The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies will screen the film, “Ask Dr. Ruth,” on Friday, September 20 at 1:45 p.m. in the Trustees Pavilion (PAV1&2) at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The program is free and open to the public.

Directed by Ryan White, the Hulu Original Documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth, tells the story of how Karola Ruth Siegel, of Frankfurt, Germany the only member of her Jewish family to survive the Holocaust, became the 91-year-old author, therapist and media personality known throughout North America for her outspoken and frank advice on all matters sexual.

In the film, Westheimer speaks openly about her three marriages (the third, to Fred Westheimer, was the longest and happiest), and her children and grandchildren. We learn about how she was consistently ahead of her time- from her advocacy of choice and compassion for the gay community during the height of the AIDS crisis in 1980s to her open and sympathetic discussion of LGBT issues more recently.

Partly through compelling sequences from her diaries, we also learn how she at the age of 10, her parents arranged for to be sent to an orphanage in Switzerland as part of the Kindertransport  to being a decade later a sniper in Israel’s war of independence, nearly losing her legs when an artillery shell exploded right next to her.