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Ruth Gruber: On the Cusp of
History By Eve Berliner |
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Ruth Gruber, international
correspondent, photographer on the cusp of history, humanitarian of heroic
tenacity. Above, as special emissary
of the Roosevelt Administration documenting frontier life in Alaska, 1941. |
The exiles of Exodus 1947,
barred from entering Palestine by the British, await deportation back to
Germany. A flag of defiance is raised
overhead. |
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The Extraordinary History of Ruth Gruber By Eve Berliner Images that haunt the
mind – a hoisted flag, desperate eyes, outcries, pieces of time and memory,
Ruth Gruber, at 100 years of age, a wizened, rather beautiful little butterfly,
deep deep blue eyes peering into time, her wings outstretched, drawn to the
dispossessed of this earth, refugees of
Nazi death camps and fear, no one to give sanctuary. Her epiphany, the
harrowing voyage of The Exodus 1947,
a ship carrying 4,500 Jewish Holocaust survivors to British Mandate Palestine
in defiance of the British blockade.
Shadowed by British men-of-war and under constant threat, the Exodus was brutally attacked by a
British flotilla, leaving three dead, 150 injured. The war torn vessel limped into the Port of
Haifa, Gruber there with her camera to bear witness. In the end, the British refused them entry
and deported them back to Germany to the refugee camps of Elmden and
Wilhelmshaven. “I knew my life would be
inextricably bound by rescue and survival,” Ruth Gruber would utter. Ruth, on that final
tragic journey with the desolate, in her white suit and wide-brimmed straw
hat, amid the teeming masses on board the prison ship, Runnymede Park, a
mother figure to them all. Her powerful story and searing photographs of the
Jewish refugees surrounded on all sides by a barbed wire cage, raising the
Union Jack flag – the flag of Great Britain – upon which they had defiantly
painted the hated Swastika – was
published by the New York Herald Tribune on its front pages in Paris and New
York, picked up by the Associated Press, and seen around the world! It’s been an epic life. * * * It all began on
September 30, 1911 in Brooklyn, New York, Ruth, one of five children born to
Gussie and David Gruber, emigres from Russia with aspirations for their
daughter. They resided at 14 Harman
Street in Bushwick in an insular loving Jewish world and Ruth dreamed of
being a writer. Her father gave her a little upstairs space to work and
Greenwich Village on Harman Street was born.
A poet at age 15. But Ruth had to get
away. She had to get out of
Brooklyn. She had to get away from her
family and the cocoon where she couldn’t breathe. She loved her family but she needed to
break free. In 1931, Ruth won a
fellowship from the Institute of International Education to study in Cologne,
Germany where she lived with a German Jewish family, the Herz’s, and their
daughter, Louisa, and won a Ph.D in one year’s time from the University of
Cologne. At age 20 she became the youngest person in
the world to receive a doctorate.
The subject of her thesis: “Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create As A Woman.” Ruth was mesmerized by her courage to write
as a woman and believe in herself as a woman.
Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” became her bible. She would ultimately be invited to tea by
Virginia Woolf, the image of Virginia in her long silk gown lying in front of
the fireplace, a cigarette between her fingers, endures still; the letters
they exchanged, one of her life’s treasures. The most ominous,
portentous experience of her year-long stay in Germany, never to be erased
from the mind, was her attendance at an enormous Hitler rally in 1932. Hitler on the march, the Herz’s, her German
host family, near hysterical at her unyielding determination to go. She traveled by herself across the Rhine,
and there, in a huge fair grounds filled with hundreds of thousands of
people, she was seated in an area reserved for German citizens. She found herself remarkably close to the podium, surrounded
by tens of thousands of brown uniforms, SS troops with Swastikas emblazoned
on their arms. At last, the doors flung open and Hitler entered, surrounded
by thirty bodyguards. A total silence fell upon the stadium. No one dared to speak or move. She could never forget
that voice. It was unlike anything she
had ever heard . Piercing and almost subhuman, terrifying in its fever pitch
of emotion and evil, its mad crescendo
screamed over and over: “Death to the Jews. Death to America!” * * * Gruber returned to the United States and at
age 24 was personally asked by Helen Rogers Reid, publisher of The New York
Herald Tribune, to join that great paper’s staff as a special foreign
correspondent. Gruber became the first
foreign correspondent to fly through Siberia into the Soviet Arctic! The
year,1935. Stalin’s long rumored Gulag
was expanding. Gruber penetrated the
Siberian Gulag, interviewed Soviet political prisoners exiled in the Yakut
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of.Yakatsk. She interviewed and
photographed the exiles. There were said to be tens of thousands of prisoners
all over Yakutkia Republic, Gruber pushing deeply into the Soviet Arctic,
traveling to Igarka, near the Arctic Circle. With the outbreak of
World War II in 1941, Ruth Gruber was
asked by Harold L. Ickes, President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, to
become his special assistant. Shortly
thereafter, she was dispatched to Alaska!
The ostensible purpose of her
exploration was to determine the feasibility of homesteading wounded and
shell-shocked returning American soldiers to the Alaska Territory. Gruber documented frontier life and the
unique role of women, traveling the Alaska frontiers. She fell in love with Alaska. She became
enchanted with the Eskimos and their way of life, and the powerful role that
women played in their society. Upon her return to the
United States, the U.S. House of Representatives blocked the pay of Dr. Ruth
Gruber declaring, “It was time to stop the propaganda of Communism.” Her new book, “I Went to the Soviet
Arctic,” expressed “Communistic philosophy.” “Any of us who vote to
pay this woman’s salary is not fit to sit in the House of Representatives,:”
shouted Rep.Taber. Here is the book’s closing
sentence: “But I know that some
day I shall go back, and bathe again in the Yenisel at Molokov Island, take
midnight walks in Igarka, work with its newspaper people and pioneers, get up
at dawn at a polar station, swim in the Arctic Ocean and rush back to a
steaming breakfast shouting “Zdravstvuitye” until that full-mouthed greeting
seems to ring across the Arctic.” * * * In 1944, while war and
Holocaust raged, Gruber was assigned a secret mission to escort 1,000 Jewish
refugees from Europe to the United States, in what would be a harrowing
voyage of sanctuary. Acting on executive authority, President Roosevelt
secretly circumvented the government policy of strict quotas that kept our
doors effectively sealed against Eastern European Jews, and moved to give
shelter to 1,000 Jewish refugees. He dropped the project in the lap of
Interior Secretary Harold Ickes who assigned Ruth Gruber to lead the mission.
Ickes formally declared Gruber to be a General. In the event the military aircraft in which
she was flying to Europe was shot down by the Nazis, her life would be
protected by the Geneva Convention. Throughout the 13 day
rescue, the Army troop transport Henry
Gibbins was hunted by Nazi seaplanes and U-boats. In the end, the refugees were locked behind
a chain link fence with barbed wire at Fort Ontario in Oswego New, York, the
threat of deportation at war’s end a
cruel reality. Gruber fought on, lobbied for the United States to give
them permanent refuge. When the war ended the
Oswego refugees remained in America. This was the only
attempt by the United States government to shelter Jewish refugees during the
Second World War. * * * In 1946, Ted Thackrey,
editor in chief of The New York Post, asked Gruber to cover the work of a
newly created Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. The Committee was to decide the fate of
100,000 Jewish refugees who were living in European camps as displaced
persons, [DPs]. The Commission traveled throughout Europe, Palestine and the
Arab countries for four months, collecting testimony in Munich, Cairo,
Jerusalem, Tyre [Lebanon], Haifa, Baghdad and Saudi Arabia [Gruber not
permitted entry] – with another month
of deliberation in Switzerland. They
toured the displaced person camps of Germany, many filled with orphaned
children. They went to Dachau. They attended the Nuremberg Trials of the
German war criminals, Gruber staring into the face of Hermann Goering, head
of the German Luftwaffe, dressed in his immaculate blue uniform stripped of
its medals. Ben Gurion testified
before the Commission, as did Chaim Weizman and Golda Meir. In the end, the twelve members of the Commission
unanimously agreed that Britain must allow 100,000 Jewish immigrants to
settle in Palestine. President Harry
Truman implored Great Britian to open the doors of British Mandate of
Palestine. But the British Foreign
Minister, Ernest Bevin, would not relent.
