Witness Read online

  ALSO BY RUTH GRUBER

  Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman

  Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel

  Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent

  “Exodus 1947 ”: The Ship That Launched a Nation

  Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews

  Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America

  Raquela: A Woman of Israel

  They Came to Stay

  Felisa Rincon de Gautier: The Mayor of San Juan

  Israel on the Seventh Day

  Science and the New Nations

  Puerto Rico: Island of Promise

  Israel Today: Land of Many Nations

  Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship “Exodus 1947 ”

  Israel Without Tears

  Alaska

  I Went to the Soviet Arctic

  Virginia Woolf: A Study

  To my four grandchildren,

  Michael Evans and Lucy Evans,

  Joel Michaels and Lila Michaels,

  who give me more joy and pride

  than I can tell them.

  Contents

  Foreword by Richard Holbrooke

  Preface

  1. The Soviet Arctic / 1935–1936

  2. Alaska / 1941–1943

  3. World War II and the Oswego Refugees / 1944–1946

  4. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine and the Nuremberg Trials / 1946

  5. UNSCOP, the Exodus, and Prison Camps in Cyprus / 1947

  6. The Birth of Israel and the War of Independence / 1947–1948

  7. The Yemenite Jews Fly to Israel on “Wings of Eagles” / 1949

  8. Operation Ezra and Nehemiah: 120,000 Iraqi Jews Secretly Escape to Israel / 1951

  9. The Ingathering of Jews from Romania, the Soviet Union, and Ethiopia / 1951–1986

  Foreword by Richard Holbrooke

  You could not invent Ruth Gruber, not even in a movie (although Natasha Richardson did play her in Haven, a movie based on her efforts to save refugees in the middle of World War II). But Ruth Gruber is very real; she is ninety-five, and she lives in a splendid apartment on New York's Central Park West.

  Visitors to apartments on Central Park West usually look first at the magnifi-cent views of the great park. But a visitor to Ruth's apartment will hardly look outside. It is what is inside the apartment that commands attention. The walls are covered—and I mean covered—with art and artifacts from her life: folk art and mementos from Alaska and Ethiopia and Israel; works of art by Chagall and Mir; photographs of Ruth with Eleanor and Hillary and Golda, with FDR and Ben-Gurion and Hammarskjld and Truman and Ickes; letters from grateful people who owe their lives to Ruth; testimonials and awards from the great and near-great; pictures of her children and grandchildren. And at the center of all this history is an astonishing sight: a tiny, ninety-five-year-old dynamo who rushes around answering the telephone, opening the door, quickly finding exact passages from books in her vast library to illustrate specific points. She remembers everything, swiftly correcting me, for example, on how we first met (through my wife, Kati Marton, she reminds me, who interviewed her for a book on George Polk, the CBS correspondent murdered in Greece in 1948).

  If our nation had officially designated living national treasures (as Japan does), Ruth Gruber would certainly be among them. Her career has spanned eight decades, and while she proudly broke the gender barrier time and time again, she never sought recognition simply for being a woman; as her niece, Dava Sobel, wrote in the introduction to the 2000 reissue of Haven, “Ruth pioneered without even realizing that she was spearheading a movement.” (Sobel was referring to the fact that Ruth had her first child when she was forty-one, at a time when late motherhood was considered dangerous and in slightly bad form.) Ruth could have been a big star, in the modern sense of the celebrity-journalist, but she never sought personal publicity, although as an attractive and very young woman who many thought resembled Myrna Loy, she got a lot of attention— which she knew how to use to gain often unprecedented access to people and stories.

  But Ruth's primary interest was the fate of the people she covered. She was invariably drawn to the downtrodden, the forgotten, the drive-by victims of history. When she heard in January 1944 that President Roosevelt would finally permit one thousand refugees into the United States, she was a special assistant to the legendary Harold Ickes, FDR's secretary of the Interior, working first as his field representative for Alaska and then as his special assistant. Within hours she was in Ickes's office, asking to be sent to Italy to escort the refugees on a secret convoy across the Atlantic. Thus the experiences that became the book, and later the movie, Haven.

