Ruth Katharina Martha Pfau, the fourth of five daughters, was born on Sept. 9, 1929, in Leipzig, in eastern Germany, to Walter and Martha Pfau.
As a teenager, she barely survived Allied bombing, which severely damaged her home during World War II.
She was inspired to become a doctor shortly after the war, when her baby brother became ill and died. She escaped from the Soviet Occupation Zone in 1948 and followed her father to Wiesbaden, in West Germany, to study gynecology at the University of Mainz and in Marburg.
At college, after meeting an elderly Christian concentration camp survivor who had devoted the rest of her life to preaching love and forgiveness, she rejected a marriage proposal from a fellow student. She was baptized in the evangelical tradition, converted to Catholicism and joined the Society of Daughters of the Heart of Mary in 1957.
When you receive such a calling, you cannot turn it down, for it is not you who has made the choice, she told The Express Tribune. For it is not you who has made the choice. God has chosen you for himself.
She arrived in Vellore, India, in 1961 for training, then returned to Pakistan to organize a leprosy-control program and, with Dr. Zarina Fazelbhoy, one of her many collaborators, a tutorial for paramedics.
Even after she gave up the directorship of the center in 2006, she lived in a single room there, rising at 5 a.m. to fulfill her obligations as a nun and, beginning at 8 a.m., tending to patients and running interference with government bureaucrats.
