L.A. veteran to get highest military honor — 55 years later

los angeles | When Tibor Rubin enters the White House this week, President Bush will rise and then drape the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for gallantry in combat, around the neck of the 76-year-old Holocaust survivor and Korean War veteran.

Rubin and a legion of supporters have waited almost 55 years for this moment of triumph over bureaucratic lethargy and the prejudice that embittered the lives of so many old-time Jewish GIs.

Oddly, Rubin still does not know precisely which of his feats met the Medal of Honor criterion of "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life, above and beyond the call of duty, in actual combat against an enemy armed force."

He guesses it might have been the time he secured a retreat route for his company by singlehandedly defending a hill for 24 hours against North Korean soldiers.

Or it might have been any of the other actions that earned him four recommendations for the Medal of Honor by his commanding officers or fellow soldiers, two times for the Distinguished Service Cross, and twice for the Silver Star.

Had he received all those awards, he would have become the most decorated American veteran of the Korean War. What he actually got were two Purple Hearts for combat wounds and a 100 percent disability.

Rubin, known as "Tibi" to his Hungarian childhood friends and "Ted" to his army buddies, was born in Paszto, a Hungarian shtetl of 120 Jewish families, one of six children of a shoemaker.

At age 13, Rubin was transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was liberated two years later by American troops.

He came to the United States in 1948, settled in New York and worked as a shoemaker and butcher.

In 1949 Rubin tried to enlist in the Army, both as an assumed shortcut to American citizenship and, he hoped, as a way to attend the Army's butcher school in Chicago. He first flunked the English language test but tried again in 1950 and passed, with help from fellow test-takers.

In July of that year, Pfc. Rubin found himself fighting on the frontlines of Korea with I Company, 8th Regiment, First Cavalry Division. There he encountered the terror of the company — 1st Sgt. Artice Watson.

According to lengthy affidavits submitted by nearly a dozen men — mostly self-described "country boys" from the South and Midwest — Watson was a vicious anti-Semite who consistently "volunteered" Rubin for the dangerous missions.

Toward the end of October 1950, massive Chinese troop concentrations crossed the border into North Korea and attacked the Americans. After most of his regiment had been wiped out, the wounded Rubin was captured and spent the next 30 months in a prisoner-of-war camp.

"No one wanted to help anyone. Everybody was for himself," wrote Sgt. Leo Cormier Jr., a fellow prisoner.

All except Rubin: Almost every evening, he would sneak out of the camp to steal food from the Chinese and North Korean supply depots, realizing that he would be shot if caught.

"He shared the food evenly among the GIs," Cormier wrote. "He did many good deeds, which he told us were 'mitzvahs' in the Jewish tradition ..."

Survivors of the camp credited Rubin with keeping 35 to 40 people alive and recommended him for the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross.

For some 30 years after his discharge, Rubin lived quietly in a small house in Garden Grove with his wife, Yvonne, a Dutch Holocaust survivor. The couple reared two children: Frank, an Air Force veteran, and a daughter, Rosalyn.

It wasn't until the 1980s that Rubin's old Army buddies started protesting the Army's inaction in recognizing the man who had saved so many of their lives. They were soon joined by others.

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. military, now a model equal-opportunity employer, was forced to revisit its record of discrimination against minorities during World War II and the Korean War.

"It would have been nice if they had given me the medal when I was a young handsome man," mused Rubin. "It would have opened a lot of doors."