The first time he met Tibor Rubin, author Daniel Cohen thought the old man resembled a pumpkin swallowed up by sofa cushions. It was hard to reconcile the octogenarian jokester sitting before him with the warrior Rubin had been 60 years earlier.
And not just any warrior. Rubin was more like a superhero, on his own holding off scores of North Korean combatants in one hilltop battle, and taking the surrender of hundreds more at a different Korean War battle. Then, as a prisoner in a Chinese POW camp, he helped his fellow soldiers survive the harshest of conditions.
Add it up, and that’s why Cohen named his Rubin biography “Single Handed.”
The Hungarian-born Rubin, who endured a harrowing year in the Mauthausen concentration camp, is the only Holocaust survivor ever awarded the Medal of Honor. That recognition came late, in 2005, more than a half-century after the end of the Korean War. But it did come.
“Tibor was programmed from the cradle to be a hero by his early [Jewish] education, which he didn’t take to,” says Cohen, who spent four years writing the book. “He thought he was resisting it. He wanted to throw off Judaism, but he couldn’t.”
Today the 86-year-old Rubin, who lives in Garden Grove, is plagued with health problems severe enough to curtail what had been a busy career as a public speaker. Cohen, who lives in Santa Monica, considers himself lucky to have befriended Rubin in time to take down his amazing life story.
That story began in 1929 in a small Hungarian town. Rubin was born into a middle-class Jewish family, and though he struggled with school, he developed street smarts and a caring attitude that would later serve him well.
His parents and a sister perished during the Nazi roundup of Hungarian Jews in 1944, but Rubin and four siblings managed to survive. Imprisoned at Mauthausen, resourcefulness and cunning kept him alive.
Cohen says Rubin, like many Holocaust survivors, resisted recounting his camp experience.
“He didn’t like to talk about the concentration camp,” Cohen recalls. “But over time, I would circle back to the Holocaust, and little by little he started to chat about it.”
That included tales of young Tibor slipping out to steal food right under the noses of the Nazis. After liberation he reunited with his siblings, most of whom came to America. Rubin lived in Oakland for a while, but he felt he owed something to his adopted country and joined the Army, even though he was not a citizen and barely spoke English.
Once in the military and deployed to Korea, he faced a rabidly anti-Semitic superior officer, who not only harassed Rubin but also sent him out on extremely dangerous solo missions, ostensibly to get him killed.
Didn’t happen. Instead, Rubin showed his battlefield mettle. Once captured, he proved even more valuable, relying on the cunning he developed in Mauthausen to steal food and defy his captors at every turn.
“Another man might have gotten killed,” Cohen notes. “[Rubin] felt he had no choice to do what he did. He was lucky because he stayed calm.”
To write the book, Cohen interviewed Rubin dozens of times and also spoke with surviving members of his former squad, Item Company, and pored over letters, memoirs and other accounts of the period, accounts Cohen says “were written in blood and tears.” The book is thoroughly footnoted, but even Cohen admits the story is, at first blush, “hard to believe.”
Though a push to give Rubin a medal began before he even left Korea, the process stalled. Years turned to decades, but the humble Rubin, who settled in Los Angeles, married and led a quiet life working in his brother’s liquor store, was reluctant to push for the honor.
Others took up the cause and finally, in 2005, the overdue medal was placed around Rubin’s neck.
“The reason he kept quiet,” Cohen surmises, “is that there were other voices in his head [saying] he was just a lucky guy. I don’t think it was in his DNA to make a big deal.”
Rubin was wrong. It was a big deal, and at last a grateful nation expressed its appreciation. Cohen says Rubin cherished his Jewish identity, raising his children in a Jewish home. But given the dual ordeals he went through in life, he earned his curmudgeon status.
Cohen says Rubin once told him, “If I ever get to heaven, I’m going to sue the SOB who runs the place.”
“Single Handed” by Daniel Cohen (Berkeley Caliber, 442 pages)