Ruth Gruber - Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent

My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent

Ruth Gruber

To my young grandchildren, Michael and Lucy Evans and Joel and Lila Michaels

In the hope that they will dream dreams, have vision, and let no obstacles stop them

Contents

1935

I paced the room. Had I been followed? Was the phone tapped? Was there a microphone hidden somewherein the ceiling perhaps, or behind the heavy German drapes?

It was nearly twilight. Outside the hotel window, the latticed steeples of the Cologne Cathedralthe Klner Domstretched upward toward the summer sky.

Somewhere I had read that music drowned out a microphone, scrambled the voices. I switched on the radio. Beethovens Violin Concerto filled the room.

I was mad to do what I was doing. Was any traveler safe from their surveillance? Surely they knew that I was a Jew.

From London I had written Johann, I shall be arriving in Cologne on Tuesday. If you want to see me, come to the [Klner Dom] Hotel at 5:30 in the afternoon.

That would give him the choice. If it were not safe for him to see me, he wouldnt come. If he had become a Nazi, then surely he wouldnt come. Still, I had to know.

Four years before, as Hitler was marching to power, we had met at the University of Cologne. Our friendship grew out of reading Goethe and Rilke together, walking hand in hand through the great German forests, impassioned discussions of German philosophers and musicians. In that one year, on an exchange fellowship from America, I had come as close as I could to German life, to the Germany of Goethes Faust and The Sorrows of Werther.

Marry me, Johann had implored. We, who come from two religions, two cultures, two different civilizations, we will bring strength to each other. We will bring strong, fresh blood to both our races.

Races! The word had not yet become the hated word the Nazis would make it. Sitting in the hotel room with its heavy German furniture, I could still picture him on the platform of the railroad station, seeing me off to Americathe narrow, poetic face, the shining black hair, and the dark eyes that seemed to have glints and shadows of the Black Forest.

He spoke with urgency. Its true, the Nazis are getting more powerful every day, but there are also social democrats and communists and Prussian Junkers. And theyre fighting each other. Were not like them, you and I. We can have a beautiful life, and together we can change whats happening here.

I knew he believed his own words, believed that two young students could make a difference in this German world. I wanted to believe it too.

I cant make any decision until I go home, I said. I must put distance between us. Give me time.

I had gone home to Brooklyn.

A few months later my grandfather, Zayda Moishe-Avigdor Gruber, who looked like Moses in my storybooks, died in his sleep. His death shook me. On Saturdays and holidays, when I was four and five, he had taken me by the hand to his little synagogue in Williamsburg and let me sit beside him. (Little girls could sit in the mens section.) Solemnly, I drank in the prayers and the chanting, for I was sitting next to my own Moses.

I climbed the stairs of the tenement in which he had lived for forty years, since the day he had landed at Ellis Island from Odessa, where he and my grandmother had run a kosher inn. When I stopped at the stairwell on the second floor, his voice seemed to come to me: You cannot marry this young man, no matter how fine, how noble you think he is. He is a Christian. This is your home. Here you belong. In America, among us. This is your fate.

I entered the spotless apartment. My grandfather lay like a dead monarch on the high white bed. I whispered to him, weeping, Zayda, I heard you.

That afternoon I wrote to Johann. Its like a fever that has broken. I know now it can never be.

He persisted. You are wrong. We belong together. Give yourself more time. You will see that I am right.

In January 1933 Hitler came to power.

He will not last, people said. The man is ridiculous. In a few months he will be exposed and finished.

I was not so sanguine. Though I had fallen in love with Germany, I knew its dark side too. In that student year of 1932, despite the anguished warnings of the Jewish family I lived with, I had gone to a Hitler rally at the Messehalle, the huge Exhibition Hall on the Rhine. I had clutched my American passport in my purse, my heart beating so loud I was afraid the storm troopers would hear it and grab me.

Huge swastika banners waved in the packed hall; the stage was festooned with flags; brown uniforms with red swastika armbands were everywhere; anti-Semitic songs kept the crowd charged with shock waves of hatred.

Suddenly the audience screamed. Hitler was marching toward the podium, followed by stern-faced storm troopers. He waited on the stage until there was silence. Then he spoke, his voice hoarse, hysterical. He ranted against the Weimar Republic, against capitalists and communists, against America, against Jews. His audience shrieked with approval, their hysteria matching his. Juda verecke [May the Jew croak], he shouted. Juda verecke. The crowd took up the cry. Juda verecke. Juda verecke.

I left the Messehalle unattached but sick at heart. Germany had two faces. Das Land der Dichter und Denker,the land of poets and thinkers, was also the land of Lumpenproletariat and screaming racists.

Now, three years later, I walked restlessly to the tall window in the hotel room, drew aside the dark drapes and looked down at the city with its cluster of narrow medieval streets and its vertical electric signs, like Chinese banners, blinking the names of beer parlors and movies, and beyond the streets, the Rhine river on whose banks Johann and I had walked countless days and nights.

Would he be in brown uniform? Would he come?

Late afternoon shadows fell over the Cathedral. Down below I saw a group of storm troopers marching and singing. On the sidewalk, passersby waved at them.

Screams came from a nearby building. I saw two storm troopers pull an old man out of a house. His cries filled the air. But on the street there was silence.

October 1, 1911

I was born in a shtetla shtetl called Williamsburgin Brooklyn.

At five and a half, I learned about birthing. Mama, short and stout, with thick, curly, prematurely gray hair, shrewd gray eyes, a determined chin, and wide hips, had given birth to four children in less than eight years. I was the youngest. Then, at twenty-nine, she discovered she was pregnant again. She was mortified. She was too old to have more children. What would the neighbors on Moore Street think? She told no one, not even my grandmother, Baba Rockower. Mama hid her shame beneath a huge blue woolen cape.

On a warm afternoon in May, she corralled her four children. You, she said to my oldest brother, who was twelve and street- smart, you take Harry and Betty and go to the movies. Heres a nickel for each of you. (For a nickel, two could see a movie.) Then she turned to me. Youre too small to go with them. You go in the bedroom and take a nap.

And Dave, she ordered my father, its time. Run down to the corner drugstore and call Dr. Hyman. Dont call from our store. I dont want the customers to hear.

I tiptoed out of bed and watched from the bedroom door as Mama went to the kitchen, flung an oilcloth across the round table, hoisted her heavy body on a kitchen chair, and climbed onto the table. In minutes, I heard her drawing in sharp breaths that seemed to give her pain. Soon she cried out. There were other sounds I had never heard before. Then I saw her bend forward and lift a baby swathed in blood from between her legs.