Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story

Ruth Gruber

Schocken

Raquela Prywes lived on the front lines of Israel's history. A ninth-generation Jerusalemite, she found her true calling as a hospital and battlefield nurse, delivering babies in the infamous Athlit detention camp, where Holocaust survivors were interned by the British, and literally walking across minefields to tend the wounded during the 1948 War of Independence. Surrounded by men of uncommon bravery, Raquela fell passionately in love with the handsome young captain of one of the refugee ships and had to choose between him and the brilliant and distinguished doctor who waited for her back in Jerusalem. Upon her return to Israel, she helped to found the first hospital in the desert frontier of Beersheba, where she delivered the babies of Bedouin women and Jewish immigrants, eventually organizing the hospitals credited with saving Israeli soldiers during the Six-Day War. Alive with the courage of a rare woman and a rugged nation, Raquela tells the powerful and deeply moving story of an Israeli woman who knew passionate love, great danger, and shattering loss and who witnessed the darkest -- and most triumphant -- moments in the history of the Jewish people. This edition of Raquela, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1978, includes an introduction by best-selling novelist Faye Kellerman.

Raquela, A Woman of Israel

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

Coward, McCann, Geoghegan

The powerful story of a top-secret mission to rescue one thousand European refugees in the midst of the Second World WarIn 1943, nearly one thousand European refugees from eighteen different countries set out on a journey for asylum in the United States. Accompanying them was Ruth Gruber, who with the backing of the United States government, was made a simulated General to escort the refugees on their secret mission across the Atlantic from a port in Italy to a camp in Oswego, New York a dangerous endeavor that carried the threat of Nazi capture with each passing day.While on board the ship that was to transport them to America, Gruber recorded the stories of the refugees, and she presents them in vivid detail here. The result is a poignant and engrossing story of suffering under Nazi persecution and bravery in the face of the most overwhelming of circumstances. "

Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America

Open Road Media

This book is written in German. Taken from the English book Exodus 1947: "The ship looked like a matchbox that had been splintered by a nutcracker. In the torn, square hole, as big as an open, blitzed barn, we could see a muddle of bedding, possessions, plumbing, broken pipes, overflowing toilets, half-naked men, women looking for children. Cabins were bashed in; railings were ripped off; the lifesaving rafts were dangling at crazy angles." On July 18, 1947, Ruth Gruber, an American journalist, waited on a wharf in Haifa as the Exodus 1947 limped into harbor. The evening before, Gruber had learned that this unarmed ship, with more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors crammed into a former tourist vessel designed for 400 passengers, had been rammed and boarded by the British Navy, which was determined to keep her desperate human cargo from finding refuge in Palestine. Now, though soldiers blockaded both exit and entry to the weary vessel, Gruber was determined to meet the refugees and hear their tales. For the next several months she pursued the émigrés' stories, from Haifa to the prison camps on Cyprus (where she was misled by the British to believe the DPs would land, though they never did), to southern France, and, appallingly, back to Hamburg, Germany, where they were ultimately sent by the intractable British authorities. As the lone journalist covering this story, Gruber sent riveting dispatches and vivid photographs back to the New York and Paris Herald Tribune, which in turn sent them out to the rest of the world press. Gruber's relentless reporting and striking photographs shaped perceptions worldwide as to the situation of postwar Jewish refugees and of the British Mandate in Palestine, and arguably influenced the United Nations decision to finally create the State of Israel in 1948. In 1948, Gruber assembled her dispatches and thirty of her pictures into Destination Palestine, the book that became the basis for Leon Uris's bestselling novel Exodus and the film.

Die Irrfahrt der Exodus. Eine Augenzeugin berichtet.

Zürich/München, Pendo

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Books by Ruth Gruber