Ruth Aliav-Klüger (née Polisiuk) was born in Kiev, Ukraine (then under Tsarist Russian rule) on April 27, 1910. She was the youngest child in a family of eight. Her father, a horse trader, disappeared before she knew him. While she was visiting her grandmother and her mother’s sisters as a toddler, in a (Yiddish) Small-town Jewish community in Eastern Europe.shtetl  near Kamieniec Podolski (Ukraine), the battles of World War I reached their area. The shtetl was occupied and Aliav-Klüger lost contact with her immediate family. The young child and her aunts were forced to leave their home and wander from place to place as refugees. While fleeing, the child witnessed brutal pogroms against Jews, which became deeply engraved in her memory. Seven years later, she was reunited with her mother, brother, and sisters in Czernowitz (until 1918, under Austrian rule and later under Romania). There she attended elementary school and gimnazjum and became a member of the Zionist-socialist Ha-Shomer ha-Za’ir youth movement. After completing high school, she took up the study of law in Vienna, but left before taking the final examinations.

In school and in her travels, she displayed a flair for languages, becoming fluent in Russian, Yiddish, German, Romanian, French, English, Spanish, and Hebrew. She later mastered Portuguese as well.

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Late in World War II Aliav-Klüger was among the first representatives of the Yishuv to meet with Holocaust survivors on European soil and come to the aid of the she’erit ha-pletah (surviving remnant). During this period she was in direct contact with David Ben-Gurion, carrying out his personal instructions. As in her previous assignments, she displayed great resolve and, through her contacts with civilian and military authorities, succeeded in improving conditions for the survivors. Among other things, she helped collect Jewish children from monasteries in France, traveled to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp a week after its liberation, and assisted in conducting a A seven-day festival to commemorate the Exodus from Egypt (eight days outside Israel) beginning on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan. Also called the "Festival of Mazzot"; the "Festival of Spring"; Pesah.Pesah Lit. "order." The regimen of rituals, songs and textual readings performed in a specific order on the first two nights (in Israel, on the first night) of Passover.seder after the war for 4,000 children, among them the “Buchenwald children,” and a group of 217 children that she assembled in Berlin.

In 1947 she returned to Palestine, but soon afterwards (in early 1948) embarked on another Mosad mission, this time to raise funds in South America. She was in the United States when the State of Israel was declared. During this period, she changed her last name to Aliav, an acronym for Aliyah Bet.

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with Mann, Peggy. The Last Escape: The Launching of the Largest Secret Rescue Movement of all Time. New York: Doubleday, 1973.

with Mann, Peggy. The Secret Ship. New York: Doubleday, 1978.