Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship Exodus 1947

New York: Current Books, Inc.; A. A. Wyn, Publisher, 1948. Reprint. Second printing. Hardcover. Good. No dust jacket. Cover has some wear and soiling.. Gruber, Ruth (Photographer). 134 p. Includes illustrations. Includes an unpaginated (32 p) section, "The Photographic Story of the: Exodus 1947". Before Leon Uris there was Ruth Gruber. Ruth Gruber (born September 30, 1911) is an American journalist, photographer, writer, humanitarian and a former United States government official. During World War II, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes appointed Ruth Gruber as his Special Assistant. In this role, she carried out a study on the prospects of Alaska for homesteading G.I. s after the war. [5] In 1944, she was assigned a secret mission to Europe to bring one thousand Jewish refugees and wounded American soldiers from Italy to the US. Ickes made her "a simulated general", so in case the military aircraft she flew in was shot down and she was caught by the Nazis, she would be kept alive according to the Geneva Convention. [6] Throughout the voyage, the Army troop transport Henry Gibbins was hunted by Nazi seaplanes and U-boats. Ruth Gruber's book Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America was based on case histories she recorded as she interviewed the refugees. Since the US Congress refused to lift the quota on Jewish immigration to the United States from Europe, US President Roosevelt acted by executive authority and invited the group of one thousand to visit America. The refugees were to be guests of the President and upon arriving in New York, they were transferred to Fort Ontario, a decommissioned army training base near Oswego, NY and locked behind a chain link fence with barbed wire. While US government agencies argued about whether they should be allowed to stay or, at some point, be deported to Europe, Gruber lobbied to keep them through the end of the war. It was not until January 1946 that the decision was made to allow them to apply for American residency. This was the only attempt by the United States to shelter Jewish refugees during the war. A 2001 film called Haven was based on Gruber's book, with Natasha Richardson portraying Ruth Gruber. In 1946, Gruber took leave from her federal post to return to journalism. The New York Post asked her to cover the work of a newly created Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. The Committee was to decide the fate of 100, 000 European Jewish refugees who were living in European camps as displaced persons (DP). Harry Truman pressed Great Britain to open the doors of British Mandate of Palestine. The committee members spent four months in Europe, Palestine and the Arab countries and another month in Switzerland digesting their experiences. At the end of its deliberations, the committee's twelve members unanimously agreed that Britain should allow 100, 000 Jewish immigrants to settle in Palestine. British foreign minister Ernest Bevin rejected the finding. Eventually the issue was taken up by the recently established United Nations, which appointed a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Gruber accompanied UNSCOP as a correspondent for the New York Herald. Gruber witnessed the Exodus 1947 ship entering the Haifa harbor after it was attacked by the Royal Navy while making an attempt to deliver 4, 500 Jewish refugees. To meet the Exodus refugees Gruber flew to Cyprus, where she witnessed and photographed Jewish refugees detained by the British. However the British sent the Exodus prisoners to Port de Bouc in France and Gruber went there. The prisoners refused to disembark and after 18 days standoff, the British decided to ship the Jews back to Germany. Out of many journalists from around the world reporting on the affair, Ruth Gruber alone was allowed by the British to accompany the DPs back to Germany. Aboard the prison ship Runnymede Park, Gruber photographed the refugees, confined in a wire cage with barbed wire on top, defiantly raising a Union Jack flag on which they had painted a swastika. This was her third book.