Britain renounced its
Mandate over Palestine. It no longer
wanted to rule. The nascent United
Nations created its own Committee – the United Nations Special Committee on
Palestine – UNSCOP. Tribune
owner Helen Reid assigned Gruber to accompany UNSCOP as a special foreign
correspondent, traveling, once again, to Europe, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon
and Syria. On November 29, 1947,
the 58 members who comprised the United Nations General Assembly began voting
on the Partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab entities, Gruber,
in the press section overlooking the proceedings, as 33 nations including the
United States of America and the Soviet Union, voted Yes, 13 No votes,
largely from the Arab states, 10 Abstentions, Great Britain among them. The State of Israel was
born. * * * Through the ensuing
years, Ruth’s work has remained relentless – covering the Yemenite “magic
carpet,” transporting of 50,000 Yemenite Jews to refuge in Israel on “wings
of eagles,”[1949], the secret
airlift of 120,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel,
[1951], the North African exodus
off the coast of Tunisia and the ingathering of Jews from Romania, the Soviet
Union and Ethiopia [1951 to 1988]. Ruth would be the chronicler of every major
Jewish emigration to Israel. * * * The little birch bark
cradle had been given as a gift to
Ruth in 1935 by an old woman named Marfa Mokhaolovna in a small village near
Yakutsk in the Soviet Arctic. The 104-year-old Yakut
woman castigated her for not being married and warned her sternly, “Don’t
wait too long.” She brought out a
beautiful birch bark cradle and said she had rocked every one of her 20
children in that cradle. It was
constructed of birch bark ingeniously carved to fit a baby’s body. There was a hole at bottom’s end which
emptied into a birch bark potty. “It’s yours,” said the
old woman. Ruth carried Marfa’s
cradle back to New York and sixteen years later rocked her own children,
Celia and David, in it, who passed the revered tradition along to Ruth’s
grandchildren, Michael and Lucy, her
daughter’s children, Joel and Lila, her son’s. An unconventional spirit,
, Ruth Gruber married Philip H. Michaels at the age of 40 in 1951. He is the
father of her children. Her second
marriage to Dr. Henry J Rosner in 1974, occurred after her first husband’s
death. Ruth Gruber is the
author of 19 books about the worlds she has traveled and the history she has
witnessed. She was honored in 2010 by the International Center of
Photography with a major exhibition of a lifetime of her photographic work.
She is the subject of a searching and acclaimed. 2010 documentary portrait
entitled, “Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber.” Ruth Gruber, one of the
great humanitarians of the 20th century, a renowned
photojournalist of immense poignancy and power, fearless. There is in Ruth a
deeply felt sense of self as a Jew, as a woman, and as a human being. She was
a feminist pioneer of immense courage, her life consumed by rescue, sanctuary
and liberation of the victimized, the hunted, her dedication to the fate of
those she covered profound. Her great hurt, she would
tell the New York Times in February of 2001,
is that the United States of America did not act to give refuge to the
desperate, top officials of the State Department deliberately, delaying the
visas of Jews, the visas of thousands of people who ultimately perished in
Nazi concentration camps, a tacit acquiesence by the United States government
to the annihilation of Jews. “They knew what was
going on. They knew about the death
camps. They could have saved hundreds of thousands. “The indifference haunts
me, it haunts me every day.” |
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