Ruth Gruber > Quotes

“What does your friend Abdullah mean, they were here before us? Abraham was here more than four thousand years ago. Thousands of years before Mohammed, who died, if I remember right, in A.D. 632.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Only you would think of Sholom Aleichem to make the people forget for a little while.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“The passionate love of a mature woman.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Mama wept openly. “If I don’t die now,” she cried, “there is no death.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“How does one comfort a young woman whose body must hunger for her husband? How does one help her mourn? How does one comfort the wives and mothers and children of dead soldiers?”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Fifty million Arabs in seven neighboring Arab states, five regular Arab armies, a million Arabs in Palestine—against 650,000 Jews.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“But the other face of British rule now showed itself naked and clear: political expediency in its most treacherous form; betrayal of the promise and the hope; surrender to the Arabs for their petroleum favors.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“See my gray hair. I know I look like an old woman. I’m thirty-eight. My hair turned gray overnight.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Gadna was pre-military training for fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Work and study, theory and practice: the two must go hand in hand. You must not stop studying because you work, and you must not stop working because you study.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Children of fourteen were almost always sent, by the infamous Dr. Mengele, directly to the gas chambers.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“She searched her mind. Are there special words to send your son into battle?”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“The mufti and his terrorists had achieved their goal: a spectacular capitulation from the British.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Arik was the master of caesarean sections. Arik could perform a caesarean in three minutes.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Arab-speaking Jews, like Moshe Dayan, had been sent, disguised as Arabs, on dangerous missions to help liberate Vichy-held Syria and Lebanon, and to Iraq to help quell the pro-Nazi uprising.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Russia swiftly resupplied the Arabs; in the course of one day alone, Friday, October 12, Soviet cargo planes made sixty flights to Cairo and Damascus, ferrying in new military hardware.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“They’ll give you the ein hora—the evil eye.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Thirty-nine. A widow. Trying to fill her sons’ needs. Trying to be both mother and father. Careful not to demand too much of the boys.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“The fog of war hinders the enemy, and so let us leave him with it rather than dispel it.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Intelligence warned that the Egyptians, who had already used poison gas in Yemen, were planning to use gas in Israel.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“As time passed, hundreds of Arabs streamed out from neighboring areas and the Old City with more guns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails. British soldiers watched from their post less than a hundred yards away and did nothing.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Repression begat violence. Violence and terror begat more repression.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“The Israelis had a secret weapon—Ein Brent, “no alternative.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“The Holy Land became a police state. The British brought in more troops, until there were one hundred thousand soldiers. Some of the Black and Tan policemen, who had once suppressed the Irish, were sent to Palestine to keep order.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“American GIs gave the morphine syringe each front-line soldier carried to the doctors and medics to alleviate the suffering of the half-dead concentration-camp victims.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Two weeks later the British decided to break the back of the Jewish Resistance Movement and, they hoped, to crush the Jewish will to establish a state.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“The Arab Legion was the most formidable—twelve thousand soldiers trained by the British, armed by the British, and led by the English general Sir John Glubb.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Again the desert, unpeopled, limitless, empty to the horizon.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Why don’t the British let us deliver our babies like human beings, in the hospital in Haifa?”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel

“Twenty months. Six thousand dead. One out of every ten Jews dead on the battlefield. The nation born—like all births—in blood.”
― Ruth Gruber, Raquela: A Woman of Israel