Ruth Moser Borsos (1923–1999) was born in Frankfurt, Germany. She was 9 years old when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany. She experienced antisemitism in school and witnessed the effects of the Nazis' antisemitic policies. After Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass") in November 1938, Ruth immigrated to the Netherlands. There, she joined her father, who was divorced from her mother. Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. In late 1943, Ruth was imprisoned in the Westerbork transit camp, where she had to perform forced labor. Her father acquired passports claiming that they had Paraguayan citizenship. In September 1944, Ruth and her father were sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany along with other people who held Paraguayan papers. As the war came to an end, they were transferred to another camp, where they were liberated in April 1945.
In the camp we were put to work, real silly work. We had to carry sand from one place to the other. It didn't make sense, but we had to do it, and as time went by they organized us into a variety of tasks, what we had to do. Well, I was really delegated to a place where we were sewing clothing, again sewing clothing, for...I'm not quite sure for whom it was. That was the whole day. Sometimes we would...I worked at a Dutch, but this was a Nazi, a Dutch Nazi farmer's farm. He had us clean out the pig sties. He had us work around his farm, clean up certain things. He had us work in the potato fields, or whatever so that he didn't have so much...we were slaves to him. He profited from from the camp being so nearby and from being a Nazi and collaborating with the Germans. And as a reward he would sit us with the chickens in the yard and give us a watery soup. That was the meal for the day.
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