by Ruth Gruber
Intrigued by my driver's courteous behavior, I asked him where he was from.
“Louisiana,” he said. “We're mostly all from the South. We're a black unit building the Alcan. Funny, huh?”
It was not funny. An Army officer told me one day, “Somebody ought to be court-martialed for the way those Negroes are treated. They suffer from rank negligence and stupidity. In December, they were wearing the same clothing they had worn in building an airfield in Florida.”
To take the sting out of his remarks, I told him, “Ickes was one of the first cabinet members to desegregate his department's cafeteria.”
“That's good,” the officer agreed. “Washington, you know, is still the segregation capital of the United States.”
It was not until the end of the war that President Truman finally desegregated the military.
After sending more reports to Ickes, I again told him in one of my cables that I was planning to fly home.
Ickes answered, “Would like you to stay on and go to Juneau to cover the territorial legislature?”
In Juneau, Dorothy Gruening, the wife of Governor Ernest Gruening, invited me to stay at the Governor's Mansion. She ran the Governor's Mansion with the ease and skill of a well-trained first lady. Each dinner party was a venue for discussing politics and especially for dwelling on the governor's dream that Alaska should become our forty-ninth state.
The long days at the legislature were filled with the venom that some of the legislators felt toward the governor. Often, when a bill was running its course, someone would ask, “Is Gruening in favor of this one?” If the answer came back “yes,” the bill was defeated.
But Gruening's popularity skyrocketed when Alaska became the forty-ninth state in 1959. He was elected, almost unanimously, to be Alaska's first U.S. senator. One day on the floor of the Senate in Washington, he greeted me and said, out of the blue, “Ruth, I predict you're going to find more ways to help people. You'll never know what turn your life will take.” I wondered how he knew.
I was visiting an Eskimo hut when I came upon a woman making mukluks (boots) like the ones she was wearing. She especially wanted me to see how she softened the reindeer leather soles with her teeth. In this so-called primitive village—with no sewing machines—Eskimo women learned from their mothers how to design and create their own fur boots and fur parkas. My parka was made of groundhog with a collar of wolverine, which doesn't freeze. Before I left for Alaska, the editor of Natural History magazine asked me to send him some photographs. He selected this Kodachrome slide for the magazine's 1941 holiday cover.
Point Barrow, Alaska's north-ernmost Eskimo village, became one of my favorite villages. One day, the Eskimos invited me to participate in a walrus hunt. I found comfort in knowing that the Eskimos did not waste any part of the animal they hunted.
Hooper Bay, Alaska, 1941. Hooper Bay, a typical Eskimo village on the Bering Sea where I spent many days. The babies bonded with their mothers from morning to night, content and protected. They snuggled against their mothers in parkas and wolverine fur collars.
The Hooper Bay schoolteacher was about to leave for a hospital. She and her husband sent me an SOS: “Could you come and run the school for us till we get back?” “I'll come,” I answered. I taught the students English and math. It was a curriculum designed for indigenous people. That's when I took the picture of an Eskimo woman reading Life magazine. At one schoolhouse I gave each child a copy of Life and asked them each to write about what they had read. Every single one in that school wrote about the ads. So much for us journalists.
One child wrote, “This is a story of a little girl. She is waiting at the church. The groom has left her. She has bad breath.” The ad was for Listerine.
An Eskimo cemetery, Point Hope, Alaska, 1941. Missionaries came every year to convert the Eskimos to Christianity; they didn't want them to use shamans. But the Eskimos believed that shamans could help them. The new missionaries came with alcohol, which ruined the health of the Eskimos and their ability to cope with life there. (lower left)
Dr. Levine, a pediatrician sent by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was furious that every Eskimo village was without a doctor and nurse. Often it was difficult to get the people to a hospital—they had to wait for bush pilots. Tuberculosis was prevalent, though it had been even worse in Siberia. Many Eskimos lived crowded in one hut, and parents, unknowingly, would pass the disease on to their children. (above)
The Army and Coast Guard always think in terms of camps, so they moved the Aleuts who were in danger of a Japanese attack to a camp near Juneau in Funter Bay. The people had to start a whole new life in a whole new climate.
