by Ruth Gruber
The Foreign Office's pro-Arab policy continued even after the war ended. Holocaust survivors, hoping to reach Palestine, dreaming of “going home,” found the way blocked by British warships. Defying the British from 1945 to 1948, nearly half a million made their way to the DP camps in Germany and Austria. In the rush to set up camps for them, the U.S. military commandeered former Nazi concentration camps, death camps, slave labor camps, and even SS stables. President Harry Truman, learning of the sordid, overcrowded conditions, sent Earl G. Harrison, dean of law at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on refugees, to investigate.
In Germany, Harrison was shocked to see twenty or thirty Jewish DPs sleeping in one room on bunks of straw on which thousands of Jews had slept before they were burned in the ovens. Harrison told Truman that some American soldiers were treating the Holocaust survivors much the way the Germans had treated the Jews. The only difference, he said, was that we weren't murdering them.
Harrison's report was so devastating that Truman asked Ernest Bevin, Britain's foreign minister, to allow 100,000 Holocaust survivors to enter Palestine. Bevin could not afford to turn the president down. The British needed American help. Britain's economy had been devastated by the war. So Bevin did what government officials often do: he said, “Let's form a committee.” Truman agreed.
The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine was formed, consisting of six Americans chosen by Truman and six British chosen by Bevin. Truman exacted a promise from Bevin: if the committee voted unanimously to allow 100,000 Jews to enter Palestine, Bevin would agree.
Ted Thackrey, the editor in chief of the New York Post and the husband of Dorothy Schiff, owner of the paper, telephoned me. “Ruth, I would like you to accompany the committee as our foreign correspondent. Will you do it?”
I said I would be delighted, but I had to check with my boss, Secretary Ickes. When I asked Ickes, he shook his head: “No, I need you here.”
“As long as you need me, Mr. Secretary, I'll stay.”
But Thackrey was adamant. “I'm not giving up. You know Washington. The American members of the committee will need all the help you can give them. You know the problems of refugees. You are the one to do this job. I'm going to work on Ickes.”
On January 21, 1946, Ickes called me to his office. “I was wrong,” he said. “You must go. You owe it to your people.”
I called Helen Reid at the Herald Tribune: “The New York Post has asked me to cover the Anglo-American committee for them. I want to know if my going for them will affect my relationship with the Trib.” I had been thinking of returning to the Herald Tribune after I left the government.
“It won't affect our relationship at all,” Helen said. “This is the story that the Post has made its own. I'm glad you're doing it for them, but you are definitely still in our family.”
For the next four months I traveled with the committee through Europe, the Holy Land, and the Arab world, taking photographs, cabling articles, and spending sleepless nights after listening to the survivors' stories of torture and murder. In one DP camp a distraught woman took my arm and said, “You are the only woman traveling with these men. I feel I can talk to you. I saw my husband burned. I don't want to be burned. I want to live—in the Holy Land.”
“That's why we're here,” I said. “But if, Heaven forbid, we fail to get the doors of Palestine open for you, where would you want to go?”
“To the crematorium.”
In each camp, there was always one question the committee asked: “Why do you want to go to Palestine? It's a poor country. There's so much fighting going on.”
A teenage orphan gave us the most poignant answer. “Everyone has a home. The British have a home. The Americans have a home. The Russians have a home. Only we don't have a home. Don't ask us. Ask the world.”
In February 1946, while we were in Frankfurt, with the help of the Army I found my younger brother, Irving, a dentist, serving as a captain in charge of a medical unit under Gen. George Patton. He had been sleeping in a tent one night when a Nazi plane dropped a bomb on the bed of the officer sleeping next to him and killed him.
The Army apparently found Irving's services so useful that they prolonged his tour of duty, though most of our troops were already on their way home. He was heartsick. Before leaving for the war, he had married the woman he loved, Fannie Davis, and he was counting the days until they could be reunited.
