He admitted he "was just a schmuck", a regular guy, who worked at his brother's liquor store in Southern California. He lived quietly and died on December 5, 2015 at the age of 86.
Not many knew that this same humble man, an immigrant, had "the remarkable courage and forbearance of a . . . American hero, a man who joined the United States Army to thank the nation and the troops that rescued him from the concentration camp where he had been imprisoned as a teenager, and for whom recognition was delayed for decades because he happened to be Jewish," according to the New York Times.
He said his mom taught him that "There is one God, and we are all brothers and sisters. You have to take care of your brothers, and save them."
"To her, to save somebody’s life is the greatest honor," he added. "And I did that.”
You probably never heard of him. His name was Tibor Rubin. He had to wait 55 years to receive the Medal of Honor he deserved. He was the only Holocaust survivor to receive the Medal of Honor.
He was born in 1929 in Hungary.
At the age of 14, "Tibor Rubin was . . . was deported in 1944 to Mauthausen, the Nazi concentration camp complex in Austria," according to the Washington Post. He never saw his parents nor his younger sister again.
A commandant told him that he would never get out alive.
After 14 months, according to writer Adam Bernstein, Rubin had become "a disease-ridden skeleton."
American troops liberated Mauthausen on May 5, 1945. He was so grateful that accoording to a 2013 documentary film, “Finnigan’s War,” about veterans of the Korean War, Corporal Rubin said in broken English, “I promised the good Lord that if I get out of here alive, I’d become a G.I. Joe, to give back something.”
It took him a while to get to America, but when he finally came to the United States in 1948, he kept his promise and tried to enlist. But, because his English wasn't good enough, he had to wait until 1950, when he literally "cheated his way into the Army, he said, by cribbing the entrance exam, according to the Washington Post.
Because he was not a citizen, he was told he didn't have to fight, but somehow made his way to the Korean front lines, when he said, remembering his mother's words - "Well, what about the others? I cannot leave my fellow brothers.”
His sergeant, according to Bernstein, was "a sadist and anti-Semite" who repeatedly "volunteered" Rubin "on seemingly certain-death assignments."
One of those missions had him "single-handedly [hold] off a wave of North Korean soldiers for 24 hours, securing for his own troops a safe route of retreat." That in itself should have earned him the Medal of Honor.
Corporal Rubin would also "spend 30 months as a prisoner of war in North Korea, where testimony from his fellow prisoners detailed his willingness to sacrifice for the good of others," according to the New York Times.
Because he was not a citizen, his captors offered to return him to Hungary, but he refused, deciding to stay in the isolated camp that the Americans called “Death Valley.” He would not forget his mother's words.
He would risk his life sneaking out of the camp, only to return after he foraged for food and and stole enemy supplies, to bring back "what he could to help nourish his comrades."
“Some of them gave up, and some of them prayed to be taken,” Mr. Rubin later told Soldiers magazine. He did his best to rally them, reminding them of relatives praying for their safe return home.
“He shared the food evenly among the G.I.’s,” Sgt. Leo A. Cormier Jr., a fellow prisoner, wrote in a statement, according to The Jewish Journal. “He also took care of us, nursed us, carried us to the latrine.” He added, “Helping his fellow men was the most important thing to him.”
The prison camp survivors remembered Rubin, crediting him with keeping them alive and saving at least 40 American soldiers.
Rubin received the Purple Heart with 1 bronze oak leaf cluster, but not the Medal of Honor.
He returned home, to the United States, where he would lead a quiet life, rarely talking of his war experience.
When he did talk of his war experience, he said he felt guilty, seeing the countless maimed and lifeless bodies and hearing the agonized screams in Korean from the wounded.
“I had the guilt feeling what I did here,” he later told an interviewer with the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center in Philadelphia. “I killed even the enemy but I killed somebody’s father, brother, and all that. . . . But then again, the truth is that if I don’t kill him, he kill me and vice versa. It’s war. War is hell.”
In the 1980s, he attended a reunion of veterans, where he learned that he had been nominated four times for the Medal of Honor by his grateful comrades, but the sergeant, who hated him for his religion, deliberately ignored the orders from his own superiors to prepare the appropriate paperwork.
In 2002, after Congress passed the Leonard Kravitz Jewish War Veterans Act, Rubin's records were reviewed and the affidavits recommending Rubin for the Medal of Honor were found.
He finally received his Medal of Honor at a 2005 White House ceremony.
“I waited 55 years,” he said. “Yesterday I was just a schmuck. Today, they call me, ‘Sir.’ . . . How I made it, the Lord don’t even know. I don’t even know because I was so many times supposed to die over there, but I’m still here.”
Rubin kept his promise to give back something to the country who saved him, and, in doing so, he also remembered his mother's words to consider everyone a brother and take care of them.
The Jon S. Randal Peace Page ·
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