Many of the Aleuts were unhappy in living in southeast Alaska. The government was working hand in hand with the Fowke Fur Company in St. Louis, Missouri so women could wear sealskin coats. In the midst of the war, they took men from Funter Bay and sent them back to the Pribilof Islands so they could hunt seals and send the skins to St. Louis.
The main street of Fairbanks, Alaska, 1941. I interviewed people about why they had come to Alaska, if they were planning to settle there. They came from all over the United States and many from Sweden and Norway. Some came for the fish, an important industry. Others came to hunt game and still others to attend the university in Fairbanks.
In 1941, there were few roads to Alaska. You entered the territory either on a plane or a ship. The U.S. Army realized that in the event of war, a road from Edmonton, Alberta, to Fairbanks would make it possible to truck ammunition and supplies to the Fairbanks airport.
By the time war broke out on December 7, 1941, there were more than 100,000 soldiers and a score of civilians living along the route of the Alaska Highway.
The Alaska Highway, 1943, cut its way through magnificent mountains, crossed Arctic rivers and lakes, and filled the air with dirt and, according to the soldiers, with “mosquitoes as big as bombs.” I reported to Ickes how African American soldiers had built the highway in less than one year. It was an incredible engineering success.
Arest stop at mile 20 along the Alaska Highway.
The Alaska Highway was not yet a tourist's road. It was a pioneer's and dreamer's route that we hoped one day would link Alaska to the Strait of Magellan on the border of Chile and Argentina.
I thought Muncho Lake, along the highway, provided one of the most serene and peaceful areas in British Columbia.
The Royal Canadian Air Force pilots flew me from Edmonton to Norman Wells in the Canadian Arctic.
The native fishermen were fascinated with the road builders. When had they ever seen so many black soldiers? When had they ever seen Army engineers determined to finish a 1,500-mile-long highway in one year?
U.S. Army engineers worked tirelessly against the hardships of the North. Loneliness was one of their worst enemies. My driver ruefully said, “You're probably the first woman they've seen in weeks.” I was happy to smile and wave to them as we drove on.
As we drove along the highway my camera caught scenes of Alaskan life.
Progress along the highway came in the form of stores like Sears, Roe-buck (top right), which sold necessities—even luxuries.
The native people often took time off to watch the way the highway promised to change their lives by solving one of the biggest problems— transportation.
World War II and the Oswego Refugees
1944–1946
In January 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a startling announcement: “I have decided that approximately one thousand refugees should be immediately brought from Italy to this country.”
What was the reason for this almost incredible turnabout in the government policy of strict quotas, based on the racial bias that kept our doors effectively sealed against Eastern European Jews? I soon learned that one of the major reasons was a report written in the Treasury Department called “Acquiescence of the United States Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Though the report was written by Joe DuBois, a young lawyer in the T
reasury Department, it was signed R.E.P. (Randolph E. Paul) of the War Refugee Board.
On January 16, 1944, a rainy Sunday morning, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., brought the report to his friend President Roosevelt. It was an honest, passionately written document, telling how our State Department had not only barred Eastern European Jews from entering our country but used the machinery of government to bar them.
Breckenridge Long, assistant secretary of state in charge of the visa division, was, in effect, the arbiter of life and death, since no one could enter the United States without a visa. Mr. Long, an admirer of Mussolini, was sending coded messages to our consulates abroad that if Jews came for visas, delay, delay, delay. Meanwhile, cables sent from Switzerland were kept top secret in the files of the State Department. These cables warned of Hitler's determination to annihilate all Jews.
The key word was Vernichtung! Annihilation.
