• courtesy Illinois Holocaust Museum
  • Ruth Gruber in Alaska, looking more fabulous in the freezing cold than you could ever dream.

Ruth Gruber, the 102-year-old photographer whose work goes on display this Sunday at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, has had an amazing life. Some of it has been described in a preview of the exhibit, called “Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist”: her travels in the Soviet arctic and through the Alaskan frontier; her stewardship of 1,000 Jewish refugees who traveled from Italy to upstate New York in 1944 aboard the ship Henry Gibbins; her photographs showing the deplorable conditions aboard another ship of refugees, the Exodus, which had been denied entry into Palestine by the British and was eventually sent back to Germany.

“This was before Hitler came to power,” says Maya Benton, the curator at the International Center of Photography who created the exhibit, “but she could see the writing on the wall.” (A point probably reinforced by Gruber’s romance with a young German man who became a Nazi. Gruber’s memory is still extraordinarily clear, Benton says, “but she did not want to talk about it.”)

The two women met in 1935 when Gruber interviewed Woolf for a study on women and democracy. Woolf had initially declined the interview, claiming it was a subject she knew nothing about, but Gruber never received the letter. During the hour they spent together at Woolf’s house in Bloomsbury, Woolf was outwardly gracious, but, as she wrote in her diary, inwardly grumpy from a bad day of writing and resentful at having to answer questions from “an importunate and unfortunate Gerwoman.”

Gruber returned to Germany and sneaked into a Nazi rally to hear Hitler speak. She traveled to the Soviet Union and, thanks to her connections with Stefansson, secured a meeting with Otto Schmidt, a government official who had also been an arctic explorer.

“We watched the news together every day,” Benton remembers. “It was the Arab Spring. Watching her watch it—it was like she was going to be in the world for another 100 years.”