Rut Wermuth

An English translation of the book under the title "Leap for Life" was published in 2010.

Rut Wermuth-Burak is a Polish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, whose life story was published in Polish as "Spotkałam Ludzi", ("Encounters with the Decent") in 2002, and in English as "Leap for Life" in 2010.

Rut wrote her memoirs, and in September 1999, the Polish version of "Spotkałam ludzi" ("Encounters with the Decent") won the David Ben Gurion Centenary Grand Prize. The memoirs were also published in German in 2006, and Rut has spoken to many schoolchildren in Germany and Poland about her experiences.

Through a series of meetings and correspondence with friends in New York and Israel, she discovered that Salek had also survived the war, and gone on to be a respected journalist and commentator. 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. In 1994 after 53 years apart, they were reunited, first over the telephone, and then as Rut visited Victor in England.

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 two brothers had earlier been separated from the family; Pawel had been executed by the Germans in the Szeparowce forest while Salek had fled the German invasion, following the retreating Russians. Rut and her parents managed to escape the death train through a hole in the side of their cattle compartment, but during the course of their escape her father was killed.

Rut Wermuth was born in 1928 in the small town of Kołomyja, Stanislawowskie in eastern Poland. She was born to Jewish parents who ran a delicatessen in the center of the town, and kept a comfortable middle-class household. Rut had two older brothers- Pawel and Israel (nicknamed Salek). Though Rut's formal education was interrupted by the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 and the German invasion of Poland in 1941, the books that her brothers provided inspired a lifelong love of reading, and later influenced her career path.