Ruth Kluger (2) (1910–1980)

Ruth Klüger, née Polisiuk, was born in Kiev, Ukraine, the youngest child in a Russian Jewish family. World War I forced her relatives to flee their homes and young Ruth lost contact with her immediate family. She and her aunts became refugees and wandered for several years, witnessing brutal anti-Semitic pogroms that became deeply engraved in her memory. She was reunited with her mother, brother, and sisters seven years later in Chernivtsi. There she attended elementary and high school, and joined the Zionist Ha-Shomer ha-Za'ir youth movement. She studied law at the University of Vienna, but left before taking her final exams. She had a talent for languages, becoming fluent in Russian, Yiddish, German, Romanian, French, English, Spanish, Portugese, and Hebrew. In 1930, she married Emanuel Klüger and emigrated with him to the British Mandate of Palestine. In late 1938, she was recruited to serve with the clandestine effort, banned by the British, known as Mossad Aliyah Bet, to smuggle Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. She was the only woman among the early members of the group. Mossad Aliyah Bet emissaries had to operate in great secrecy and the risk of arrest was ever-present. Ruth was sent to Romania posing as a representative of the Jewish National Fund to obtain ships to bring out as many Jews as possible. With her linguistic facility, resourcefulness, courage, and creativity, she managed to persuade senior members of government, officials, shipowners, and wealthy Jews to enable the ship Tiger Hill to set sail from Constanta carrying about 1,400 immigrants to Palestine. Ruth was forced to leave Romania in late 1940 by Marshal Ion Antonescu and the Iron Guard. She returned for a brief period to Palestine, where she received training in espionage and intelligence gathering. In 1943, she began operating in Egypt and Turkey to organize the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Palestine. She went to Paris after the liberation in 1944 to help collect Jewish children hidden in Catholic institutions in France. In 1948, she embarked on another mission to raise funds in South America. It was during this period that she took the surname Aliav, an acronym for Aliyah Bet. In early 1949, Ruth Aliav-Klüger returned to Israel and joined the Zim national shipping company. She was appointed director of the Public Relations Department, a post she held until her retirement in 1972. She became a much sought-after speaker at United Jewish Appeal and Israel Bonds meetings. In 1974, she was selected as Woman of the Year by the National Council of Jewish Women in the USA in honor of the release of her book The Last Escape: The Launching of the Largest Secret Rescue Mission of All Time (1973), written with Peggy Mann. She published another memoir, The Secret Ship, also written with Mann, in 1978.