Bartley Crum, the crusading San Francisco lawyer on the committee, invited Irving to join us on our way to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, the “trial of the century.”
Inside the Palace of Justice, I pulled my Army coat tightly around me, shivering, as I sat between Bartley and Irving in the front row of the VIP gallery. The brightly lit courtroom was packed with dozens of men and a handful of women, while the judges, representing Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States, sat at the judges' table with the flags of their countries behind them. There was an air of apprehension in the room. We waited impatiently for the prisoners to enter the dock.
Finally, Hermann Goering, the former head of the Luftwaffe, Hitler's air force, goose-stepped in. He was wearing his blue uniform, stripped of all his medals, as pompous as if he had won the war. Twenty others, following him, took seats in two rows in the wooden dock cordoned off from us with a red rope. Behind each defendant in the second row, stood an American soldier wearing a white helmet, on guard for potential action.
The sight of Julius Streicher, chewing gum, smirking, and looking bored, sickened me. He was the editor of the Nazi rag Der Stürmer, which had disseminated lurid anti-Semitic propaganda for years.
It seemed fitting, I thought, that this international military tribunal was convening in Nuremberg. As an exchange graduate student in Germany in 1932, I had been enchanted by this ancient town, especially by its Glockenspiel, the famous town clock with its lovely chimes and figures that danced around on a platform.
It was here that Hitler had promulgated the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of their citizenship, their professions, their businesses, and their jobs. Jewish children could no longer attend school. The Nuremberg Laws were the beginning of the end of Jewish life in Germany. Now Nuremberg lay in rubble, as if our pilots had been making a statement by destroying the city Hitler had made the center of his evil kingdom.
During a pause in the trial, we were taken to a screening room in the palace. Here, we sat in silence watching the films of naked bodies piled on top of each other, of huge ovens in which bodies had been burned, of the nooses in which Jews had been hanged. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor, had described the horror of these films in his opening statement on November 21, 1945:
We will show you these concentration camps in motion pictures, just as the Allied armies found them when they arrived, and the measures General Eisenhower had to take to clean them up. Our proof will be disgusting, and you will say I have robbed you of your sleep. But these are the things which have turned the stomach of the world and set every civilized hand against Nazi Germany.
I was still shaking when we returned to the trial to watch the defendants picking their noses and ears and scratching their chests. Goering kept yawning, like one of his pet lions. I clutched my brother's hand and whispered, “I wish we were closer and I had a gun.”
My anger rose in my throat when we were taken on a tour of the jail. The cells filled two sides of a long gallery. A helmeted soldier, with no apparent weapon, stood at the door of each cell, even while the defendants ate a lunch provided under the laws of the Geneva Convention. The doors themselves were not iron-barred but looked like solid metal, with a square window set in each one. We were told the guards were ordered not to turn their gaze away from the windows for even a few seconds lest a prisoner try to commit suicide.
Looking through one of the windows, I could see an Army cot covered with an Army blanket and a toilet in a small alcove. Their laundry was done for them, and their uniforms were
carefully pressed, every day. To while away the time, they were given a choice of eight hundred books.
“Compare these accommodations,” Bartley muttered bitterly, “with the conditions we've been seeing in the DP camps.”
Nearly every one of these defendants was condemned to death by hanging. Goering avoided the noose by swallowing a cyanide pill. Heinrich Himmler— head of the Gestapo and the architect of the extermination camps—had averted even standing trial in Nuremberg, also by swallowing a cyanide pill.
We left Germany and began traveling through the Middle East. Here I encountered two of my worst frustrations as a journalist. A reporter's mission is to get the story, and twice I failed.
In Jerusalem, traveling with the committee, I learned that a subcommittee was going to Baghdad and planning to fly from there to Saudi Arabia. It was an important subcommittee made up of two British and one American—Sir John Singleton, the British chairman of the committee, Harold Beeley, the British secretary, and Frank Buxton, the American editor of the Boston Herald.
