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WPCNR CITY DESK. By John F. Bailey. April 17, 2010: When Brenda Starr (Mrs. Bailey) picked out the documentary film Ahead of Time at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville for us to go see, she told me it sounded interesting. She said it was about a writer/reporter who helped save Jewish refugees in World War II. The name of the writer did not ring a bell with me.
Ann Curry, left, News Anchor/Correspondent, Today Show and Dateline, with Ruth Gruber and Stephen Apkon, founder and executive director of the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville. Curry interviewed Gruber after screening of Ahead of Time, the opening night film of the Westchster Jewish Film Festival 2010 at the Center. Gruber, the subject of the film was a foreign correspondent, photojournalist, author and humanitarian for 70 years. She covered the Nuremberg Trails,documented the voyage of the Exodus and has a lifelong devotion to Jewish causes. Photo, Courtesy, Jacob Burns Film Center, by Lynda Shenkman Curtis.
So we went and I met Ruth Gruber.
I know who she is now. She really did fight for truth, justice and the humane way. She was one writer against the odds, just like in the movies.
With one big chilling difference: she had no script to assure things would turn out right and she would come back alive.
A packed house at the Burns was enthralled by the movie, intercut with memorabilia of Ms. Gruber’s life, pictures of the famous men and women and her presence in the course of twentieth century history. It is a movie that describes her youth growing up in Brooklyn, and being encouraged by a teacher who came to her home one day encouraging her parents that she was a great writing talent. To this day, Ms. Gruber confided to the audience that this teacher inspired her to become a writer
After seeing this movie, I asked reporters I know if they knew of Ruth Gruber. They did not know her.
I, after meeting this shining example of what reporting is and what it’s all about, shall always remember her .
All of us who report because we are compelled to do it, because it is in our gut, and who still search for those guts at times, who still have the inner resolve, should see this movie and learn about Ms. Gruber.
I know her now. At the age of 20, (1931) as a young writer growing up in New York she traveled to Germany and earned a Ph.d at that young age. Staying with a Jewish family at the time, and possessed of a reporter’s curiosity, she saw and listened to Adolf Hitler at a Nazi rally, on the rise at that time.
In the question and answer period after the movie, she told the audience, “I shall never forget the sound of his voice.” The comment spoke volumes. It was risky for Ruth Gruber to attend that rally, she dressed in a manner so that she would not be perceived as Jewish. It was the curiosity and courage that would distinguish Ms. Gruber’s reporting and adventures her entire life.
Ms. Gruber covered the Nuremberg Nazi war criminal trials. She visited Ben-Gurion when he was dying. She stood up to powerful men. She was a foreign correspondent for the Herald Tribune.
Through her pluck and guile and refusal to say “no,” or “give-up,” she became the first correspondent to report from the Russian Arctic. She reported on matters that were not politically correct.
She escorted a boatload of Jewish refugees knowing the ship could have been targeted by German aircraft and submarines, and wrote about the plight of the refugees.
She snapped away pictures on the Jewish refugee ship Exodus on its endless voyage, embarrassing Great Britain, and shaming them into letting these refugees into Palestine. Her photograph of the Union Jack flag with a swastika painted on it is a news photo classic. It was a photo that changed thousands of people’s minds because she had the guts to take it.
She picked by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to report on the potentials of Alaska, and stood up to staunch political criticism of her selection.
Throughout the film, it became clear that Ms. Gruber achieved because she would not take “no” for an answer, had the courage to take a chance, and always looked to the horizon. She did what she thought had to be done.
After the movie ended, Ann Curry, the NBC Correspondent introduced the Ruth Gruber of today, 99 years old.
Ms. Gruber was precisely articulate, confident, and we learned she was still out there reporting.
Just four years ago, she was asked to go on a speaking tour she said to raise funds to transport Jewish refugees from Ethiopia to the United States during the awful civil war there. She said she could not do that without seeing first-hand the refugees’ plight. So in her mid-90s she traveled to Ethiopia and interviewed the refugees first-hand. For a person that at half her age doesn’t like driving into New York City, well I tell you, I was confronted with my own fear.
When you meet some one like Ruth Gruber, you’ll never forget them.
In the audience were persons who traveled on the refugee ship that Ms. Gruber was on in 1944 as am ambassador and actually a human shield, that because of her international reputation, the United States felt the refugee ship would be protected with her on board. Ms. Gruber took the risk. Their admiration for her was shining, even after all these decades have passed.
She has authored seven books and writes every day, using computers.
She is the reporter’s reporter, and I wondered why I and some of my colleagues did not know of her. We know of the Cronkites, the Murrows, the Hemingways, Martha Gelhorn, but I had not heard of Ms. Gruber, until last week.
Some one in the audience asked what advice she had for the young today for young writers.
She said, “Read, read read every paper you can get your hands on. Write, write, write, do not be discouraged by rejection. Do not let anything stand in the way of your dreams.”
Asked how she raised two children and still kept her career going, Gruber, obviously the mold from which tough, no-nonsense, nose-for-news woman reporters were made of dismissed the incredulous-tinged question with a thoughtful, “it was not easy.”
The woman has a way with dialogue. Snappy, direct, uncompromising, self-sufficient. It is very attractive.
I encourage every reporter – especially young women and men in journalism—to see this documentary, Ahead of Time. It is a film to watch whenever you don’t get that interview, whenever you’ve been scooped, lied to, hit on, disrespected, not given big assignments, and given the shaft, and your editor is a jerk.
Ms. Gruber was treated like that, experienced those things but did not let it stop her – she rose above it – when women were not supposed to be reporters.
Asked for one last bit of advice from the audience about what she would tell young people, Ms. Gruber repeated,
“Let nothing stand in the way of your dreams.”
Ruth Gruber Reporting
