost 38 years. He adopted their daughter and together they had a son.

Westheimer received his PhD in Education in Colombia, focused on sex education, and studied with Helen Singer Kaplan, a pioneer in the field of sex therapy. In 1980 she was hired by local radio producers in New York to create a short weekly segment that answered the listeners’ most private questions. Her then-controversial show grew to two hours as audiences reacted to her dull talk of erections and orgasms. Her strong German accent and irreverent humor made her an icon of the era.

She has published 40 books, still teaches in Columbia, and speaks all over the world. She is out and about almost every evening, in the theater, at the opera or at a charitable event. She has a Twitter account, a YouTube channel and has new projects in the works. She has no intention of slowing down because she survived and continues to survive. “I lived while 1 1/2 million Jewish children died,” she says. “So I have an obligation to fix the world.”

Dr. Ruth with a doll that reminds her of the one she gave away to another child on a train from Nazi Germany in 1939. (Chris Sorensen / For The Washington Post)

Dr. Ruth has been a widow for almost 20 years now, and during that time her apartment – the same one she has lived in for five decades – is full of dolls and figures.

On a side table is a doll that looks very similar to the one she gave away – bright eyes, springy curls and delicate turtles embroidered on the white dress. It even has the same turtle badge on its back. Westheimer identifies with the turtle – a creature that carries its home on its back but has to stick its neck out to get on in life. She has had turtle figurines from all over the world, so many that her coffee table has to be rearranged to make room for a small glass of water.

Her parents and grandmother “would have been very happy to see what happened to me,” she says. And she is happy too, remembering the joys of her early childhood and the accomplishments of her life.

The darkness in which it does not linger. “But I don’t forget either,” she says.

Dr. Ruth’s Dollhouses Ruth Westheimer will speak about her life and dollhouses in the National Building Museum on Monday at 6:30 p.m. Tickets available at nbm.org.