| Ruth Gruber was born in 1911 in Brooklyn, New York. At only nineteen years of age, she began her doctoral studies in Cologne, Germany. While in Germany, she witnessed Adolf Hitler's verbal attacks against Americans and Jews.
After earning her Ph.D. at age twenty, Gruber became a foreign correspondent.
In 1935, the New York Herald Tribune assigned the 23-year old to write a series about women under communism and fascism. She traveled across Europe and into Siberia becoming the first journalist to report from the Arctic.
Gruber's stories caught the attention of Harold Ickes, the US Secretary of the Interior. "I told him the Herald Tribune wanted to send me to Alaska. [...] Harold Ickes said: 'Don't go to Alaska for the Herald Tribune. Go there for me.'"
Ickes hired Gruber to study the prospect homesteading GIs in Alaska after World War II.
Soon, Ickes asked Gruber to undertake a secret mission to escort a group of almost 1000 Jewish refugees from Italy to America.
In Italy, Gruber set sail on the troop ship Henry Gibbins with wounded American soldiers and the Jewish refugees.
Gruber interviewed the refugees providing some of the earliest first-hand accounts of the Holocaust.
Upon arrival in New York, the refugees were sent to Fort Ontario near Oswego, New York. At the end of the war, the refugees were allowed to apply for American residency and some became citizens.
In 1946, Gruber returned to journalism. Gruber accompanied the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) on visits to DP camps in Germany. She then traveled to the Arab states and to Palestine.
While in Jerusalem, Gruber learned of the British attack on the Exodus 1947. Gruber immediately left for Haifa and witnessed the battered Exodus 1947 entering the harbor.
Gruber traveled to Cyprus hoping to interview the refugees upon arrival. She photographed the Jews in the camps, living behind fences with little or no water or sanitary facilities.
Learning that the British were taking the former Exodus 1947 passengers to Port de Bouc in southern France, Gruber rushed there from Cyprus. When the prison ships arrived, the prisoners refused to disembark. After 18 days, the British announced their intention to ship the Jews back to Germany. Gruber accompanied the "DPs" back to Germany. Her reports helped helped turn world opinion in favor of the formation of the State of Israel.
Gruber has published fourteen books, including Raquela, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1978. Her photographs of the Exodus 1947 appeared in the 1997 Oscar-winning documentary The Long Way Home.
In 1998 Gruber received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She lives in New York, New York. She has two children and four grandchildren, and speaks frequently around the country. Book Credits:Movie and TV Credits:Links: | 
