Ruth Michaelis had to break off her training as a fashion illustrator and instead perform forced labor in Berlin, since she was Jewish. She was arrested during the large-scale raid on February 27, 1943, and taken to the Hermann Göring Barracks. She managed to escape from there the following night, and lived “illegally” from then on.
She and her friends Ernst Schwerin and Gerd Ehrlich, both also in hiding, took a train to Singen in early October 1943. The Berlin widow Luise Meier accompanied them from the station to Josef Höfler, who lived very close to the border to Switzerland. Meier and Höfler had previously helped several people at risk to escape Germany. Höfler led the three escapees to the border and gave them precise instructions so they would not be discovered by guards. After walking about half a mile (one kilometer), they reached Swiss soil on October 9, 1943.
In Schaffhausen, they were interrogated by the Swiss police. While Michaelis was put into a refugee camp in Schaffhausen, Schwerin and Ehrlich were taken to a labor camp in Baselland. After the war, Ruth Michaelis remained in Switzerland and in 1945 married the chemist Rudolf Borth, also originally from Germany.