Ruth Gruber |
YIVO
What
This World
Might Have Been
Story and Photos by Tim Boxer
 T
is nothing short of amazing what kind of world this might have been
if the Six Million were allowed to live. This realization was made
vivid as foreign correspondent Ruth Gruber recounted
how she struggled to bring 1,000 survivors of the Nazi
slaughterhouse of Europe to the safety of a transit camp in Oswego,
New York, in 1944.
After they settled here,
they grew up to contribute mightily to society. One helped create
the MRI and CAT scan. Another became one of the fathers of the
Polaris and Minuteman missiles.
A five-year-old girl among the refugees today operates My
Favorite Dessert Company, a popular Manhattan Midtown kosher
restaurant.
Gruber, a retired foreign
correspondent, wrote of her wartime experiences in a book, which
recently aired as a CBS miniseries, Haven.
“The TV film took a lot
of liberties, but it doesn’t bother me – after all, that’s
Hollywood,” she said at YIVO’s annual dinner at the Pierre
Hotel.
Dr. Eric Kandel |
Bruce Slovin, board
chairman of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and Vera Stern
presented a lifetime achievement award to Gruber, 88. They also
honored Dr. Eric Kandel, a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize
in medicine.
Kandel, who avoided the
Holocaust when he left Vienna as a child in 1939, started out at the
Yeshiva of Flatbush and Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. Today he is
a professor in biochemistry at Columbia University.
The day he got the call
that he would get the Nobel Prize for research in the molecular
biology of memory, the first thing he did was go to shul.
That was not surprising. It
was Yom Kippur and he was going anyway.
In accepting YIVO’s
lifetime achievement award, Kandel said, “We have taken the first
steps in linking mind to molecules.” (Right, I don’t understand
it either!)
Sanford
Batkin, Rosalind Devon,
Bruce Slovin and Ruth Gruber. |
Another notable achievement
is his marriage to Denise who, as a child, was hidden during
the war in her native France.
“When I first met
Denise,” Kandel said, “I asked if she wanted to go to the movies
or to the best bar in town. Her eyes lit up and she said the best
bar in town. I took her to my apartment.”
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