  Her fearlessness had been established long before that. She had gone to Germany to study in the early 1930s, seen the rise of Hitler, and returned to New York at the age of twenty a minor sensation, billed by The New York Times and other newspapers as “the world's youngest Ph.D.” She wrote her doctoral thesis for Cologne University on Virginia Woolf; it was probably the first scholarly study done on the great British writer. (For this achievement she was summoned to a meeting with the mayor of Cologne, a man named Konrad Adenauer, and three years later she met the great writer herself, who described the meeting in her own diaries and letters in vaguely antiSemitic and highly snobbish terms.) Her thesis was finally published in the United States in 2005. Unable to find a full-time job despite her achievements, she talked her way into “special assignments” for the New York Herald Tribune.

  In 1935 and 1936 she managed to visit the closed Soviet Far East, penetrating the local branch of Stalin's secret police in Yakutsk, in the heart of the gulag, to the amazement of her jealous male colleagues. Her articles changed her more than they changed the gulag or her readers; they unleashed her lifelong concern for the oppressed, the voiceless, the homeless.

  But Ruth Gruber was Jewish, and after her early experiences in Germany— even though she had originally loved Germany, its language, and its culture— the mid-century crisis of the Jews gradually became her primary concern. Starting with her covert mission for Ickes and FDR nine years later, Ruth would become the chronicler of every major Jewish emigration to Israel—from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Romania, Russia and Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union, and finally from Ethiopia, where, in her mid-seventies, she scrambled up and down muddy fields to find Jews living in dangerous and terrible conditions in the highlands. As well, she would witness the struggle of the Jews to create their own homeland, and she would become a passionate supporter of Israel.

  If Ruth had done nothing else in her remarkable life, she would still be remembered, of course, for her book on a desperate group of Jews who kept trying to get into pre-Israel Palestine on an aging ship they had renamed the Exodus 1947. From her journalistic, factual account (which she originally called Destination Palestine), Leon Uris got an unforgettable title and the general plotline for his famous novel and the film that followed. Uris's one-word book title took on a new meaning in English, a shorthand for the painful, seemingly endless quest of Jews for a homeland.

  In the book you hold in your hands, Ruth has chosen the best photographs of her long career. The selection, her editor, Victoria Wilson, has told me, was extremely difficult and often painful. The pictures of the Soviet Arctic and the gulag and Alaska record a world gone forever. And the photographs of the terrible ordeals suffered by Jews trying to make their way to Israel, from the Exodus to Ethiopia, bear essential witness to the painful birth throes of the Jewish state. But in the end, Ruth and her editor made a brilliant selection. Scenes that once seemed ordinary have taken on, with the passage of the years, an iconic character, summing up lost worlds. Look at them again: they are anythin
g but ordinary. Study the faces—whether of Eastern Europeans who survived Hitler's death camps, or of young, confident Israelis ready to fight for their country, or of Ethiopian Jews yearning for their children who have made the dangerous voyage to Israel. Ordinary people, fighting for dignity and survival. Ruth Gruber's lens also captures the greats, especially the leaders of Israel, as they begin their fight for survival. Side by side, the ordinary and the great: the effect is powerful.

  A few years ago, Ruth asked me to write a preface for the reissue of her book on the Exodus, but when I became the American ambassador to the United Nations, the State Department told me to withdraw the preface on the grounds that it might be of commercial benefit to her publisher. At the time I told Ruth that while more and more books were coming out about the Holocaust and about Israel, the three-year period between the end of World War II and the creation of the state of Israel was a dark hole in history. Ruth has done an immense amount to lift the curtain. In the four months she spent covering the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine in 1946, and again with the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in 1947, Ruth preserved essential history in her notebooks and photographs. Look again at her famous photograph of the Nazi swastika, painted by angry Jewish refugees over a British Union Jack. Look at it, and weep.

