The future Dr. Ruth Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Germany in 1928, the only child of an Orthodox Jewish couple. In 1939, after her father had been taken by the Nazis, her mother and grandmother sent her to Switzerland to get her out of harm's way. She did not see her family again, as they were murdered in the Holocaust.
Ruth was 17 with no home, family or country when WW II ended. Like many other Jewish Holocaust refugees, she moved to Israel (the Palestine). Ruth, dedicated to the building of a Jewish homeland, joined Haganah, an underground Jewish military organization. She served as a sniper. Says Dr. Ruth of that interval:
"When I was in my routine training for the Israeli army as a teenager, they discovered completely by chance that I was a lethal sniper. I could hit the target smack in the center further away than anyone could believe. Not just that, even though I was tiny and not even much of an athlete, I was incredibly accurate throwing hand grenades too. Even today I can load a Sten automatic rifle in a single minute, blindfolded."Her military career was cut short when she was seriously injured:
On her twentieth birthday, just 8 days after the Haganah was absorbed into the IDF, just as she finished up her watch, an Arab shell exploded at her feet, seriously injuring her.
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