Ruth Gruber was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of five children of Russian Jewish immigrant parents David and Gussie Gruber. She dreamed to be a writer and was encouraged by her parents to obtain higher education. At the age of eighteen she won a postgraduate fellowship at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. In 1931, she won another fellowship from the Institute of International Education to study in Cologne, Germany. She received a Ph.D in one year, becoming the youngest person in the world to receive a doctorate. By the age of twenty Ruth Gruber earned a Ph.D degree from the University of Cologne: in German Philosophy, in Modern English Literature and in Art History. During this time, Gruber had an extensive relationship with Virginia Woolf.While in Germany, Gruber witnessed Nazi rallies and after completing her studies and returning to America, she brought the awareness of the dangers of Nazism.Gruber's writing career began in 1932. In 1935, The New York Herald Tribune asked her to write a feature series about women under Fascism and Communism. While working for Herald Tribune, she became the first foreign correspondent to fly through Siberia into the Soviet Arctic.
Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Interiormoreless
During World War II, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes appointed Ruth Gruber as his Special Assistant. In this role, she carried out a study on the prospects of Alaska for homesteading G.I.s after the war. In 1944, she was assigned a secret mission to Europe to bring one thousand Jewish refugees and wounded American soldiers from Italy to the US. Ickes made her "a simulated general," so in case the military aircraft she flew in was shot down and she was caught by the Nazis, she would be kept alive according to the Geneva Convention. Throughout the voyage, the Army troop transport Henry Gibbins was hunted by Nazi seaplanes and U-boats. Ruth Gruber's book Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America was based on case histories she recorded as she interviewed the refugees.
Since the US Congress refused to lift the quota on Jewish immigration to the United States from Europe, US President Roosevelt acted by executive authority and invited the group of one thousand to visit America. The refugees were to be guests of the President and upon arriving in New York, they were transferred to Fort Ontario, a decommissioned army training base near Oswego, NY and locked behind a chain link fence with barbed wire. While US government agencies argued about whether they should be allowed to stay or, at some point, be deported to Europe, Gruber lobbied to keep them through the end of the war. It was not until January 1946 that the decision was made to allow them to apply for American residency. This was the only attempt by the United States to shelter Jewish refugees during the war.
A 2001 film called Haven was based on Gruber's book, with Natasha Richardson portraying Ruth Gruber.
In 1946, Gruber took leave from her federal post to return to journalism. The New York Post asked her to cover the work of a newly created Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. The Committee was to decide the fate of 100,000 European Jewish refugees who were living in European camps as displaced persons (DP). Harry Truman pressed Great Britain to open the doors of British Mandate of Palestine. The committee members spent four months in Europe, Palestine and the Arab countries and another month in Switzerland digesting their experiences. At the end of its deliberations, the committee's twelve members unanimously agreed that Britain should allow 100,000 Jewish immigrants to settle in Palestine. British foreign minister Ernest Bevin rejected the finding.
Eventually the issue was taken up by the recently established United Nations, which appointed a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Gruber accompanied UNSCOP as a correspondent for the New York Herald.
Exodus 1947
Gruber witnessed the Exodus 1947 ship entering the Haifa harbor after it was attacked by the Royal Navy while making an attempt to deliver 4,500 Jewish refugees. To meet the Exodus refugees Gruber flew to Cyprus, where she witnessed and photographed Jewish refugees detained by the British. However the British sent the Exodus prisoners to Port de Bouc in France and Gruber went there. The prisoners refused to disembark and after 18 days standoff, the British decided to ship the Jews back to Germany. Out of many journalists from around the world reporting on the affair, Ruth Gruber alone was allowed by the British to accompany the DPs back to Germany. Aboard the prison ship Runnymede Park, Gruber photographed the refugees, confined in a wire cage with barbed wire on top, defiantly raising a Union Jack flag on which they had painted a swastika.
After 1950
In 1951, Ruth Gruber got married. She gave birth to two children and continued her journalistic travels. She wrote a popular column for Hadassah Magazine, "Diary of an American Housewife."
In 1978 she spent a year in Israel writing Raquela: A Woman of Israel, about an Israeli nurse, Raquela Prywes, who worked in a British detention camp and in a hospital in Beersheba. This book won the National Jewish Book Award in 1979 for Best Book on Israel.
In 1985, at the age of 74 she visited isolated Jewish villages in Ethiopia and described the rescue of the Ethiopian Jews in Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews. Ruth Gruber has received many awards for her writing and humanitarian acts, including the Na'amat Golda Meir Human Rights Award and awards from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance.
In 1991, Ruth Gruber published volume one of her autobiography Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent.
On October 21, 2008, Ruth Gruber was honored for her work defending free expression by the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Ruth Gruber lives in New York City.One of her children is epidemiologist David Michaels.
2010 Documentary AHEAD OF TIME
On September 10, 2010, at the Angelika Theater in New York, a documentary about Dr. Gruber's life from 1911-1947, AHEAD OF TIME, was shown, including footage of Gruber in the Soviet Arctic in 1935.
