Someone recently asked me who my heroes were. I have a number of them: people I know of high personal integrity; men and women who stand behind their principles, their values, their words, who have made indelible impressions upon me. And there are others who inspire me from a distance, by their own example. I went for a run this morning and found myself thinking about one such man, Corporal Tibor Rubin.
There’s a good possibility you’ve heard of Tibor Rubin, because last year, on September 23d, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
What you may not know is his story.
Tibor Rubin is a Hungarian Jew. He was born in Pásztó, Hungary on June 18, 1929—the son of a shoemaker. 
At age 13, he was transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Two years later, he was liberated by American soldiers. His parents and two sisters perished in the Holocaust. Rubin came to the United States in 1948, settled in New York, working first as a shoemaker and then as a butcher.
In 1949, inspired by the example of the American soldiers who liberated him from Mauthausen, and anxious to gain U.S. citizenship, Rubin attempted to enlist in the U.S. Army, but failed the language test. 
He tried again in 1950 and passed, with the help of his fellow test-takers. He entered the Army and was stationed in Okinawa. As his unit prepared to deploy to Korea, Rubin was given the option to stay back, based on his status as a Hungarian national. Rubin steadfastly refused, and insisted on deploying. He was assigned to I Company, Eighth Regiment, First Cavalry Division. By July 1950, Rubin was fighting on the front lines in Korea along the Pusan Perimeter. There, he met First Sergeant Artice V. Watson who made no attempt to hide his anti-Semitism or his disdain of minorities. Watson consistently assigned Rubin to the most dangerous and life-threatening missions. Every time, Rubin returned having successfully accomplishing his mission. According to one of his comrades, Harold Speakman:
“[Rubin] was repeatedly ordered by 1st Sgt. Watson on every life threatening mission that arose, day patrols, night patrols, rear action details by himself. When 1st Sgt. Watson needed a volunteer his first remark would be; where is the little son of bitching Hungarian Jew? This went on constantly day in and day out, his hatred, prejudice, and bigotry were open and known by everyone in our unit and fear alone kept any one from coming to his rescue and I do believe that 1st Sgt. Artice Watson was trying, to the best of his ability, to get Tibor Rubin killed.”
In one such mission, Rubin secured a withdrawal route for his company by single-handedly defending a hill for 24 hours against waves of North Korean soldiers. Again, this testimony from Harold Speakman:
“…the North Koreans, thinking the hill was still occupied by a whole Company, made an all out offensive with all their available troops. Pfc Tibor Rubin had stocked each foxhole with grenades, and during the attack the following morning made his way running from foxhole to foxhole, lobbing, one after the other, grenades down upon the enemy, he became almost hysterical in his actions but he held the hill, not only did he defend the hill and protect the weapons and munitions but he tied up the enemy forces allowing the safe withdrawal of allied troops and equipment on the Taegu-Pusan road during the crucial twenty-four hour action.”
For these and other acts of bravery, Tibor Rubin was recommended for the Medal of Honor twice and the Silver Star once. First Sergeant Watson was ordered on several occasions to initiate the necessary paperwork for these medals on Rubin’s behalf. He never did.
On October 30, 1950, the Chinese launched a massive assault across the border into North Korea, hitting the ill-prepared allied forces in Unsan, North Korea. In defending their positions, Rubin manned a machine gun atop a weapons carrier and fought hand-to-hand against the Chinese. Ultimately, Rubin was wounded and most of the soldiers in his regiment were either killed or wounded. Rubin and the others who survived were captured. Rubin and his fellow soldiers underwent a forced “death march” to a Chinese POW camp. Knowing that stragglers were being executed, Rubin encouraged his fellow soldiers and carried stretchers throughout the march.
PFC James E. Bourgeois had been wounded in both shoulders. Following the march, he recalled: “The first man that I remember seeing was Tibor Rubin, a young man who could hardly speak English, trying to clean my wounds. We did not know each other. But this was the Rubin that I was to learn to know and to respect for the rest of my life. His cleansing of my wounds was to be just the beginning of many things that he did to help save my life. Each day that he could get out of the hut to get a steel helmet of snow he would bring it in and melt and boil it to clean my wounds and bandages for reuse. At one time when my wounds got so infected he put maggots in them to prevent gangrene from setting in. This I am sure not only saved my left arm…but also my life. Each day that we got something to eat, there was Rubin feeding me, making sure that I got my share and that I ate whatever it was. But when there was nothing given to us to eat he would leave and come back with something he called “cake” for us who couldn’t get out. We found out later that it was horse food that was compressed with sorghum.”
Three days after their arrival, the camp was turned over to the North Koreans and their situation worsened. In one instance, the North Koreans had lined up Rubin and seven other GIs, and were preparing to summarily execute them. “Panic and pandemonium set in as we realized we were facing a firing squad,” said a fellow POW, Leonard Hamm. “…[It was] execution for no apparent reason, except for the amusement of our captors…. Some men were crying, some were pleading and begging for their lives, Pfc Run Tibor stood out amongst us all….” Rubin faced the North Koreans down, and directed his fellow prisoners to hold hands in prayer. At that moment, the Chinese arrived on the scene and directed the North Koreans to desist.
Over the next 30 months, suffering from exhaustion, starvation, filth and disease, most of the prisoners simply gave up. 