Determined to cover their work and learn how the monarch of Iraq and the king of Saudi Arabia looked upon the Arab-Jewish problems in Palestine, I left Jerusalem by bus for Baghdad, and registered in the hotel where the men were staying.
An hour later, walking through the lobby, I was stopped by a blond-haired, blue-eyed man. “I am a Kurd,” the man said. “I can see from your camera and notebook that you are a journalist. May I talk to you?”
“Of course,” I said. We found seats in the dining room and ordered coffee. He spoke in English and watched me record his words in my notebook as he talked with urgency.
Every promise this Iraqi government has made to the Kurds has been broken. We are a proud people, and since the beginning of history, we have always been fearless and independent. Now in many ways, we are a minority without a state, treated like second-class citizens. Our children cannot learn our language in schools; our literature is not taught. We live in other countries, too. In Iran alone, there are about 750,000 Kurds, and all together we are about four million.
We live in the richest area—it's Iraq's oil—yet we get nothing from the land we inhabit, from the wealth of our own country. We just pay taxes. We are victims of the “oil curse.” Everyone, even in foreign countries, benefits from our wealth except us.
Still troubled by his bleak words, I said good-bye and left to interview the Saudi Arabian consul in Baghdad. I told him I was traveling with the Anglo-American committee and wanted to be with them in Saudi Arabia.
“We'll be happy to have you,” he said.
I handed him my passport, pleased that it had been so easy to get a visa. I could feel joy and anticipation rise through my body as I watched him stamp the picturesque Arabic visa in my passport.
“What about accommodations?” I asked.
“You would stay with the women in the sultan's harem,” he said as if it were obvious. I nodded, but did not permit myself to respond. He went on, “I suggest you buy an aba—that's a long robe—and a yashmak, to cover your face.”
Clutching my purse containing the precious visa, I shook his hand, thanked him, and made my way by foot to Baghdad's Jewish quarter to interview Rabbi Sassoon Khadouri, Iraq's chief rabbi. His office was inside a large courtyard. I climbed a flight of rickety stairs and knocked on his door.
The rabbi himself opened it and greeted me. He was robed like a monarch in a medieval drama. Vastly overweight, he wore a long gray dressing gown with a wide paisley sash and a matching turban. His stomach pushed through the dressing gown.
He motioned for me to enter and sit facing him as he walked to his desk and introduced his son, Dr. Meir Sassoon, a slim twenty-four-year-old who spoke fluent British-accented English and who sat beside him, acting as our interpreter.
Rabbi Sassoon opened the meeting with a benign, fatherly smile. “Tell me all your questions at once.”
I had a long list in my notebook, but I sensed I should ask only a few. What did he think of the Jews of Iraq trying to get to Palestine? How were Jews treated here? What did he think of Holocaust survivors breaking their way through the British blockade of warships to enter the Holy Land?
He stroked his chin. “I have met many foreigners, but no one has asked me better questions than you.”
He did not answer a single one. Instead he said, “The meeting is over. My son will show you around Baghdad.”
He blessed me as we left. It was the first of my two failures to get a story.
On the street, Dr. Sassoon whispered, “We'll soon be followed. Watch what you say very carefully. Don't say anything provocative. The Jews are not safe here. My sister is already in Jerusalem, and I hope to get there very soon. My father is opposed to Jews entering Palestine. He will stay here—this is his job— but the rest of us are making plans.”
Dr. Sassoon was an excellent guide. He showed me the villas of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor. There were Jews in Iraq in 1946 who had power and wealth. One of them was even the finance minister. But in the Jewish ghetto, beggars held their hands out for money. Many, blind, crippled, in clothes made of tattered burlap, looked as if they had not eaten for days. This land, I thought, was once the cradle of civilization.
I told Dr. Sassoon I needed to buy clothes for Saudi Arabia. “No problem,” he said, leading me to the Baghdad marketplace. In a crowded booth with gowns of all sizes hanging on a rack, I found a long black silk aba and a yashmak. Together, they cost a little over eighty dollars.
