by Ruth Gruber
“Mr. Ben-Gurion, this is the coolest dress I have.” It amused me that this strong labor leader, who was focused on opening Palestine, should even notice what I was wearing.
“Well, don't wear black anymore, unless somebody has died,” he warned me.
A few days later I went to see him again, not in black, and brought the printed interview. Before even looking at it he said, “Some of my friends have read it and they like it, but they didn't like your putting in that stuff about your black dress. Why did you do it?”
“Because I thought it was a funny story.”
He brushed me aside. I watched as he read the opening paragraph: “ ‘There is a man in our town today who is to the Jews of Palestine what Abraham Lincoln was to our people in the midst of the Civil War.' ”
He had a high voice, but now, as he jumped up from the sofa, he shrieked, “How can you say I am like Abraham Lincoln? When I think of a great leader, I think of Lincoln. Who am I? ‘A little Jew.' ”
“Not to your people,” I said softly.
He continued reading the article. Then he turned to me and said, “I want you to do me a favor. Take me to some bookstores, and help me find books in Greek—I'm studying Greek now.”
“Why Greek?” I asked him. It seemed pretty daunting for a man preoccupied with establishing a nation to be studying Greek.
“I want to read the Greek classics in the original,” he answered. “There's a saying, ‘To read a book in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.'
“My second request,” he said, “is I want you to buy every available book on Abraham Lincoln.” We spent the next hours running from bookstore to bookstore and purchasing everything on Lincoln we could find. We did not find many books in Greek in New York. But the books on Lincoln filled one of his suitcases.
Several times a year I returned to Palestine and became one of the few journalists to whom he always granted an interview. I was prepared to sit at his feet, but every time I spoke with him, he would turn the tables and interview me about the political picture in America.
Of all the world's leaders, I found Ben-Gurion to be the most prophetic. In the months that followed, I witnessed his passionate struggle to keep the doors of the Holy Land open to scores of hunted and displaced people. His words frequently sent me back to the Bible to find the truth and beauty of my Jewish heritage. Because of his courage in facing down his enemies, he inspired me to record, in words and pictures, as clearly and simply as I could, the truth of whatever I was witnessing, no matter how controversial it might be.
Young people in a DP camp in Germany, 1946, most of them orphans, greet the Anglo-American Committee with hope that the committee will help them make their way to the Holy Land. My camera was like a magnet for the orphaned children. As soon as I focused on a small group, others rushed to join us. Each image contained some faces of hope, but far more displayed eyes shadowed with sadness.
Wherever we went the people greeted us with passionate signs. In January 1946, the refugees in each DP camp that we visited raised banners, telling us of their determination to find a home in Palestine.
In the DP camps, refugees would often tell me they were planning a hunger strike so I would tell the world about them. They told me stories of horror, explaining why they had to have a home.
When I got back to New York, the first person who wanted me to tell those stories at her dinner parties was Helen Rogers Reid. I was shocked when Richard Kluger, in his book The Paper, called Helen an anti-Semite.
I was asked to counter Kluger, who was discussing his book at the Overseas Press Club. “No anti-Semite,” I said, “would have made a secret trip to Paris to meet with Britain's foreign minister Ernest Bevin. ‘You must let the people out of your camps,' she told him. ‘After what they have been through, to keep them in your prisons!' ”
Bevin's answer was “I'm deeply honored by your visit, but these people are all illegals. They're acting against the laws.”
Helen said, “They're only illegals according to your White Paper, and the only country that accepted your White Paper was Pakistan.”
Bevin refused to help her.
I was especially caught by the eyes of the orphans at a DP camp for children in Leipheim, near Munich, in 1946. It was in a former SS barracks. The word “orphanage” was verboten. The orphans were put in “children's homes.” Children of nine or eleven became the parents and guardians of the sixand seven-year-olds. Some of the children looked brave and confi-dent, while others seemed terrified. This little girl's eyes carried the images of the horrors they had witnessed. A few of the children held out their arms to me; I embraced them, holding them close to me. I didn't know who needed to be hugged more, they or I.
Munich, 1946. I first went to Munich on Christmas day 1931. The American exchange students in Germany were all invited by the State Department to a ski lodge in Hitler's favorite vacation spot, Berchtesgaden. I was working on my doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf and took it with me on the train from Cologne, together with a copy of Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf. Hitler was not yet in power, but his book was in the window of every bookstore. A State Department official invited the American exchange students to dinner with local townsfolk. I found myself seated next to a Bavarian in his late thirties whose beer stein was never empty. After several drinks, he put his arm around my waist. I promptly removed it. He then declaimed in a loud voice, “I hate Americans and I hate Jews.” I stood up furious. “I will not allow you to insult my country and my faith.” I picked up my purse and stormed out.
I was followed, not by the drunken racist, but by the State Department official. Livid with anger, he grabbed my elbow in the hall and said, “You go right back into that restaurant and apologize to that man!”
“What?” I freed myself. “You want me to apologize to a rude, drunken man who insults my country and my religion? He should apologize to me!”