"Nobody cared, everyone was for himself," wrote Sergeant Leo A. Cormier Jr., a comrade of Rubin’s. Having experienced the Holocaust himself, Tibor Rubin was a notable exception. There was little doubt that many of the survival skills he exhibited in Camp #5 on behalf of his fellow POWs, had been acquired in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Leonard Hamm wrote,“Rubin was not in the best of health himself, but he knew the ones by the bland look on their faces and the defeated look in their eyes. He tried every way in the world to cheer these men up, to instill a sense of self worth into them, to motivate them into living, and it worked on many of them. One of his comments were, ‘come on now, you know dam well that if a little Jew fellow like me can take it then you guys can sure as hell handle it too…. There are a number of survivors out there today who, and they will be the first ones to admit it, owe their very lives to this small man with the big heart.”
Almost every evening, Rubin would sneak out of the camp to the Chinese and North Korean food stores, knowing all-the-while that he would be shot if he were caught.
Carl McClendon, one of Rubin’s fellow POW’s in Camp #5 wrote about the desperate circumstances and conditions in the camp:“I am 6”1 and I weighed before capture 195 to 200 lbs. My weight started getting down. I went down to 95 to 100 lbs in a few months. Everywhere was death. Smell filth, lice and all kinds of sicknesses. I had dysentery, worms, Beriberi, night blindness, chills, fever. My nerves started to crumble. Our most important thing was FOOD. We thought, dreamed and that’s all we talked about FOOD AND FOOD. One night, a few weeks later in Camp #5, someone was crawling toward me and told me in very bad English to keep quiet. Then he came closer and reached in his fatigue pants and his pockets, and he started giving me some food and a few others as well. It was Rubin like we called him later, that young man, who I did not really understand his English. He first started coming every evening a few hours when it got dark. He used to bring corn, millet, barley, turnips and vegetables. He used to take care of the wounded people. He was like Santa Claus to us. When he came over, it was like Christmas to us. I asked him quite a few times, how will I ever repay you Rubin? He told us: “you can repay me, please don’t tell my name to anyone. …So every day, when it got dark and we went to sleep, Rubin was on his way, crawling on his stomach, jumping over fences, breaking in supply houses, while the guns were looking down on him. He tied the bottom of his fatigue pants and filled up anything he would get a hold of. He crawled back and distributed the food what he had stolen and risked his life. Between the wounded, the very sick and the dying, he washed us. Took care of our wounds, force fed us. Talked to us about not giving up. We will go home he used to tell us. Our troops will liberate us. Your family is waiting for you. Please, don’t give up. In day time, he carried the very sick to the toilet. Cleaned their rear from the dysentery. Washed up the dying ones.”
McClendon relates one anecdote that reflects Tibor Rubin’s courage, innovation and sense of humor through extreme adversity: “Rubin had had guts. The Chinese planted a nice victory garden in springtime 1951. Cucumbers, radishes, onions, soy beans and tomatoes. Nobody was allowed to go close to the garden. Our mouths were watering as we saw it grow. One tomato was worth a million bucks if we could have it. Well, one day Rubin told us: Carl if the good Lord helps us, tomorrow there will be harvest day. I really did not know what he was talking about. But the next day around midnight we found out. Rubin had tomatoes, onions, radishes, cucumbers and turnips. We asked Rubin: Where did you get it? He told us, the Chinese donated it to us. Well, the next morning, when the Chinese woke up, they saw the damage. They probably first blamed each other, but later on the Commander Lam, a skinny fellow ran around screaming, that they knew who had done it and the people better come forward voluntarily. Rubin told us ‘If the fools know who did it, they would get him already.’”
"He also took care of us, nursed us, carried us to the latrine,” Cormier wrote. “He did many good deeds, which he told us were mitzvahs in the Jewish tradition....He was a very religious Jew and helping his fellow men was the most important thing to him."Rubin refused his Chinese captors' repeated offers of repatriation to Hungary—a communist state--by offering him good jobs. His fellow prisoners urged him to go back for his own sake. McClendon recalls, “Rubin told us: No way will he ever go back, and leave his comrades. They needed him here.”
Tibor “Ted” Rubin finally received his U.S. citizenship after his return to the United States. "I was the happiest man in the world," he said. He left the Army and worked at his brother’s store. He married his wife Yvonne, and they had two children. For years following their release, Rubin’s comrades assumed he was dead. Only in 1980 did they discover that he was very much alive. It took them five decades to see that Corporal Tibor Rubin received the recognition he deserved, and only after the statutory language for the awarding of the Medal of Honor was amended in 1996. Rubin’s case was one of many reviewed under section 552 of the 2002 National Defense Authorization Act, requiring the Department of Defense to "review the records of certain Jewish American and Hispanic American war veterans to determine if any of these veterans should be awarded the Medal of Honor."
Tragically, most of these awards will be made posthumously.
I had the honor of playing a small role in processing Tibor Rubin’s Medal of Honor package and in planning for his ceremony. I attended the ceremony at the White House on September 23, 2005 where President Bush awarded Tibor "Ted" Rubin the Medal of Honor in the East Room. I met Mr. Rubin and his family in a reception that followed, as well as the surviving comrades with whom he served. His story was an inspiration for me—and, I believe for anyone who hears about it.
In an interview with The Orange County Register a month after the White House Ceremony, Rubin said, “I don't hate nobody because life is so short. If you feel hate for your fellow man ... you'll only hurt yourself. You hate yourself inside and accomplish nothing."
In the end, Tibor Rubin is a hero for all of us. Because he cared.
