FINDING SAFE HARBOR Though she’s gained fame as an author RUTH GRUBER (4) and photographer, Ruth Gruber MA’31 found her greatest fulfillment advocating on behalf of the resi- dents of America’s only World War II refugee camp. By John Allen Neither war nor weeks aboard the crowded troop ship U.S.S. Henry Gibbins could dampen the refugees’ enthusiasm at their first sight of the Statue of Liberty. They would pass New York City by and disembark in Hoboken, New Jersey, before heading to Fort Ontario. Photos from the book: Haven by Ruth Gruber. Copyright © 2000 by Ruth Gruber. Published by arrangement with Three Rivers Press, a Division of Random House, Inc. 20 ON WISCONSIN FROM THE COLLECTION OF RUTH GRUBER Where you go, I will go ... your people shall be my people. BOOK OF RUTH 1:16 In the language of biblical symbolism, The story unfolds1 in the summer of Ruth is a daughter’s name, not a 1944, when, after having largely ignored mother’s. Her eponymous book shows the plight of refugees until then, President Ruth as the good child, so devoted to her Franklin Roosevelt declared that the U.S. mother-in-law, Naomi, that she would should bring a thousand of them across give up her homeland. When Ruth’s hus- the ocean from war-ravaged Italy. The band dies, she follows Naomi to Bethle- decision was partly humanitarian, partly hem, in search of refuge from the public relations, and partly pragmatic. poverty they face in Ruth’s native Moab. “The army was getting ready to make a To be symbolically correct, a Ruth push northward from Rome,” says Gru- Gruber aboard the Henry Gibbins: bringing should be an unfortunate, a wanderer, a ber, “and officers were afraid that refugees the refugees to Fort Ontario was, she says, “the most important assignment of my life.” refugee. Motherhood, stability, and nur- would get in the way of the tanks and turing don’t belong to her — they belong jeeps heading to the front lines.” leave their children behind enemy lines. to Naomi. That’s how the world would Roosevelt’s refugees would fall under And there was Mathilda Nitsch, a Czech be, if life paid attention to its allusions. the administrative control of the Depart- who had run an underground railroad But life, it seems, skipped the class ment of the Interior, and that’s where station helping Jews to escape. Captured on symbolism. With the sort of casual Gruber joins the tale. She was a special by the Italian secret police, she’d been disregard for literary propriety that assistant to that department’s secretary, tortured, locked in a cellar for ten days vexes English majors, one of the best Harold Ickes, who appointed her as his without heat, then shipped off to the real-life refugee stories of the last century emissary. “My mission was to help pre- concentration camp at Ferramonte. Each cast a Ruth in the role of a Naomi. pare the refugees for life in America, refugee had a horror story, and Gruber Ruth Gruber MA’31 is an author, inside the camp,” she says. “But I gave recorded them all for Ickes and, eventu- photographer, and journalist, but “the myself the mission of collecting their life ally, the American public. most important assignment of my life,” histories, their case histories. We needed Gruber’s charges had come from she says, came in 1944, when she to have a better idea of where they’d eighteen different nations, and during the became a virtual adoptive mother for come from, of their culture and what voyage, she gave them a basic course in the 982 residents of Fort Ontario, near they’d been through, if we were to help American life. She introduced some of Oswego, a small city in upstate New them properly.” them to the ship’s other passengers, a York. There, at the only refugee camp Gruber soon discovered that life in a thousand American soldiers wounded in set up in the U.S. during World War II, camp had an ominous sound to many of the bloody battles at Casino and Anzio. she helped a collection of impoverished the refugees. She joined them in Naples, And she began teaching them English Holocaust survivors adjust to life in just before they crossed the Atlantic, and phrases, working in a mix of the mun- America. as she collected their histories, she learned dane and the bizarre — the refugees “The camp was one of the best-kept the full details of the terrors they’d faced. needed to learn not only simple pleas- secrets of the war,” says Gruber, but the She met Manya Hartmayer, who had antries, but also to maintain military secret’s out now — in February 2001, been imprisoned in the concentration secrecy. “Walking around the ship,” she CBS aired a miniseries called Haven, camp at Gurs, in southern France, and says, “I could hear people reciting to based on Gruber’s memoir of the same who’d crossed the Alps on foot and hid- each other in all accents the litany of name, which describes her time among den in a convent until the American army their first words of English: ‘How do you the refugees. Television gave Gruber the came. And she met Samuel and Breindel feel? I feel fine. The name of this ship is a face of Natasha Richardson and cele- Silberman, who’d fought in the Belgian secret. We come from the North Pole.’ ” brated both her work and the camp’s underground and had been forced to Gruber came to feel a parent’s success. According to the program’s responsibility for the refugees’ welfare. tagline, “Her courage saved a thousand 1 Here’s a summation for those of you who She cried with them when one of their lives. A girl from Brooklyn defied the missed the miniseries. And there’s no shame number died; she cheered with them at Nazis, challenged the U.S. government in admitting you did — part of it aired on their first sight of the Statue of Liberty; ... and changed the world.” Valentine’s Day. Maybe you had a date. and she traveled with them to Oswego, SPRING 2002 21 where they would live behind barbed wire for a year and a half. When the war ended and Congress threatened to deport them, she lob- bied on their behalf, challenging rigid U.S. immigration policies and eventually helping to convince President Harry Truman that the refugees should be allowed to stay. In Jan- uary 1946, they were offered visas, and most of them became citizens. “Even today, I still travel all over the coun- try to meet with them,” says Gruber, who’s now ninety. “And we have the best reunions. They still Many of the refugees had been inmates of concentration camps, and some, like the men here, had no clothes other call me Mother Ruth.” than those that had been issued to them by their German and Italian jailers. Gruber says she’s delighted with the CBS’s treatment. going the experiences that would prepare variety of cultures just beyond her door. Natasha Richardson adds an element of her for that role. An important step in that “Brooklyn was like a little Europe then,” glamour to defying Nazis and challenging education came — though she wouldn’t she says. “There was a Jewish section, a the U.S. government, but the story know it at the time — when she first left German section, an Italian section, an hardly needs glamour to grab a person’s Brooklyn for the University of Wisconsin. Irish section, and the Gypsies wandered interest. If the events described in Haven through it all.” Moving from neighbor- didn’t change the world — and there are hood to neighborhood was like passing plenty of signs to suggest the world is still GRUBER WAS BORN, SHE SAYS, from nation to nation, an environment pretty rough on refugees (see sidebar, in a shtetl. However, her shtetl wasn’t that gave Gruber easy access to different “The Tampa”) — they certainly changed a tiny village in Russia or Poland, but languages. She grew up speaking not Gruber. In the pages of her memoir, she rather the Williamsburg section of just English but Yiddish, and she soon describes her journey with the refugees as Brooklyn, New York. “On Moore learned its close cousin, German, as well. a defining moment: “From this voyage Street,” she says of her birth home, “I A precocious student, she graduated on, I knew, my life would be inextricably thought the whole world was Jewish. from high school at age fourteen, and locked with Jews. I felt myself trembling The butcher, the grocer, the dressmaker, received her bachelor’s degree from in the Atlantic night, trembling not from the corsetière who made my mother’s New York University at eighteen. the wind but from the revelation.” Before corsets — everyone was Jewish.” The She fell in love with the works of then, Gruber was a minor official in the Brooklyn of Gruber’s birth in 1911 was Goethe and Schiller, and so she studied Department of the Interior; afterward, growing quickly, filling with recent German language and literature. But she she became a forceful advocate for Jew- arrivals to America. Her own parents fell in love, also, with the idea of inde- ish refugees (see sidebar, “Exodus 1947”). had both been born in Eastern Europe, pendence. In Brooklyn, she had a large Still, the miniseries hardly gave a full her father coming to America only in and supportive family, with four siblings picture of Gruber’s life.