Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4 , 1928 , in Wiesenfeld ( now part of Karlstadt am Main ) , Germany , the only child of Orthodox Jews , Irma ( née Hanauer ) , a housekeeper , and Julius Siegel , a notions wholesaler and son of the family for whom Irma worked . She was given an early grounding in Judaism by her father , who took her regularly to the synagogue in the Nordend district of Frankfurt , where they lived . In January 1939 , she was sent by her mother and grandmother to an orphanage of a Jewish charity in Heiden , Switzerland after her father had been taken by the Nazis — her last memory of him was seeing his arrest and removal the morning after Kristallnacht . She stopped receiving her parents ' letters in September 1941 . In 1945 , Westheimer learned that her parents had been killed in the Holocaust , possibly at the Auschwitz concentration camp
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Ruth Westheimer