Ruth Gruber

Bio

Ruth Gruber experienced the defining moment of her life on a U.S. military boat, traveling from Italy to the United States in 1944 during the height of World War II. She had been appointed by Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, whose special assistant she was, to escort 1,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to America. She was 33 years old and traveling as a “surrogate general” in the army because, Ickes explained, “If you're shot down and the Germans capture you as a civilian, they can kill you as a spy. But as a general, according to the Geneva Convention, they have to give you food and shelter and keep you alive. “

Recording the stories, on this dangerous journey, of how the refugees had survived (she often had to stop because tears were wiping out the words in her notebook), she knew that she would be bound up with rescuing refugees the rest of her life. She said that the refugees, many of whom had been on the run since 1933, were “walking witnesses of Hitler's atrocities.”

In 1983 she told the story in her book, Haven: The Unknown Story of 1000 World War II Refugees. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had “invited” the 1000 refugees to visit America, with the understanding that they would be returned to Europe after the war. They were taken to a barbed-wire-surrounded camp in Oswego, N.Y. After the war, she, Harold Ickes and Eleanor Roosevelt lobbied to permit them to remain in America. Many of these immigrants became famous for their contributions to American society, “symbols,” Gruber said, “of what immigrants can do for this country.”

Ruth Gruber was born to Russian immigrant parents in 1911 in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. She graduated from New York University at 18 and received her Ph.D. from the University in Cologne (Germany) at the age of 20. According to The New York Times, she was the youngest Ph.D. in the world. In 1935, she traveled to the Soviet arctic, the first foreign correspondent allowed to fly into Siberia. She lived among prisoners, many of them Jews, in Stalin's gulag while completing a study on women under fascism, communism and democracy. Her book, I Went to the Soviet Arctic, 1939, brought her to the attention of Harold Ickes. Ickes sent her to Alaska to make a social and economic study for the Department of the Interior. For 19 months she covered the country by plane, train, truck, paddle-wheel steamer and dogsled.

After World War II, she worked as foreign correspondent for the New York Post, reporting on the condition of Jewish refugees in European displaced persons camps. While covering the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine in Jerusalem, she learned of the expected arrival of the British-besieged ship Exodus in Haifa. From the port, she watched British soldiers transfer 4,500 refugees from a ship (made to hold 400 people) that looked as if it had been “crushed by a giant nutcracker.”

When they were transported to Cyprus to join 52,000 other Jewish refugees in filthy camps, Gruber followed. The British decided to return the 4,500 refugees to Germany; Gruber was one of three journalists allowed to follow them. Her photograph of the refugees raising a British flag with the Nazi swastika painted on it was LIFE Magazine's “Picture of the Week.” She watched the refugees being forcibly removed from the Exodus with a young Hagannah soldier who said, “Now you're seeing the birth of a nation.” The refugees were eventually smuggled out of the German camps and reached Palestine in the same month that the country became Israel. Gruber's book, Destination Palestine: The Story of the Hagannah Ship Exodus, 1947 (1948), recounted the story.

In 1951, at the age of 40, Ruth Gruber married for the first time and had two children. She continued to work as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Gruber said she had two tools with which she could help Jewish refugees, her typewriter and her camera. She covered each new wave of immigrants to Israel-the Iraqis, Yemenites, Romanians, Russians and Ethiopians.

In 1978 she spent a year in Israel writing a biography of an Israeli nurse who had worked in a British detention camp and in a hospital in the desert frontier of Beersheba. This book, Raquela: A Woman of Israel, won the National Jewish Book Award in 1979 for the Best Book on Israel.

She was 74 when she traveled to isolated Jewish villages in Ethiopia to assist in the rescue of Ethiopian Jews. These experiences appeared in her book, Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews in 1987. In 1991 she published an autobiographical novel, Ahead of My Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent.

This remarkable woman has received numerous awards, including the Na'amat Golda Meir Human Rights Award for her life's work; several prestigious awards from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance for a lifetime of rescuing Jews; and the Institute of International Education's First Annual Fritz Redlich Alumni Award. Her experience with the secret U.S. government mission which brought 1000 Jewish refugees into America in 1944 was dramatized in “Haven,” a CBS miniseries starring Natasha Richardson in 2001. At 93, Ruth Gruber's energy, enthusiasm and humanitarian vision still glow strong.

Appearances on CUNY TV

Jewish Women in America