Quotes from Ruth Gruber

Hatikvah—"Song of Hope.

As time passed, hundreds of Arabs streamed out from neighboring areas and the Old City with more guns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails. British soldiers watched from their post less than a hundred yards away and did nothing.

Gadna was pre-military training for fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds.

Fifty million Arabs in seven neighboring Arab states, five regular Arab armies, a million Arabs in Palestine—against 650,000 Jews.

Only you would think of Sholom Aleichem to make the people forget for a little while.

See my gray hair. I know I look like an old woman. I'm thirty-eight. My hair turned gray overnight.

The Arab Legion was the most formidable—twelve thousand soldiers trained by the British, armed by the British, and led by the English general Sir John Glubb.

German scientists, many of them former Nazis, were building rockets outside Cairo that could penetrate Israel within minutes.

But Palestine was derived from the name "Philistine," the people who were constantly at war with the ancient Israelites.

Time had no meaning, save that it was running out.

The fog of war hinders the enemy, and so let us leave him with it rather than dispel it.

After the liberation, when the American Army freed me—I was working in a Nazi slave-labor camp—I went back to our home in Brno. I looked for my family. But they were all dead. Then I looked for the families of my friends. Judith, dear, it grieves me to tell you that your family, too, were all exterminated.

Remembering his own feelings when he had lost his eye on a mission for the British, Dayan stopped at their bedside to cheer them up. "Boys," he said, "for all that's worth seeing in this wretched world, one eye is enough.

Arab-speaking Jews, like Moshe Dayan, had been sent, disguised as Arabs, on dangerous missions to help liberate Vichy-held Syria and Lebanon, and to Iraq to help quell the pro-Nazi uprising.

The courage, the will, the guts, to fight the British, even if they end up here, like you, in Cyprus. I don't know any other place in the world where this is happening.

Of all the Arabs who encircled Israel, the Syrians were the most vicious.

Eritrea, on the east coast of Africa, near Ethiopia, had been used by the British during the war to imprison members of the Irgun. They had called it Devil's Island.

Looking down, the Israeli pilots could tell their troops from the Egyptians' when they saw ice-cream trucks, hot-dog vans, and laundry wagons navigating the desert.

I have a theory," Gruber said, "that even though we're born Jews, there is a moment in our lives when we become Jews. On that ship, I became a Jew.

I think it was beshert—destined—that you become a nurse.

You've got to stay alive even if it kills you.

The Holy Land became a police state. The British brought in more troops, until there were one hundred thousand soldiers. Some of the Black and Tan policemen, who had once suppressed the Irish, were sent to Palestine to keep order.

She searched her mind. Are there special words to send your son into battle?

Repression begat violence. Violence and terror begat more repression.