Surviving from a war is never easy. Tibor Rubin (76) had not only survived from two wars, but he also came up as a remarkable hero. For his valor, the Korean war veteran and Holocaust survivor received the highest military award in the USA, the Medal of Honor from U.S President George W. Bush on September 23—after fifty years he was a soldier and being recommended four times by two separate commanding officers for separate actions and his fellow soldiers.
"By repeatedly risking his own life to save others, Corporal Rubin exemplified the highest ideals of military service and fulfilled a pledge to give something back to the country that had given him his freedom," Bush said in a White House East Room ceremony.
Born in Hungary as a child of a shoemaker, in 1943 young Rubin (13) was taken to the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria during the Nazis' effort to eliminate Hungary's Jews. His mother and 10-year-old sister died in an Auschwitz gas chamber; while his father perished in Buchenwald. Rubin stayed long enough until he was liberated two years later by American troops. "We stunk, had terrible diseases. Still, they picked us up and brought us life," Rubin recalled recently. He then took a vow to join that Army one day.
In 1948, his remaining family moved to America where he worked in New York City as a shoemaker, and then a butcher, before enlisting in the Army in 1950—not yet a U.S. citizen. Within months, he found himself on the front lines in Korea under the thumb of First Sgt. Artice Watson, an anti-Semite who repeatedly sent Rubin for dangerous assignments, such as to hold a strategically critical hill so his battalion could withdraw. So for the next 24 hours, the lone Private fought wave after wave of North Korean soldiers—ran around to fire from different directions and rolled hand grenades down so the enemy would think there were many soldiers to face in the battle.
For his deeds, the two commanding officers ordered Watson to secure the Medal of Honor for Rubin. But they were killed soon after, and the First Sergeant never prepared the papers. Fellow GIs later signed affidavits stating that the Watson rebuffed Rubin because he did not want the combat honor to go to a Jew. "I really believe, in my heart, that (the sergeant) would have jeopardized his own safety rather than assist in any way whatsoever in the awarding of the medal to a person of Jewish descent," former Cpl. Harold Speakman wrote.
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