Ruth Gruber
| Ruth Gruber | |
|---|---|
Gruber in 2007
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| Born |
September 30, 1911 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | November 17, 2016 (aged 105) Manhattan, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Journalist, photographer, writer, humanitarian, U.S. government official |
Ruth Gruber (September 30, 1911 – November 17, 2016) was an American journalist, photographer, writer, humanitarian, and a United States government official.
Ruth Gruber was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of five children of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Gussie (Rockower) and David Gruber. She dreamed of becoming a writer and was encouraged by her parents to obtain higher education. She matriculated at New York University at the age of 15. At 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. from the University of Cologne in German Philosophy, Modern English Literature, and Art History, becoming the youngest person in the world to receive a doctorate. The subject of her dissertation was 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 the Herald Tribune, she became the first foreign correspondent to fly through Siberia into the Soviet Arctic.
During World War II, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes appointed 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. 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.
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