With her perfect memory (and plenty of zip), ninety-five-year-old Ruth
Gruber–adventurer, international correspondent, photographer, maker of
(and witness to) history, responsible for rescuing hundreds of
thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II and after–tells her
story in her own words and photographs.
Gruber’s life has been
extraordinary and extraordinarily heroic. She received a B.A. from New
York University in three years, a master’s degree from the University
of Wisconsin a year later, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cologne
(magna cum laude) one year after that, becoming at age twenty the
youngest Ph.D. in the world (it made headlines in The New York Times; the subject of her thesis: the then little-known Virginia Woolf).
At twenty-four, Gruber became an international correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune
and traveled across the Soviet Arctic, scooping the world and
witnessing, firsthand, the building of cities in the Siberian gulag by
the pioneers and prisoners Stalin didn’t execute . . . At thirty, she
traveled to Alaska for Harold L. Ickes, FDR’s secretary of the
interior, to look into homesteading for G.I.s after World War II . . .
And when she was thirty-three, Ickes assigned another secret mission to
her–one that transformed her life: Gruber escorted 1,000 Holocaust
survivors from Italy to America, the only Jews given refuge in this
country during the war. “I have a theory,” Gruber said, “that even
though we’re born Jews, there is a moment in our lives when we become
Jews. On that ship, I became a Jew.”
Gruber’s role as rescuer of Jewswas just beginning.
In Witness,
Gruber writes about what she saw and shows us, through her haunting and
life-affirming photographs–taken on each of her assignments–the worlds,
the people, the landscapes, the courage, the hope, the life she
witnessed up close and firsthand: the Siberian gulag of the 1930s and
the new cities being built there (Gruber, then untrained as a
photographer, brought her first Rolleicord with her) . . . the Alaska
highway of 1943, built by 11,000 soldiers, mostly black men from the
South (the highway went from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, 1,500
miles to Fairbanks) . . . her thirteen-day voyage on the army-troop
transport Henry Gibbins with refugees and wounded American
soldiers, escorting and then photographing the refugees as they arrived
in Oswego, New York (they arrived in upstate New York as Adolf Eichmann
was sending 750,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz).
In 1947, Gruber traveled for the Herald Tribune
with the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP)
through the postwar displaced persons camps in Europe, and then to
North Africa, Palestine, and the Arab world; the committee’s
recommendation that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and an
Arab state was one of the key factors that led to the founding of
Israel.
We see Gruber’s remarkable photographs of a former
American pleasure boat (which had been renamed Exodus
1947) as it limped into Haifa harbor, trying to deliver 4,500 Jewish
refugees (including 600 orphans), under attack by five British
destroyers and a cruiser that stormed the Exodus with guns, tear gas, and truncheons, while the crew of the Exodus fought back with potatoes, sticks, and cans of kosher meat. In a cable to the Herald Tribune,
Gruber reported that “the ship looks like a matchbox splintered by a
nutcracker.” She was with the people of the Exodus and photographed
them when they were herded onto three prison ships. Gruber represented
the entire American press aboard the ship Runnymede Park, photographing
the prisoners as they defiantly painted a swastika on the Union Jack.
During
her thirty-two years as a correspondent, Ruth Gruber photographed what
she saw and captured the triumph of the human spirit.
“Take photographs with your heart,” Edward Steichen told her.
Witness is a revelation–of a time, a place, a world, a spirit, a belief. It is, above all else, a book of heart.
About the author:
Ruth Gruber was born in 1911. She was a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune
from 1935 to 1967. In 1998, Gruber received a lifetime achievement
award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She is the
author of nineteen books, including I Went to the Soviet Arctic, Destination Palestine, Haven, Raquela, and Ahead of Time. She lives in New York City.
