Ruth was born Renee Friedman to a Czechoslovakian Jewish family that included doctors and rabbis. The Friedmans, she said, also owned a wholesale liquor business and ran a soup kitchen for those in need.

As World War II raged in the open, Nazi Germany secretly plotted to kill every European Jew, and the Third Reich’s genocide eventually reached the Friedmans.

They lost their business, then their home. And in May 1944 they were torn from each other, some forever.

Cohen’s mother, Bertha, her…