In the months since my return from Alaska, I had been feeling helpless, angry, and frustrated. Working for Secretary Ickes, I knew that Jews were fleeing bombs, terror, anti-Semitism. What were we doing to help them? Almost nothing. We saved famous people, like Albert Einstein, Marc Chagall, and the German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, whose defining novel, The Oppermanns, told the story of Hitler's rise to power. (I wrote a preface for a new edition in 2001.) But except for saving such people, we were doing shamefully little to stop the annihilation of six million Jews.
Roosevelt, who was magnificent domestically, kept arguing, “First we must win the war. Then we can worry about refugees.” Yet it was clear to many of us that if we waited until we won the war, there might not be any refugees to save.
Now I discovered with gratitude and joy that Roosevelt had pulled the rug from under Breckenridge Long and had created a brand-new government agency, the War Refugee Board. Their assignment was to rescue Jews.
Then, as he did so often, FDR dropped the whole project in Harold Ickes's lap. I hurried to Ickes's office. “Mr. Secretary,” I said urgently, “these refugees are going to be terrified, traumatized. Somebody has to hold their hands.”
Ickes had been looking weary. Suddenly he was energized. “Of course. I'm going to send you. You're a young woman. You're Jewish. There will be a lot of women and children. I'm sure this will mean as much to you as it does to me.”
“Mr. Secretary, this is the most important assignment of my life.”
He nodded. “You know this project is the president's idea. You'll be going as his emissary. It's top secret. We'll have to make you a general.”
“Me? A general?”
“You'll be flying in a military plane. If you're shot down and the Nazis capture you as a civilian, they can kill you as a spy. But as a general, according to the Geneva Convention, you must be given shelter and food, and kept alive.”
With my camera bag hanging over my shoulder, my portable typewriter in my hand, and a suitcase with winter and summer clothes, I boarded an Army Air Force plane filled with officers wearing the uniforms of many of our Allies.
It took five days changing planes in half a dozen airports across Europe. In each airport, soldiers sprayed me from head to toe with DDT. We didn't know then that DDT could be fatal.
In Naples, Bob Neville, an old friend and editor-in-chief of the GIs' newspaper Stars and Stripes, met me at the airport, helped me climb up into his Army truck, and showed me Naples's lunar landscape. Buildings hung like rags. Houses were sliced down the front. Staircases led nowhere, and curtains were flying insanely in the wind.
“The Neapolitans,” Bob told me, “are living without water, without plumbing, without food. The Germans blew up the water supply. They put a twenty-one-day bomb in the post office, so innocent people would get killed weeks after the Germans were gone. To add to the madness, they even emptied the prisons and the insane asylums.”
After dinner with his newspaper staff, he showed me a map of the war they were covering with passion and integrity. I returned to my hotel and immediately switched on the radio for news. A German voice was screaming: “… this criminal attack against the Führer.”
Dear God, was it possible? Had someone attacked Adolf Hitler? Was he dead?
The next voice was Hitler's, high-pitched and hysterical, barking into the room. I pulled out my notebook to jot down his disjointed words: “We will catch these traitors. Their stupidity is enormous. They plot for the slavery of our people. They planned a terrible fate which our people will live through.”
His screams felt like a snake crawling on my skin.
If only that assassination attempt had succeeded, I thought, we would be saving not one thousand but tens of thousands of refugees.
The next morning, an Army soldier drove me to various government officials to whom Ickes had given me letters of introduction. Dressed for these diplomatic calls, I wore a white suit, the obligatory white gloves, and a large-brimmed red straw hat to protect me from the Neapolitan sun.
In midafternoon, my GI driver drove me to the waterfront. The port was completely fenced in by barbed wire to keep out potential spies. A huge sign hung over the entrance gate: KILL HITLER, KILL MUSSOLINI. The sense of the battles being waged north of us in Italy was everywhere—in the water, in the air, and on the docks. Soldiers, carrying their guns and heavy gear, marched down the gangplanks of destroyers and troop ships, jumped on camouflaged trucks and personnel carriers, and headed straight to the battlefields.
