"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 Jews was 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 corresponde"