“We are their guests,” he sputtered. “And you represent America.”
I did not wait for the rest of his diatribe. He was scolding me as if I were a child. I ran upstairs to my bedroom. It was freezing. I called downstairs to the concierge to send something to warm my feet. He sent up a hot brick, wrapped in a towel. Unable to sleep, I wrapped myself in my coat and left the next morning.
Fifteen years later, in January 1946, I returned to Munich with the Anglo-American Committee.
Munich had once been a beautiful city. Lovely shops and thriving businesses had filled the streets. Now it lay in ruins from the war Germany had started. I could only think of the babies and the other children who had been murdered in the nearby concentration camp, Dachau.
Germans struggled to reconstruct their lives after Allied bombs ripped Munich apart.
Traveling with the Anglo-American Committee, I went from Munich to Dachau, one of the Nazis' first concentration camps and killing centers. When we first got to Germany and I saw the devastation our pilots had done, I thought, “Why did we do so much damage?” But after a few days in Munich, and listening to the testimony of surviving victims, I looked at the devastation differently. If there was one building standing on this German street, I wondered why the pilots hadn't destroyed that one too.
Munich, 1946. Germany was divided into four Allied-occupied zones at the time, and we were interested primarily in visiting the American and British ones. Survivors of the Holocaust began filling up the DP camps while the people of Munich scrounged for food and shelter amid the rubble. Seeing women walking around in their expensive winter coats, I couldn't help wondering if those coats had been pulled off the backs of dead Jews.
At Tyre, in Lebanon, the committee members enjoyed the sights of young Arab boys watching us. We interviewed Arab leaders who were determined to keep Jews out of Palestine. The pashas welcomed us with sumptuous banquets. The tables were piled high with lamb, sheep's eyes, and other food I didn't recognize. When no one watched I slipped the food into my tote bag.
After dinner, they pl
ayed music, jazz, and even a Viennese waltz. Several young Arab men drew me onto the dance floor. One of them said, “You see how easily we get along. We're cousins, Arabs and Jews.”
Sir John Singleton, the British chairman of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, kept saying, “We don't want to open those doors in Palestine; we don't want Jews in there.”
Haifa, 1946. We spent days interviewing Arabs and Jews. The town's citizens were famous for the harmonious way they lived together, shopped together, and even voted together.
Haifa was the industrial center of the country. I always thought of it, with its big oil tanks and industries, as the morning city. Tel Aviv was the noonday city: crowded, busy, people running back and forth. Jerusalem was the sunset city. The sun seemed to set from inside those beautiful stone walls.
I brought Helen Rogers Reid to Haifa, and its mayor, Abba Hushy, came to take us around. Helen wanted to know how they voted—it was election time. So he showed us what he was doing in that city.
Most people thought that the Arabs would stay in the city during the War of Independence, but their leaders said, “Leave Haifa. We'll bring you back with a victorious Arab Army, and you'll control the city.”
And they left. They believed their leaders.
Gerold Frank, the prolific writer and biographer, was one of the journalists who covered the Anglo-American Committee's travels for the Overseas News Agency.
Although I was one of the few women in the press corps, I rarely encountered gender discrimination. Not only did we read one another's stories, we also often worked together and shared information.
There were a few resentments held against me as a woman journalist, however. Some of the male journalists were jealous that I was able to make friendships easily with the leaders. One day in the Government Press Office in Jerusalem I was approached by Moshe Sharett, who would become Israel's first foreign minister, and asked if I would join him and his family for dinner that night. After he left, one of the French correspondents confronted me: “What scoop did he give you?”
“He invited me to meet his wife and children at dinner,” I replied. “That's what you say; I don't believe it.” I simply shrugged my shoulders. Fortunately, these incidents rarely happened.
Arabs and Jews walked and worked peacefully together in Jerusalem in 1946. I hoped that the two peoples that inhabited this tiny land could help each other build it.
With members of the Anglo-American Committee and a few of their staff, I visited Cairo in 1946. The meetings were held at the elegant Mena House, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek had held a summit during the war. Only Arab leaders came to testify.
Bartley Crum, the most charismatic American of the committee, learned later that King Farouk had summoned the Jewish leaders, including the chief rabbi, and had warned them that it would be wiser for them not to testify. All the Arabs' speeches had the same theme: Palestine should not be opened for 100,000 Jewish DPs.
At the YMCA in Jerusalem, Dr. Chaim Weizmann (seated; left), who later became Israel's first president, held a head-to-head conversation with David Horowitz, later Israel's chief economist. Dr. Weizmann was the first leader to appear before the committee.
“We warned you, gentlemen,” Dr. Weizmann said passionately. “We told you that the first flames that licked at the synagogues of Berlin would set fire, in time, to all the world.”
Each day in Jerusalem, foreign correspondents had to appear at the government press office for a new press card. When we complained of this time-wasting order, we were told that if we lost the press card and a terrorist found it, he could enter the YMCA and kill us. We doubted their excuse, convinced that it was another way for the British to learn what we were cabling to our papers.
