After Minsk was captured by German troops in June 1941, eleven-year-old Leonid Ruderman and his mother Lea were interned in the Minsk ghetto. His father Grigori Ruderman was fighting in the Red Army. The occupiers began systematically murdering ghetto inmates. Lea Ruderman therefore decided to smuggle Leonid out of the ghetto to give him a chance of survival. Her relative Mariya Gliot helped her by contacting her non-Jewish friend Nadezhda Kreso, who was willing to take the boy in. Leonid Ruderman was taken to her secretly in 1943.
Belarusian police officers one day came to look for him at the home of Nadeszhda Kreso and her mother Anna. The helpers persuaded the men not to take Leonid Ruderman away. They then took him to a forester friend in the countryside. However, Leonid fell sick and was brought back to Minsk. The Kresos hid him in their basement.
After Minsk was liberated in July 1944, Leonid’s rescuers looked for his parents but could not find them. His mother had been murdered in 1943 and his father had fallen in the war a year later. Leonid Ruderman stayed with Nadeszhda and Anna Kreso until he married in 1963.