  Of course one cannot leave the sunny apartment on Central Park West without asking the obvious questions. Ruth knows what they are, and her answers are quick, decisive, and to the point. Most impressive person she ever met? That's easy—David Ben-Gurion: “both a dreamer and a practical man.” Most exceptional woman? Even easier—Eleanor Roosevelt: “such simplicity and humility.” What about Franklin Roosevelt? Ruth pauses for a moment. “He was a great president,” she says, “in so many ways. But he was bad on refugees.” She smiles and tells a story about how reporters covering the White House, knowing FDR did not permit women to attend his press conferences, pushed her to the very front of the group surrounding the president's desk (presidential press conferences were then just a group of reporters milling around the president's desk) in order to make FDR squirm. “I was so close I could see his crooked teeth.” And, after another pause, Ruth said to me, “Franklin and Eleanor could not have been less alike.”

  It is time for me to go. The phone is ringing, and someone is at the door. But the apartment is filled with things that I have not yet sufficiently examined. There are still so many stories to hear. Ruth has a lot more to teach us, not only about the great people and historic events that she has seen but also about how to live a rich and fulfilled life, a life that has made a difference.

  Preface

  There are so many people to whom I owe gratitude, and so many organizations that have helped shape the contents of this book, that I believe the best way to start is to thank the Institute of International Education for giving me an exchange fellowship from 1931 to 1932 to the University of Cologne. My search for knowledge, my love of adventure, and my passion to fight injustice were fueled in that fateful year, attending Hitler's rallies and watching his rise to power.

  I owe special thanks to the American Arctic explorer and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson for his letter of recommendation in 1935 to the leaders of the Soviet Arctic, which helped me cover that little-known part of the world.

  My gratitude and love go to Helen Rogers Reid, the owner of the New York Herald Tribune, for appointing me the paper's special foreign correspondent covering the Soviet Arctic.

  My five years of working for Harold L. Ickes, secretary of the Interior, from 1941 to 1946, changed the course of my life. Ickes gave me assignments that I shall always cherish, such as the opportunity in 1944 to help rescue one thousand refugees while war and Holocaust raged. Through that experience I realized that from then on my life would be inextricably bound up with rescue and survival.

  In 1942, after returning from an assignment in Alaska and attending Eleanor Roosevelt's press conferences for women only, I began to draft answers to the poignant letters she was receiving from soldiers still serving there, who wanted information on how to homestead when the war ended. Our friendship continued when she came to the refugee camp in Oswego, New York, with her friend Elinor Morgenthau, the wife of Henry J. Morgenthau, Jr., secretary of the Treasury. It deepened in 1952 when I shepherded her in Israel to a development town where the refugees greeted her as “the Queen of America.” She wanted to learn firsthand how the new state was absorbing the new immigrants in these first hectic years of Israel's life. I will never forget how the immigrants responded to her compassion.

  No one has done more for this book than Victoria (Vicky) Wilson, vice president of Alfred A. Knopf. We first met on December 1, 2004, when a documentary on Eleanor Roosevelt, in which I appeared, was being shown at the United Federation of Teachers headquarters in New York City. Allida Black, project director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Foundation, asked me to participate on a panel with the two other women in the film. I have warm memories of working with Maureen Corr, who was Eleanor's private secretary for the last ten years of her life, and with Charlotte Klein, a well-known public relations executive.

  “How many people do you expect?” I asked Allida.

  “We've had about thirty-five responses.”

  I wondered if I could give up an evening working on my Virginia Woolf book for an audience of thirty-five people. But for Eleanor? Of course I would do it.

  When I taxied down to the teachers' union headquarters, I discovered there were not thirty-five attendees. There were more than a hundred Eleanor Roosevelt scholars and aficionados.

