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Journalist, author and
human rights advocate Ruth
Gruber LLD (Hon.) ’01
autographs her latest book for students attending
her lecture during Oswego’s College Hour
Wednesday, April 11. She has written 19 books
about her international travels and experiences.
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Journalist, author and human rights advocate Ruth
Gruber LLD (Hon.) ’01 spoke to a full audience
during Oswego’s College Hour Wednesday, April
11, in the Hewitt Union Ballroom. Gruber became the
world’s youngest Ph.D. at the age of 19 and has
written 19 books about her international travels and
experiences.
In 1944, Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior under
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, sent Gruber as a special
assistant to accompany 982 Jewish refugees to Oswego’s
Fort Ontario.
Gruber wrote the book Haven,
about the only American safe haven camp for Jewish refugees
in World War II, which became the basis for a four-hour
miniseries on CBS.
During her speech Gruber also shared her experience
as a witness to the 1947 attack of an American lend-lease
boat, renamed the Exodus, on a mission to deliver 4,500
Jewish refuges to Israel. During the crisis, Gruber,
a New York Herald Tribune
reporter and photographer, was selected to represent
the American press.
“I think they’ve regretted it ever since,”
she said with a laugh.
Gruber’s determination to depict the horrific
conditions for her readers ruffled a few feathers within
the political circle. But the refugees pleaded with
her to tell the world of their story aboard the “floating
Auschwitz.” She did not fail them.
Even in the midst of great difficulty, Gruber fostered
a sense of hope among the refugees.
“The ships were full of miracles,” she said.
Gruber became quite close with the passengers, teaching
them basic English phrases on the crowded ship deck,
listening to their stories and photographing their journey.
She was also the first foreign correspondent to report
from Stalin’s Gulag prison camps across Siberia.
She recorded her experiences in her book I
Went to the Soviet Arctic.
“I was kind of the Arctic expert,” Gruber
said, “but the Oswego story changed the course
of my life. On the ship, I had an epiphany and I knew
from that moment on my life would be intertwined with
rescue and survival.”
In her latest book, Witness,
published by Random House in April, Gruber gives firsthand
accounts of her assignments in the Russian Arctic, covering
the construction of an Alaskan highway by primarily
Southern black prisoners, the journey to Oswego with
wounded American soldiers and Jewish refugees, the Exodus
tragedy, and the establishment of the state of Israel.
In the book’s foreword, former ambassador to the
United Nations Richard Holbrooke wrote that Gruber’s
“primary interest was the fate of the people she
covered. She was invariably drawn to the downtrodden,
the forgotten, the drive-by victims of history.”
Filled with 195 revelatory photographs and intuitive
writing, Witness uncovers
a piece of history that few have known or experienced,
and continues the message that Gruber wanted to share
with the world.
“We need to learn tolerance,” she said.
“Then the prophecy (of peace for the world) will
come true. For all of us — for Oswego —
there will be peace.”
—Meagan Smith ’07 |
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