Ruth Gruber, who accompanied 1,000 Jews to the shores of the United States during the Holocaust, dies at 105



[font size=1]Ruth Gruber waves from the deck of the Henry Gibbins in August 1944. (Courtesy of David Michaels/U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)[/font]

By Emily Langer

https://twitter.com/emilylangerWP

November 19

Ruth Gruber, an American journalist who stumbled into one of the great rescue stories of the Holocaust when the U.S. government appointed her to escort nearly 1,000 Jews across U-boat infested waters to the shores of the United States, died Nov. 17 at her home in Manhattan. She was 105. ... Her son David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, confirmed the death.

In an era when many female reporters were writing for the social pages, Dr. Gruber, as a photographer and reporter, was a dynamic exception. ... Working for the New York Herald Tribune, she was the first Western journalist to visit the Soviet Arctic and the gulag.

In 1947, she watched as a ship carrying 4,000 Holocaust survivors and displaced persons was turned away from Palestine. She photographed and later chronicled those events in a book that Leon Uris used to write his best-selling novel “Exodus.”
....

She was believed to be survived by fewer than 100 of the former refugees, according to a spokeswoman for the Safe Haven Museum and Education Center in Oswego {New York}.