By Joe Spier
CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — Tibor (Ted) Rubin enters the room. The President of the United States, bound by tradition, rises and salutes him.
Rubin, born a Hungarian Jew, is one of 79 persons who command the salute of the President. They are the living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award for valor in combat issued by the United States of America to members of its armed services.
What is unique about Tibor Rubin is that he is a Holocaust survivor, received his award for acts of bravery committed during the Korean War while a member of the U.S. army but not an American citizen and whose recognition was delayed for over 50 years after that war ended. Rubin’s story is one of survival, heroism, prejudice and finally redemption.
Rubin, the son of a shoemaker, was born in 1929 in Paszto, a Hungarian village with just 120 Jewish families. At the age of 15 he was rounded up, forced from his native Jewish community and sent to the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Against all odds and the admonition of an SS Captain on his arrival that “none of you will get out of here alive,” Rubin survived 14 months of starvation, forced labor, brutality and disease. The U.S. army liberated the camp on May 5, 1945 where they found Rubin little more than a skeleton clothed in rags living in indescribable filth and human degradation. His father, mother and a sister perished.
To Rubin, the U.S. soldiers were saviors who displayed great compassion for him and his fellow survivors. “Even though we were filthy, we stunk and had diseases; they picked us up and brought us back to life.” Rubin, in appreciation, vowed that he would repay his liberators by going to the United States to join and fight with the U.S. army.
Tibor Rubin was able to immigrate to the United States in 1948 and the following year, keeping his promise, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but because of his limited knowledge of English, failed the written language test. Trying again in February 1950, not yet a citizen, he passed the test but only with a little covert help from two fellow test-takers and was accepted into the army. Five months later, though as a non-U.S. citizen he need not have gone, Rubin was in Korea on the frontlines fighting as an infantryman with the First Cavalry Division, one of the first American units sent to help repel North Korean invasion forces.
Tibor, now known as Ted, fell under the thumb of a viciously anti-Semitic first sergeant who gave Rubin the most dangerous assignments in hopes of getting him killed.
When Rubin arrived at the front during the first chaotic month of the war, the North Korean army had crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea and the South Korean army together with the United States forces already in place was in retreat, trading land for the time needed for arriving allied troops and equipment to become deployed. While Rubin’s unit was withdrawing south, he was assigned the task of staying behind to fool the enemy into thinking that its abandoned position was fully occupied by the whole company so that his unit could safely withdraw. During the ensuing battle, overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops assaulted a hill solely defended by Rubin. Rubin fired from different positions and ran from foxhole to foxhole, lobbing previously stockpiled grenades down upon the enemy. During his personal 24-hour battle, he inflicted a staggering number of casualties on the attacking force, slowed the enemy advance, allowed his unit to complete its withdrawal and saved countless American lives.
For this and other actions, Rubin’s two commanding officers recommended him for the Medal of Honor. However before the paperwork could be processed both officers were killed in action and the Jew-hating first sergeant whose responsibility it was to forward the papers refused to do so.” Not on my watch,” he proclaimed.
The actions of servicemen like Rubin gave the allied forces the time needed to regroup and to reinforce. By October, not only were the North Korean forces pushed back across the 38th parallel but all the way north to the Yalu river, the border between North Korea and China. Then all hell broke loose. China entered the war.
On October 30, Chinese troops attacked Rubin’s unit at Unsan near the Chinese border in a massive whistle blowing and trumpet blaring nighttime assault. The whole mountain let loose. The unit’s firepower dwindled to a single .30 caliber machine gun. That night and throughout the next day, after three previous gunners became casualties, Rubin operated the machine gun until his ammunition was exhausted. His heroism permitted the remnant of his badly beat up unit to retreat southward. Rubin, wounded with shrapnel in his left hand and chest, was captured by the Chinese. Others from his unit were also captured.
The Chinese compelled the captive American soldiers, including the wounded, to force-march to a prisoner of war camp known today as “Death Valley.” Rubin, though wounded, together with a Chaplain, carried stretchers and assisted others who could not walk. During rest breaks, he went up and down the line urging tired soldiers to continue the march. Laggards were shot.
Rubin spent 30 months in prisoner of war camps during which time he used the survival skills learned in the Nazi concentration camp, which no doubt gave him an edge in brutal and inhumane captivity, to keep him and his comrades alive. He knew how to make soup out of grass, what weeds had medicinal qualities, how to apply maggots to clean infected wounds, that a human body can sometimes overcome through force of spirit and that for his comrades to survive they would need hope, will and strength.
Life in the camps was constant hunger, filth and disease. Some just gave up…but not Rubin.
At the risk of execution if caught, almost every night Rubin snuck out of his barracks to steal food from the supplies of his captors, which he distributed to his fellow GIs. He nagged them to “debug” themselves and nursed them through sickness. Those he could not save, he helped bury and recited the Kaddish. He told his buddies that his deeds were compelled by Jewish practice as mitzvahs. The survivors credit Rubin with personally saving over 40 lives in the camps.
During his captivity, the Chinese learned that Rubin was a native Hungarian and they offered to return him to that country, which at the time was a part of the Soviet Bloc. Rubin refused and selflessly chose to remain with his fellow soldiers.
Rubin was repatriated on April 20, 1953 under an exchange of prisoners. While in Korea, he was recommended four times for the Medal of Honor as well as twice for the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star yet received only two Purple Hearts and a disability rating. While this shameful and insulting shunning of a hero may be blamed on the anti-Semitic first sergeant, guilt must also lie with the U.S. military’s then institutional prejudice against minorities.
Rubin returned to America, settled into civilian life, became a U.S. citizen and married, his army service record archived and ignored by the military for decades.
Then in the 1980s, nearly 30 years after Rubin’s discharge, his army friends, finding out that he was still alive, took up his cause urging the Pentagon to recognize his valor. They were joined by the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America but to no avail.
A decade later the U.S. military finally began to acknowledge the bias displayed against minorities within its ranks. The Pentagon reviewed the records of Asian American veterans, African American service personnel and Hispanics to correct, belatedly, injustices done to them.
Finally, in 2001, the Pentagon began to examine the records of about 150 heroic Jewish war veterans albeit only after being mandated to do so by the United States Congress. Rubin’s file was the thickest.
Rubin wanted recognition, in his words, “for my Jewish brothers and sisters. I want the goyim to know that there were Jews over there, that there was a little greenhorn, a little shmuck from Hungary, who fought for their beloved country.”
On September 23, 2005, Tibor (Ted) Rubin stood in the White House honored by President George W. Bush, not for one act of courage, but for multiple acts of bravery displayed during the entire period from July 23, 1950 to April 20, 1953.
President Bush, in his remarks said of Rubin that he was, “one of the best ever to wear our nation’s uniform”, acknowledged that Rubin as a Jew had experienced prejudice in the Army and recognized that “the America he fought for did not always live up to its highest ideals.”
After the reading of the Citation, Tibor (Ted) Rubin leaned forward and the President of the United States placed the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck.
Of the 3,512 recipients of the Medal of Honor, 27 are Jewish.
*
Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history. You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com