Gruber, who was born in Brooklyn, started college at New York University at age 15 and had earned a doctorate from the University of Cologne in Germany by the time she was Her dissertation was on Virginia Woolf, whom she later met.
Gruber then went into journalism as a reporter and photographer. During World War II, she was appointed special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, for whom she carried out a study to see if returning veterans could settle in Alaska. In , Gruber got involved in a mission to bring a group of 1, Jewish refugees from Europe to the United States.
She lobbied fiercely for the refugees to be given American citizenship, which they eventually were granted. She returned to journalism after the war, covering stories such as the plight of other Jewish refugees and the movement to allow some to settle in what was then Palestine.
For four months, she traveled with the committee to the death camps and the displaced persons camps in Germany, then she went on to Palestine, where she became a trusted friend of the founding fathers and mothers of the State of Israel.
Her profiles of David Ben-Gurion, who was then almost unknown in the United States, made American readers aware of his prophetic character and unswerving Lincoln-like determination to build a Jewish state.
In Jerusalem, she learned that a ship called Exodus , with forty-five hundred survivors of the Holocaust aboard, was battling the British in the Mediterranean. Gruber decided to cover the Exodus. In Haifa, surrounded by tanks and barbed wire, Gruber watched as British soldiers carried down the battered bodies of Bill Bernstein, the beloved American second mate, and two sixteen-year-old orphans.
Some of the refugees came down dejectedly; those who refused were pulled down. The British told her they were being sent to the island of Cyprus, where in three years from to fifty-two thousand survivors of the Holocaust were imprisoned. She flew to Cyprus to wait for the ships, but they never came. Instead, they were returned to Port de Bouc, near Marseilles, the port from which they had sailed. After three weeks, the British announced they were sending the Jews of the Exodus back to Germany.
They selected Gruber as the pool correspondent to represent the American press. In , Gruber married Philip H. In , at age forty-one, she gave birth to her first child, Celia; her son, David, was born in In , Henry Rosner died. In , Gruber traveled to the isolated Jewish villages in the highlands of Ethiopia to aid in the rescue of the Ethiopian Jews.
In , at the age of ninety, she completed a twenty-city tour to publicize the reprinting of four of her books. Ickes, Golda Meir, and Other Friends It received a Pulitzer nomination. Have an update or correction? Let us know. On the eve of Israeli statehood, Gruber attached herself to the refugee ship Exodus , which the British turned away from Haifa harbor.
She was the only journalist accompanying its human cargo on their journey back to Germany. Along the way, Gruber found time to marry — and outlive — two husbands, and to have two children.
Over the years she has published 15 books, which feature both her written work and her important photojournalism. David B. Green Sep. Updated: Apr. For more information, read our Privacy Policy. By clicking Submit, you agree that we may send you communications in accordance with these terms. Submit Cancel. We use MailChimp as our marketing automation platform. By submitting this form, you acknowledge that the information you provide will be transferred to MailChimp for processing in accordance with their Privacy Policy and Terms.
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