American journalist and photographer Ruth Gruber, who "stumbled into one of the great rescue stories of the Holocaust when the U.S. government appointed her to escort nearly 1,000 Jews across U-boat infested waters to the shores of the United States," died November 17, the Washington Post reported. She was 105. Calling it the defining act of her life, she chronicled the journey in her 1983 book Haven, which became a CBS miniseries starring Natasha Richardson.
"Standing alone on the blacked-out deck," she wrote in her memoir Inside of Time, "I was trembling with the discovery that from this moment on my life would be forever bound with rescue and survival."
Her other books include Raquela: A Woman of Israel; Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story; Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews; Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation; and Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent.
