Ruth Gruber - Collected Memoirs: Ahead of Time, Haven, and Inside of Time

Collected Memoirs

Ahead of Time, Haven, and Inside of Time

Ruth Gruber

CONTENTS

About the Author

Ruth Gruber (19112016) was an award-winning Jewish American journal-ist, photographer, and humanitarian. Born in Brooklyn in 1911, she was the author of nineteen books, including the National Jewish Book Awardwinning biography Raquela (1978). She also wrote several mem-oirs documenting her astonishing experiences, among them Ahead of Time (1991), Inside of Time (2002), and Haven (1983), which documents her role in the rescue of one thousand refugees from Europe and their safe transport to America. Gruber passed away in 2016 at the age of 105.

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Ahead of Time Copyright 1991 by Ruth Gruber

Haven Copyright 1983, 1984, 2000 by Ruth Gruber

Inside of Time Copyright 2003 by Ruth Gruber

Cover design by Milan Bozic

ISBN: 978-1-5040-5297-9

This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Ahead of Time

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.