Back at the hotel I said good-bye to Dr. Sassoon.
“I hope to see you again,” he said, quoting the line we sing at Passover. “Next year in Jerusalem.”
The words had never had so much meaning to me.
Using the phone in the lobby, I called Harold Beeley, the secretary of the committee, and asked him to meet me. He came down. “So you followed us here?” Amazement distorted his face.
“I want to tell you I have a visa to Saudi Arabia. I would like to fly there with the three members of the committee and with you.”
Beeley, who was Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin's chief Arabist, blinked his eyes and stuttered whenever he grew excited. “W-w-what? Y-y-you have a visa to S-Saudi Arabia? How in the world did you get it?”
“It was no problem. The Saudi Arabian consul here gave it to me.”
“S-s-stay here,” he said. “I-I-I must speak to Sir John.”
While waiting in the lobby, I thought that in all the months of traveling with the committee, I had never been able to get an interview with Sir John Singleton. I knew that he and Judge Joseph Hutcheson, the American chairman, were constantly battling. In one of my interviews with Hutcheson, he told me that Sir John was so cruel that when he had served in Ireland he was known as the “Hanging Judge.”
About half an hour later, Sir John stood over me, looking, I swear, as if he wished he had a knife in his hand. “Don't you know,” he shouted, “that no women are allowed to enter Saudi Arabia?”
His voice was so strident that nearly everyone in the lobby stared at him.
I opened my purse, pulled out my passport, and showed him my visa. He pushed it aside. “I am in charge here, and I say you will not go! I simply will not allow you aboard our plane.”
I hardly recognized my own voice, filled with anger and disbelief. “By whose authority?”
“By mine!” He turned on his heel and stomped toward the elevator.
In my room, fully clothed, I fell on my bed. It was my second failure in Baghdad. I remembered the cold, pompous, almost sadistic way Sir John had interrogated the Holocaust survivors while we were in the DP camps in Germany. I realized now I was everything he despised—an American, a Jew, and a woman. All that night I berated myself for not having been able to win him over. Why hadn't I gone to the plane and tried to force myself onto it? What would I have done if he had called a security guard to pull me off or perhaps throw me into jail? Why hadn't I at least tried? It was useless, I knew, to cry over spilt mi
lk, but it was a lesson I would carry for the rest of my life. If you feel passionate about something, let no obstacle stop you.
Months later, Frank Buxton wrote me an apology from Boston: “I will never forgive myself for not having fought Sir John and gotten you on our plane, a twenty-passenger plane with fifteen empty seats. I was especially furious when I learned that we were paying for it; it was an American plane.”
The four months of travel were winding down. After amassing stacks of testimony, the twelve-member committee wound up in Lausanne, Switzerland, to write their report. I stayed in daily contact with them, while they argued, fought, and tried to influence one another. Judge Hutcheson told me he was so irritated by Sir John's obstinacy that he demanded, “Is you is, or is you ain't, with us!” Sir John finally agreed, and in the end, the committee voted unanimously to open the doors of Palestine to 100,000 DPs.
Truman was elated. In Palestine, thousands of Jews rushed into the streets, dancing with joy. The DP survivors were coming home to the promised land.
Their celebration lasted barely three days. Bevin had read the committee's report and denounced it, saying, in effect, “Over my dead body.”
David Ben-Gurion refused to take defeat. He continued his fight to open the Holy Land not only to survivors of the Holocaust but also to any Jew who wanted to enter. My first meeting with Ben-Gurion was in 1946 at the YMCA in Jerusalem when he testified before the committee, but our friendship began when I interviewed him in New York City in the summer of 1947. He was staying at Hotel 14, the building that housed the Copacabana nightclub. The day was one of the hottest that summer, so I wore a black cotton shift. Ben-Gurion greeted me sharply. “Why are you wearing black? Are you mourning somebody?”