Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth

Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story

With her perfect memory (and plenty of zip), ninety-five-year-old Ruth Gruberâ€“adventurer, international correspondent, photographer, maker of (and witness to) history, responsible for rescuing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II and afterâ€“tells her story in her own words and photographs.

Gruberâ€™s life has been extraordinary and extraordinarily heroic. She received a B.A. from New York University in three years, a masterâ€™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 didnâ€™t execute . . . At thirty, she traveled to Alaska for Harold L. Ickes, FDRâ€™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 herâ€“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. â€œI have a theory,â€ Gruber said, â€œthat even though weâ€™re born Jews, there is a moment in our lives when we become Jews. On that ship, I became a Jew.â€

Gruberâ€™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 photographsâ€“taken on each of her assignmentsâ€“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 committeeâ€™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 Gruberâ€™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 â€œthe ship looks like a matchbox splintered by a nutcracker.â€ 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.

â€œTake photographs with your heart,â€ Edward Steichen told her.

Witness is a revelationâ€“of a time, a place, a world, a spirit, a belief. It is, above all else, a book of heart.
Country USA
Brand Schocken
Manufacturer Schocken
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber part_0805242430
Color Multicolor
ReleaseDate 2007-04-24
UnitCount 1
Format Illustrated
EANs 9780805242430

Country	USA
Brand	Schocken
Manufacturer	Schocken
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	part_0805242430
Color	Multicolor
ReleaseDate	2007-04-24
UnitCount	1
Format	Illustrated
EANs	9780805242430

Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story

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