A Brooklyn girl who wanted to write
Ruth Gruber was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 30, 1911, the fourth of five children of David and Gussie (Rockower) Gruber, Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Her parents ran a wholesale and retail liquor store and later went into real estate. From childhood she wanted to be a writer, and her parents, though they had little formal education themselves, pushed her toward the most schooling she could get.
She was astonishingly quick. She entered New York University at fifteen, graduated at eighteen, and in 1930 won a fellowship to the University of Wisconsin, where she took a master’s degree in German and English literature. Then, in 1931, came a fellowship from the Institute of International Education to study in Germany. Her parents begged her not to go: Hitler was on the rise. She went anyway.
Cologne, Virginia Woolf and the Nazi rallies
At the University of Cologne she studied German philosophy, modern English literature and art history. Her professors urged her to stay for a doctorate, and she wrote a dissertation on Virginia Woolf, then a living, still controversial modernist, earning her PhD magna cum laude in a single year. The New York Times reported that, at twenty, she was the youngest PhD in the world.
Germany taught her something else. Curious and fearless, she went to Nazi rallies with her American passport in her purse and a tiny American flag on her lapel, and listened, appalled, as Hitler raged against Americans and, even more savagely, against Jews. She came home in 1932 alert, for the rest of her life, to the danger that totalitarian movements posed to the Jewish people.
To the Soviet Arctic and Alaska
She returned to a Depression America with no jobs, and so she wrote. After a string of rejections, she sold the New York Times a piece portraying Brooklyn’s neighbourhoods as a microcosm of Europe, and soon found a home at the New York Herald Tribune. In 1935, on a fellowship to study women under fascism, communism and democracy, she travelled with Herald Tribune credentials and became the first foreign correspondent, man or woman, allowed to fly through Siberia into the Soviet Arctic. She lived among pioneers and prisoners in Stalin’s far north and wrote I Went to the Soviet Arctic (1939).
That book caught the eye of Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior. In 1941 he sent her to Alaska as his field representative to study whether the territory could be opened to homesteaders and returning soldiers. For some eighteen months she crossed it by plane, train, truck, paddle-wheel steamer and dogsled. Ickes then made her his special assistant, a post she held for five years.
The secret mission of 1944
In 1944, with the Holocaust at its height and Congress refusing to loosen immigration quotas, Roosevelt used his executive authority to admit a single group of about a thousand refugees then in liberated southern Italy. They would come not as immigrants but as the President’s “guests” to be housed at Fort Ontario, a decommissioned army post at Oswego in upstate New York. Ickes chose Gruber to fly secretly to Italy and escort them. Because she might be shot down and captured, he gave her the rank of “simulated general” explaining that the Nazis could kill a captured civilian as a spy but would have to keep a general alive under the Geneva Convention.
In Naples she boarded the Army transport Henry Gibbins with the refugees, 982 by most counts, from many European countries, most of them Jews, and about a thousand wounded American soldiers. The ship crossed the Atlantic in a convoy hunted by German aircraft and U-boats. Day after day Gruber interviewed the refugees and wrote down their stories, telling them they would be the first witnesses to bring the truth of Hitler’s crimes to America. Often, she recalled, she had to stop because her tears blurred the ink. The passengers began to call her “Mother Ruth.” They reached New York harbour on August 3, 1944. She knew from then on that her life would be bound up with rescuing Jews in danger.
Fighting for the Oswego refugees
Haven turned out to be a camp behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The refugees had no visas and no rights, and as the war ended government agencies argued over whether to send them back to Europe. Gruber lobbied Congress and the administration to let them stay. In December 1945 President Truman ruled that they could remain and apply for legal residence, and in early 1946 they began to do so. Many went on to distinguished lives; one, Alexander Margulis, a former medical student from Belgrade, became a leading academic radiologist who chaired radiology at the University of California, San Francisco, from 1963 to 1989.
