Ruth Weiss may have lived for more than a century, but she never inured herself to injustice. The anger she felt at the inhumanity she saw around her fuelled her drive to keep writing and challenging oppression during her long, peripatetic life.

Weiss was a prolific author and journalist who bore witness to some of the 20th century's greatest crimes, from the antisemitism of Nazi Germany to the racism of apartheid South Africa.

"Mere chance took me from near Nuernberg to Johannesburg, to escape the Holocaust and muddle on through life in exile," she wrote in her memoir, A Path Through Hard Grass. "For this is the only permanent thing in my life: that I am a perpetual outsider."

She has died at the age of 101, said Thomas Jung, the mayor of her native city of Fuerth, on Friday.

Ruth L

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