Vesna Domany was born in May 1941 to a Jewish family in Zagreb. Only one month earlier, the fascist organization Ustasha took power in the “Independent State of Croatia” and began persecuting the Jews. When Vesna Domany was three months old, her father Rudolf was arrested and murdered. In 1942, her mother Eva Domany joined a partisan unit and gave one-year-old Vesna into the care of her non-Jewish friend Ruža Fuchs. Vesna Domany lived from then on with Ruža Fuchs, her husband Otto, and their daughter Silva. In 1943 the Fuchs’s had a second daughter, Milana. Ruža Fuchs was Catholic and her husband was Jewish, but the marriage initially protected him from persecution. In 1944 Otto Fuchs was nevertheless murdered. Ruža Fuchs continued to give loving care to Vesna Domany.
In 1945, Vesna Domany’s mother returned and picked her up. Vesna Hardy, her married name, always remained in contact with Ruža Fuchs and her daughters. In 1989, Ruža Fuchs was honored by the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.