Ruta Wermuth was born in 1928 in the small town of Kolomyja in the Stanisław Voivodship in eastern Poland. Ruta's parents ran a small shop in the center of the town and led a comfortable, middle-class life. Ruta had two older brothers, Paweł and Izrael (nicknamed Salek).

Although Ruta's formal education was interrupted by the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 and the German invasion in 1941, the books provided by her brothers inspired her lifelong love of reading and later influenced her career path.
In 1941, when she was just 13 years old, she and her family were forced by the Germans to move to the local ghetto. Paweł was shot by the Germans in Szeparowce and Salek escaped the German invasion by following the retreating Russians. Ruta and her parents were deported to the Belzec death camp. They managed to escape from the death train through a hole in a cattle wagon, but her father was killed in the process.
Ruta's mother successfully assumed a false identity to get a job as a maid in a local manor house, but she could not keep her daughter because she had no documents. Ruta decided to adopt a false identity and go to the last place the Nazis would look for her - for work in Germany.
Ruta survived until the end of the war, working various jobs in West Germany: in a shoe factory, in the household of a wealthy German, and at the BMW factory in Allach (near Munich). In the last place of work, she met her future husband, the Pole Witek Burak.
Ruta wondered whether to reveal her true identity to the Pole who had shown her kindness in Germany. However, Witek was very much in love with her and, her Jewish origin did not prevent them from planning their future together. After the war, they returned to Poland and settled in a small town in Dolny Śląsk. Witek worked as an engineer in the local spinning mill, while Ruta, after finishing her secondary school education, ran a bookshop. They had two daughters.
Ruta learned during the war that her mother had died - most probably she had been exposed by the Germans and murdered. After the war, Ruta searched for the only family member who might still be alive - her older brother Salek.
Through a series of meetings and correspondence with friends in New York and Israel, she discovered that Salek had also survived the war and had become a respected journalist and correspondent. During the war, he took the new name Victor Zorza and settled in England. In 1994, after 53 years of separation, they met again, first over the phone and then when Ruta visited Victor in England. More about Ruta's story you can read in the presentation below.