The driver helped me board the motor launch that would take me to the ship. A Navy lieutenant greeted me politely as I settled on the deck, surrounded on all sides by a seawall of ships.
“There she is! Your ship!” He pointed to a khaki-colored vessel with steel cables, lifeboats, huge tubs with gun emplacements, and a single black smokestack. “It's an Army troop transport, the Henry Gibbins,” the lieutenant said. “It's loaded down. Your thousand refugees are up front, and in the rear—can you see it?—a thousand wounded soldiers going home to hospitals in the States. You're gonna be part of a big convoy.”
He suddenly looked at me. “You can't climb a rope ladder in that outfit!” he said. He motioned to one of his sailors: “Go below, take off your pants, and get somebody to bring them up here fast.”
I pulled the pants over the white skirt and awkwardly stepped onto the bottom rung of a rope ladder, clinging to it as it swung wildly. The ropes dug into my hands. The water below looked menacing. As I neared the top, a sailor leaned over, caught me under my arms, and hauled me up the ladder. A crowd of refugees rushed toward me. I heard a man shout, “It's Eleanor Roosevelt!”
Many of the men were in concentration camp pajamas; others were in threadbare shorts, naked to the waist. Some wore beach sandals. Several had wrapped their feet in cloth or newspapers. Many of the women were in ragged skirts and blouses; most of the children were barefoot. I could not stop looking at the children's eyes, sad and haunted.
The thirteen days and nights on the ship were filled with efforts to prepare the refugees for life in America. Knowing that I would have to report to Ickes, and through him to Roosevelt, I began interviewing and photographing the people. A middle-aged man, still wearing his camp pajamas, said, “We can't tell you what they did to us. It was too obscene, and you're a young woman.”
“Forget, if you can, that I'm a woman,” I told him. “You are the first witnesses coming to America. Through you, America will learn the truth of Hitler's crimes.”
So, day after day, pacing the deck, they told me stories of courage, of terror, of hiding in forests, caves, and sewers, of risking their lives to save others, of defying death. Often I had to stop writing and photographing, thinking, “I can't listen anymore.” But I listened.
From them I learned that no person believes in his or her own death.
John Shea, the captain of the Henry Gibbins, told me that the commander of the entire convoy had received a message from Roosevelt: “If you are attacked, you must protect the ship of refugees.”
Thirty Nazi plane
s flew over us and did not attack us. Nazi submarines detected our engines, but we escaped.
On a cold night at sea, standing alone on the blacked-out deck, I replayed their stories of horror in my head. There was Manya Hartmayer, a tall, graceful singer who had been in five concentration camps, running, starving, until she ended up in the French camp in Gurs. There was Doris (I Dorrit) Blumenkrantz-Schecter, who was five years old when, holding her father's hand and trailing her frightened mother and newborn baby sister, she ran barefoot across minefields to escape the Nazis, who had just entered the small town in Italy where her family was hiding. There was Abe Furmanski of Warsaw, with the look of a prizefighter, who described the torture he escaped in German-occupied France. “In closed trucks that were meant to hold twenty people, the Germans pushed a hundred or more. Quicklime was placed on the floor ten inches high. The doors were sealed tight so no air could escape. The people had to urinate. That started the lime cooking. The gas and fumes came up and choked them to death. The bodies were thrown into special ovens and burned.”
With the stories rumbling through my head, I realized that from this moment on, my life would be inextricably bound with rescue and survival.
We reached New York Harbor on August 3, 1944. It was the very day that Anne Frank and her family were betrayed. And while we were bringing one thousand refugees to freedom in America, Adolf Eichmann was busy day and night sending 750,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz in cattle cars. The Nazis knew they had lost the war in Europe, but they continued their war against the Jews.