Fort Ontario was the only effort by the United States government to shelter Jewish refugees on its own soil during the war. Gruber told its story in Haven (1983), which became the basis for a permanent exhibition at the New York State Museum, and in 2001 for a television miniseries in which Natasha Richardson played her. When the Safe Haven Museum opened in Oswego in 2002, its library was named in her honour.
Exodus 1947 and the birth of Israel
In 1946 Gruber left government to cover the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine for the New York Post, travelling with it through the displaced-persons camps of Europe and on to Palestine, where she came to know the leaders of the future Jewish state and introduced David Ben-Gurion to American readers. The committee unanimously recommended admitting 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine; Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, rejected the recommendation.
In 1947, covering the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine for the Herald Tribune, she rushed to Haifa as the refugee ship Exodus 1947, carrying some 4,500 Holocaust survivors, was brought in by the Royal Navy. She watched British soldiers carry off the bodies of the dead and saw the passengers forced onto three prison ships. The British sent them back to France and, when they refused to land, on to Germany. Gruber was chosen as the pool correspondent for the American press and was the only journalist aboard the Runnymede Park. Her photographs of the voyage went around the world; her picture of a swastika painted by the refugees on the British flag became Life magazine’s Picture of the Week. The images helped turn world opinion toward the survivors, and her book on the ship later served as source material for Leon Uris’s Exodus.
In 1949 she flew on Operation Magic Carpet, the airlift of some 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel, and her Herald Tribune report broke the story of the operation.
Witness to the ingathering
Gruber’s Jewishness was the axis of her working life. For decades she followed the great waves of Jewish immigration into Israel as a special correspondent for the Herald Tribune until the paper closed in 1966, and wrote a string of books on the young state, including Israel Without Tears (1950) and Israel on the Seventh Day (1968). She volunteered for the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal and wrote a popular Hadassah Magazine column, “Diary of an American Housewife.” Her biography Raquela: A Woman of Israel, about the nurse Raquela Prywes, won the National Jewish Book Award in 1979.
In 1985, in her seventies, she travelled to isolated Jewish villages in the Ethiopian highlands to report on and aid the rescue of Ethiopian Jews, and wrote Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews (1987). Her camera went with her everywhere; her photographs spanning six decades and four continents were the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2011, when she was a hundred.
Family and private life
In 1951 Gruber married Philip H. Michaels, a lawyer, business executive and member of the New York City Youth Board. Their daughter, Celia, was born in 1952, when Gruber was forty-one, and their son, David, in 1954; David Michaels later served as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health. Philip Michaels died in 1968. In 1974 she married Henry Rosner, a senior New York City social-services official, who went with her to Israel while she wrote Raquela; he died in 1982. The science writer Dava Sobel is her niece.
Into her nineties she kept up a punishing pace, completing a twenty-city book tour at ninety and publishing memoirs including Ahead of Time (1991), Inside of Time (2002) and Witness (2007).
Legacy
Ruth Gruber died at her home in Manhattan on November 17, 2016, at the age of 105. Her honours included Na’amat USA’s Golda Meir Human Rights Award, awards from the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a distinguished journalism prize from the Norman Mailer Center.
She belonged to a rare category: a reporter who did not merely witness history but helped change its course. Nearly a thousand people found safety in America because she escorted and then fought for them; the world saw the Exodus survivors through her lens; and Yemenite and Ethiopian Jewish rescues reached readers through her reporting. Her life showed how one determined woman with a notebook and a camera could make a nation’s conscience see.
Sources & further reading
Ruth Gruber, Wikipedia · Ruth Gruber, Jewish Women’s Archive encyclopedia · Ruth Gruber, Jewish Virtual Library · Ruth Gruber finds haven for 1,000 Holocaust refugees, JWA This Week in History · Journalist, author, humanitarian Ruth Gruber dies at 105, CBS New York · Alexander R. Margulis, MD (1921–2018), UCSF Radiology · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.