Chaim Weizmann was the official head of the Jewish community in Palestine, the one the world recognized as the leader. He was old and frail and nearly blind, but he was eloquent, and he had a brain like a ballerina's toes. He was witty. He was always correcting me because I drank weak tea. “She takes a rag, she runs it through a glass of hot water, and she calls it tea. What she needs is krepke chai”—in Russian, strong tea.
He said to the committee, “Europe is burning. If you let it burn, it will burn all over.” He was predicting what would happen if war were to occur. He was so brilliantly eloquent that the reporters stopped taking notes and just listened.
He persuaded Truman to include the Negev when the UN debated partitioning Palestine—the Negev was Israel's future.
Iraq, 1946. A British pilot and copilot flew some members of the Anglo-American Committee from Jerusalem to Baghdad. I followed them to Baghdad, but was barred from boarding the plane that took them to Saudi Arabia.
David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency (the shadow government in Palestine that the Jews had created under the British), testified before the Anglo-American Committee. He tried to make the committee members understand why the survivors of the Holocaust, living in DP camps, were desperate for their own homeland.
“Here,” he said, “they can have security and freedom.” My friendship with Ben-Gurion and his American-born wife, Paula, began during the hearings and continued until their deaths. He saw the Jewish state as a place of refuge, a true democracy, a land where Arabs and Jews could live together in peace.
* The holy land now called Israel, was then called Palestine.
UNSCOP, the Exodus, and Prison Camps in Cyprus
1947
Having sabotaged the work of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin announced that Britain no longer wanted to rule the Holy Land. It meant the end of Britain's mandate to turn Palestine into a Jewish homeland.
There were pundits who predicted that the United Nations would say, “Please, Mr. Bevin. Don't do that. You are the only one who knows how to handle those ornery Jews.”
Instead, the UN decided to create its own committee, UNSCOP (the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine). It was the twentieth committee to study Palestine, but the first without a single Englishman. Its eleven members were from countries that had little or no oil. (“We would have no problems in the Middle East,” President Truman told me one day in his office, “if not for that dirty three-letter word: OIL.”)
Helen Rogers Reid asked me to accompany UNSCOP as the Trib's special foreign correspondent. I was in a quandary. To assuage my disappointment over Bevin's rejection of the Anglo-American Committee's unanimous report, I had begun to write a novel based on my work with the committee.
Should I drop the novel or travel with UNSCOP?
By chance, Lion Feuchtwanger, the famous German novelist, was in New York on a book tour. Having met and interviewed Feuchtwanger several times, I asked his advice.
“You can always write a novel later,” he said. “To cover this UN committee is an opportunity any journalist would give his eyeteeth for. I think this will turn out to be the most important committee yet in opening the doors of Palestine. This committee may lead to the birth of a Jewish state. And you will be part of it.”
I took his advice and traveled with UNSCOP through Europe, Palestine, and the Arab lands. I discovered that the novel I had been writing was like a pianist's finger exercises. It sensitized me for the real work to come; it prepared me to understand the refugees we were meeting and the problems they faced.
In the DP camps in Germany, we were greeted once again with huge new signs: WE WANT TO GO. WE MUST GO. WE WILL GO TO PALESTINE. Once again, we were taking testimony from Holocaust survivors; once again, I was not sleeping nights, but when I fell asleep, I relived in dreams some of the horrors they told us.
In the Arab countries, especially in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, we were entertained by belly dancers, fed Arab delicacies, and listened to Arab leaders who wanted to prevent any more Jews from entering Palestine.
Friday, July 18, 1947, we were in Jerusalem's YMCA taking testimony when I learned that an American ship name
d Exodus 1947, built to hold four hundred people and now carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors, was trying to enter the Holy Land. Four British warships and the cruiser Ajax were attacking it outside territorial waters.
I cabled the Trib that I was leaving UNSCOP temporarily to cover the Exodus. The cable came back: “Good luck.” Within an hour I was driving north to Haifa.
The dock was bustling with British tanks, personnel carriers, paratroopers wearing red berets, and soldiers preparing for battle. Savage-looking Sten guns lay on top of hospital stretchers. Haifa looked and smelled more like a war zone than Naples had in 1944, when I picked up the Oswego refugees.
Three ships lay in the harbor. “What are those ships doing here?” I asked Colonel Cardozo, the British officer in charge of the whole operation. He was a short marionette who never walked but danced as if on invisible strings. I had to dance after him to get his attention.
“They're hospital ships. We're going to divide up those 4,500 people and put 1,500 in each one of the three ships.”
“I'd like to go aboard one of them.”
“Impossible. But I can tell you they're a heck of a lot better than that tub they sailed in. We're giving the people sheets, blankets, clean beds.”
“Where are you taking them?”
“To Cyprus.”
Parts of Cyprus, then a British crown colony, had been cordoned off into two prison camps, which the British had set up to intern refugees caught trying to break through the British blockade and enter the Holy Land.
“Cyprus is a prison!” I said. “You're going to lock them up!”
He danced away as the battered Exodus limped into the harbor.