Jewish GI finally will get his due as hero
by Lisa Hoffman, Scripps Howard, September 22, 2005
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WASHINGTON -- He's 77 now, with kidneys half gone, a handful of implanted stents
keeping his heart ticking, bad arthritis and an old war injury that's left his
right leg all but unusable.
But this week, former Army Cpl. Tibor Rubin will marshal every ounce of his
remaining strength for a cross-country trip to take a permanent place in the
history of his adopted country.
Rubin and his wife, Yvonne, will fly this week from Garden Grove, Calif., to
Washington. At the White House on Friday, the Hungarian immigrant and death-camp
survivor will finally receive America's thanks for his extraordinary acts of
bravery and devotion that saved the lives of dozens of his fellow GIs during the
Korean War.
In an East Room ceremony -- delayed for more than 50 years at least partly
because of the anti-Semitism of one of Rubin's sergeants -- President Bush will
drape the nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor, around Rubin's neck.
"If I don't die first," Rubin quipped, breaking into a peal of the cackling
laugh that has carried him, time and time again, through some of the worst that
life can bring.
Born to a shoemaker in a Hungarian village of 120 Jewish families, he was
rounded up at 13 and sent to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria. His mother
and 10-year-old sister died in an Auschwitz gas chamber; his father, a World War
I hero in the Hungarian army, was killed at Buchenwald.
Rubin survived the horror for two years, until May 5, 1945, when U.S. soldiers
liberated him and 70 other Jews. In 1948, he worked his way to New York City,
where he labored as a shoemaker, then a butcher's assistant. In 1950, though not
a U.S. citizen and barely conversant in English, he enlisted in the Army as a
way to pay back the country that rescued him.
Within months, he was on the front lines in Korea, a 20-year-old private first
class in I Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.
His first act of bravery came soon, when his sergeant assigned him to hold a
hill so that his battalion could withdraw to safety.
Single-handedly, for 24 hours, he fought off wave after wave of enemy soldiers.
He ran around and around the crest of the hill, rolling hand grenades down it
and firing from different directions so the North Koreans would think they were
attling more than just one man.
After the battle, scores of the dead and dying littered the hill. Rubin vomited
at the sight of the lives he had taken. "Tibor, you just earned your first Medal
of Honor," Rubin recalls his captain saying.
"I didn't know what the hell he was talking about," Rubin said. "I'll never be
be proud of" the carnage that war makes men commit.
In another battle, Rubin volunteered to man his battalion's last remaining
machine gun, at which three other gunners had died, and protected his unit from
surging Chinese soldiers.
Later, he disobeyed his sergeant's orders to leave a wounded GI behind, crawling
several hundred yards under sniper fire to help his shrapnel-filled buddy. He
"saved my life by carrying me to safety," then-Cpl. Leonard Hamm wrote in a
nomination of Rubin for the Medal of Honor. Rubin himself was wounded twice.
In the end, although two unit commanders recommended him three times for the
Medal of Honor, the first sergeant in charge of Rubin's unit never prepared the
papers. A halfdozen of Rubin's fellow GIs later signed affidavits stating that
the virulently anti-Semitic sergeant snubbed Rubin because he was a Jew.
Perhaps Rubin's greatest heroism came during the 21/2 years he spent in Chinese
prisonerof-war camps. Nursing a broken leg when overrun by the enemy, he was one
of hundreds of U.S. soldiers forced to march for days through freezing weather
to a camp they called "Death Valley."
There, and in a second camp in which he was held, Rubin used what he had learned
about survival from the Holocaust. For his fellow prisoners, all near
starvation, he made soup from grass and picked wild plants for their medicinal
and nutrient qualities. He nursed many through sickness and infections. He
stayed up all one night picking lice off a soldier too weak to lift his hand.
And from the filthy latrines he plucked maggots, which he placed in soldiers'
festering wounds to eat the gangrene growing there.
"This, I am sure, not only saved my left arm -- which I have full use of today
-- but also my life," former Sgt. Leo Cormier, a fellow POW, wrote.
Over and over, Rubin risked certain death by sneaking out at night and stealing
food from the Chinese captors.
Carl McClendon recalled Rubin saying, "We will go home. . . . Our troops will
liberate us, your family is waiting for you. Please don't give up."
In the end, Rubin is credited with saving the lives of at least 30 POWs.
Now a corporal, he took his two Purple Hearts, the only decorations he was
awarded, and went to California. There he married a Dutch Holocaust survivor and
raised two children, one of whom served in the Air Force.
Rubin worked as a butcher, then as a presser in a clothes factory, then as a
liquor-store clerk, before his medical conditions worsened and he was granted
100 percent medical disability. He and his wife make do on that monthly stipend
and their Social Security checks. Even so, Rubin has scraped together $4,000
every Thanksgiving for years to buy gifts for patients in veterans hospitals.
Now, the extra $1,027 a month that all living Medal of Honor winners receive
will be most welcome, he said.
It was not until 1985, after he showed up at a convention of former POWs, that
an effort began to bring Rubin his due. Several ex-POWs, who had thought Rubin
was dead, recommended him for the Medal of Honor.
In 2001, Congress told the armed services to review the cases of some Jewish
veterans to see if anti-Semitism had robbed the worthy of the highest combat
honor. The cases of 138 decorated Jewish soldiers are being considered, but
Rubin is the first to be chosen. He is the 15 th Jewish Medal of Honor winner
since the Civil War, and the first Jewish Korean War soldier to be so honored.
When Rubin performed his uncommon acts of courage, "I was just a shmuck, a
little greenhorn," he said. "Now I'm a 'sir.' This only can happen in America."
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