‘If I ever go to America, I gonna become a GI Joe’
Rubin was only Holocaust survivor to receive the U.S. Medal of Honor
Tibor Rubin was a teenager when he was deported in 1944 to Mauthausen, the Nazi concentration camp complex in Austria. A Hungarian-born Jew, he was orphaned in the war and developed a keen survival instinct. He stole food, raided garbage and learned improvised medical techniques, like maggot therapy for gangrene. He called himself, with pride, the “Little Rat.”
He was a disease-ridden skeleton when American troops liberated Mauthausen. But for the first time in 14 months, he was free. He vowed, he later said in broken English, “If the Lord have me, if I ever go to America, I gonna become a GI Joe.”
He did just that, cheating his way into the army, he said, by cribbing the entrance exam and landing on the front lines as the Korean War began. His sergeant, by many accounts a sadist and anti-Semite, repeatedly sent him on seemingly certain-death assignments.
In summer 1950, Rubin was “volunteered” to defend a strategic hill while the rest of his company withdrew to safety near the Pusan Perimeter amid an onslaught by North Korean troops. He armed himself with grenades and guns and waited, knowing the sergeant had no intention of relieving him, ever.
The enemy attack began at dawn, and Rubin said he became “hysterical” as they swarmed the hill “like ants.” He fired helter-skelter, lobbing grenade after grenade to create the impression of more than one man. “Pull the pin, boom, pull the pin, boom,” he said. Unable to see through the resulting smoke, he kept up the defence for a full day, defending his post until American-manned Corsairs repelled the North Koreans from the air.
“He inflicted a staggering number of casualties on the attacking force during his personal 24-hour battle, single-handedly slowing the enemy advance and allowing the 8th Cavalry Regiment to complete its withdrawal successfully,” read his citation for the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award for valour.
President George W. Bush bestowed the award on Rubin in a 2005 White House ceremony, part of a congressionally mandated effort to identify veterans who might have been overlooked for the medal in earlier decades because of racial, ethnic or religious discrimination.
Rubin, the only Holocaust survivor to receive the Medal of Honor, died Dec. 5 at a hospice centre near his home in Garden Grove, Calif. He was 86. The death, of unspecified causes, was confirmed by Daniel M. Cohen, a filmmaker who wrote a biography of Rubin, Single Handed, that was published this year.
Rubin said that after the battle, he staggered down the hill and saw in the daylight countless maimed and lifeless bodies. He heard 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. War is hell.”
Tibor Rubin was born in Paszto, a Hungarian town with a small Jewish community, on June 18, 1929. His father, a shoemaker, was a tyrant at home, according to Cohen, frequently belittling his son for being a slow learner in school.
The elder Rubin, Ferenc, had been shaped by tragic times. He and a twin brother served in the Austro-Hungarian military in the First World War and were captured by the Russians. Both were sent to a labour camp in Siberia, but only Ferenc made it out alive.