|
Ruth Gruber: On the Cusp of History Dead at 105 Years of Age By Eve Berliner |
|
|
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. |
|
Ruth Gruber: On the Cusp of History 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.” |
|
