In 1941, when she was just 13 years old, the German occupiers moved the family first to the local ghetto, and then herded them onto a cattle train bound for the death camp of Belzec.
Her mother subsequently managed to assume a false identity to get a position as a maid in a local Manor House, but was unable to keep Rut since she had no papers.
Rut survived for the rest of the war working in various positions in western Germany; at a shoe factory, in the household of a well connected German, and at the BMW plant in Allach (near Munich).
Like Rut, he had taken an assumed name during the war, Victor Zorza, and had settled in England, where he wrote for The Guardian newspaper, and was famous for having an uncanny understanding of the inner workings of the Kremlin.
Rut wrote her memoirs, and in September 1999, the Polish version of "Spotkałam ludzi" ("Encounters with the Decent")[1] won the David Ben Gurion Centenary Grand Prize.