- Aimee Levitt
- Rena Olenick
The traveling exhibit “Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist” officially opened on Sunday afternoon at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center with a screening of Ahead of Time, a documentary about Gruber’s remarkable life, and a Q&A session with Gruber herself, via Skype from her New York apartment. Gruber can’t hear as well as she used to, or speak as forcefully, but a cousin of IHM curator Arielle Weininger had volunteered to sit at Gruber’s side in order to interpret.
Before the screening, though, Olenick told me a little more of her story.
We sailed on the Exodus from Marseilles. Before it was Exodus, it flew under the flag of Honduras. It was terrible on the Exodus. It was very hot and very crowded. We slept on the deck. There were cabins, but the doors were gone. I had three dresses, and I wore them all at once. I had one pair of shoes, but I didn’t wear them; I wanted to wear my shoes in Israel.
During the screening, I started to feel a little angry at Gruber. The Exodus was her big story. The day after she filed her famous photo of the Runnymede Park, she flew back to Paris. It was true she did travel around Europe taking pictures of inmates in DP camps, and that her photos helped influence public opinion and probably helped pave the way for the establishment of the state of Israel—and a way for Olenick’s family to become citizens instead of DPs. But at the end of it, Gruber always had a home to go back to if she wanted. She got the glory. She got to be considered a hero. And Rena Olenick and the other Exodus refugees had to spend yet another year in a camp, after all the years they’d spent in camps during the war. It didn’t seem fair.
