美国国家公共电台 NPR Remembering Ruth Gruber, Who Photographed The 20th Century's Darkest Moments

（单词翻译）

Remembering Ruth Gruber, Who Photographed The 20th Century's Darkest Moments

play pause stop mute unmute max volume 00:0002:39repeat repeat off Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser¹ to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: 

Ruth Gruber was a witness to many of the 20th century's worst moments and a few of its best. She was a journalist passionate² about the plight³ of the Jewish people. She died yesterday in New York at age 105. NPR's Rose Friedman has this appreciation⁴.

ROSE FRIEDMAN, BYLINE⁵: As a young woman, Ruth Gruber told her father she wanted to be a writer. In her 90s, she recalled his response.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

RUTH GRUBER: What kind of career is that for a nice Jewish girl?

(LAUGHTER)

FRIEDMAN: Here's what kind of career that turned out to be. Over and over, Gruber went to where the action was. In a documentary about her life, she recalled being at a Nazi⁶ rally.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "AHEAD OF TIME: THE EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY OF RUTH GRUBER ")

GRUBER: I pretended I was a German citizen. And I sat the closest to Hitler's party.

(SOUNDBITE OF NAZI RALLY)

ADOLF HITLER: (Speaking German).

GRUBER: It was something I will never ever forget.

FRIEDMAN: In 1935, the New York Herald⁷ Tribune hired her. She was the first Western reporter to visit Stalin's gulags in the Soviet⁸ Arctic. Then during World War II, she worked for the U.S. government. When President Roosevelt decided⁹ to bring a thousand Jewish refugees to the U.S., Gruber was sent to Europe to accompany them. She told NPR in 1999 that meeting those refugees was a shock.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GRUBER: I had no idea what they had gone through. So I was completely surprised by the stories. And I kept seeing visions of them watching their parents burned in front of them, their children snatched from them.

FRIEDMAN: After the war, Gruber returned to journalism¹⁰. In 1947, she was on assignment in Jerusalem for what would become her most famous story. A ship called Exodus¹¹, carrying more than 4,500 Holocaust¹² survivors¹³, was sailing toward Palestine. The British intercepted¹⁴ it and came aboard forcefully. Three people were killed.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GRUBER: I was standing¹⁵ at the dock when they pulled the Exodus in. She had been smashed like a sandwich by British warships¹⁶.

FRIEDMAN: Gruber boarded the ship.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GRUBER: People crowded around me and raised a flag. And they had painted the swastika on the Union Jack¹⁷.

FRIEDMAN: She took a photo which became life magazine's picture of the week. The publicity¹⁸ embarrassed the British government and contributed to the establishment of the state of Israel the following year.

That wasn't the end of Gruber's career. It wasn't even the middle. She covered Israeli independence, the airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, even the Vietnam War. For a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, Ruth Gruber was fearless. Rose Friedman, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)