  The three of us from the film sat with the audience, watching and nodding at one another occasionally as if to say, “This is pretty good.”

  When the movie ended, we were invited to the stage to answer questions. They came from people who obviously adored Eleanor and who knew much of her writing, of her struggles, and of her commitment to human rights. At the end, the audience gave us a standing ovation. We were walking down the steps of the stage when a tall, handsome woman stopped me.

  “I'm Vicky Wilson,” she said. “You made me cry twice, first during the documentary and then during the questions and answers. You're a good storyteller. Have you ever written a book?”

  I looked up at her and mumbled, “I'm working on a book about Virginia Woolf. It's my eighteenth.” (In Hebrew, the number eighteen means “life.”)

  “I would like to do a book with you,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, I'm loyal to my editor, Philip Turner, at Carroll and Graf.”

  “ ‘Loyal,' ” she repeated, as if she were holding an archaeological artifact in her hand. “I would never want to interfere with you and your editor.”

  My friend Patti Kenner, active in the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Foundation, leaned across me, her face close to Vicky's. “Why don't you do a book of Ruth's photographs?”

  Later Patti told me that she had been standing in the back of the room with Regina Tierney, the videographer who had made the documentary. Regina had told her, “You see that woman talking with your friend Ruth? She does the best photography books in the country.”

  Patti continued talking to Vicky excitedly. “Ruth has some wonderful photographs. Some were even in Life magazine and in their Time-Life war books.”

  “I want to see those photos. Give me your phone number.”

  By the time Vicky arrived at 3 p.m. the following Tuesday afternoon, my research assistant, Maressa Gershowitz, had covered a long coffee table in my living room with photo albums, Kodachrome slides, and a stack of labeled file folders filled with hundreds of black-and-white photos.

  Vicky began sorting through them with the expert eye of a seasoned editor. With a little red label she marked each picture she wanted to consider. At the same time, she kept making remarks that made the blood rush to my head. “Look at the eyes of those children. How did you capture that? Your pictures are filled with life. Some of your children's pictures are classic. We've got to do a
book of these photographs.”

  She came to my apartment nearly every Tuesday afternoon for six months and selected more than a thousand photographs. Then she began the task of winnowing them down to 190.

  Several months later, she called me from her farm in the Catskills. “You should be flattered. I'm down to 450, and I'm having a hard time. Every time I put a child's photo aside, I pull it back. ‘No,' I tell myself, ‘I have to have it in the book, I just can't take out any more.” She paused. “There will be too many photos if we have 450.”

  Finally she made her selection of the 190 photos that fill this volume.

  Some editors can be warm, wise, and encouraging; others can be hard, arrogant, and pretentious. Most of my editors, especially my two present ones, Philip Turner, at Carroll & Graf, and Victoria Wilson, at Alfred A. Knopf, are among the most skillful and knowledgeable people I know. When Philip heard that Vicky was working on this book, he told me, “You have my blessings. I'm delighted you're doing this. You know how many years I've been telling you I wanted to do a photo book of your mothers and children, but we couldn't afford to.”

  Vicky's great skills have been honed by decades of editing and publishing. Further, she is so generous that she is constantly filling my apartment with books she knows I will love and with flowers and Viennese chocolate.

  Patti Kenner brought this book to the attention of the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She, as one of the museum's trustees, persuaded them to celebrate the book's publication with an exhibition of these photos. The museum's gifted and beloved director, Dr. David Marwell, has become the book's official sponsor, and Ivy Barsky, deputy director for programs, has worked tirelessly to set up the exhibition.

  My gratitude also goes to Maressa Gershowitz, a professional photographer who became my archivist, and who spent days searching through filing cabinets and innumerable bins to find most of these photographs. One of my nephews, Mark Gruber, generously took time from his art gallery in New Paltz, New York, to straighten more than a hundred photos from the 1930s that had curled up with time.