“The Gulag of Our Time” in Perspective

Thanks to the reader who forwarded this story to me.

LOS ANGELES –Tibor Rubin kept his promise to join the U.S. Army after American troops freed him from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria during World War II.

A Hungarian Jew, Rubin immigrated to New York after the war, joined the Army and fought as an infantryman in the Korean War. In 1951, Chinese troops captured Cpl. Rubin and other U.S. soldiers and he became a prisoner of war for 2 1/2 years.

More than five decades later, after a relentless campaign by grateful comrades and Jewish war veterans, President Bush on Sept. 23 will give Rubin the Medal of Honor.

. . . .

When he was at the Chinese prisoners’ camp known as “Death Valley,” Rubin said he would pray in Hebrew for the U.S. soldiers — about 40 each day — who died in the freezing weather. He also took care of soldiers suffering from dysentery or pneumonia.

Rubin, who goes by the name Ted, called concentration camp good “basic training” for being a POW and applied lifesaving lessons he learned there. For example, Rubin said he would retrieve maggots from the prisoners’ latrine and apply them to the infected wounds of his comrades to remove gangrene.

Fellow POW Sgt. Leo Cormier said Rubin gave a lot of GIs the courage to live.

“I once saw him spend the whole night picking lice off a guy who didn’t have the strength to lift his head,” Cormier told the Army. “What man would do that? … But Ted did things for his fellow men that made him a hero in my book.”

Holocaust historians considered Mauthausen, with its infamous rock quarry, to be the Nazis’ laboratory for petty, murderous depravity. It didn’t take the toll that Auschwitz took, but Mauthausen survivors are a small and select group.

I wonder what Representative Lantos–also a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor–will think of this. It reminds me of the story I saw on another blog (I’d appreciate the URL) of a young Korean who was captured by the following nations during World War II, one after the other: Japan, Russia, Germany, and the United States, until he eventually found himself a prisoner of the Americans wearing a Nazi uniform in Normandy.

Update: Much, much more here.

Food was vital for survival, so [Rubin] began to steal rations from the enemy, who had little enough themselves. Fellow POW Sergeant Carl McClendon stated, “every day, when it got dark, and we went to sleep, Rubin was on his way, crawling on his stomach, jumping over fences, breaking in supply houses, while the guns were looking down on him. He tied the bottom of his fatigue pants and filled up anything he could get ahold of. He crawled back and distributed the food that he had stolen and risked his life.”