Brave Heart
A soldier is hailed as a hero--at last
During 14 months as a prisoner in a German concentration camp, Tibor "Ted" Rubin learned what it took to survive horrific conditions. Just 15 when liberated from Mauthausen, Rubin, a Hungarian Jew whose parents and sister died in other camps, made his way to the United States. But five years later, after joining the Army that saved him, he again found himself a prisoner, this time in a North Korean POW camp. During 30 months there, Rubin stole food from the guards, showed fellow POW s how to boil grass to make soup--and nursed other soldiers though injured himself. Once, he gave another POW goat dung, claiming it was antibiotics delivered by the Red Cross. "They call it mind over body--you have to fight for your life," says Rubin. "When I came in, I was a veteran of the concentration camp. And I used all the tricks" to survive.
Before his capture in October 1950, Rubin single-handedly held a hill and rebuffed a North Korean assault as the rest of his company retreated. When he heard the North Koreans advancing, he scrambled from foxhole to foxhole, wildly firing weapons and hand grenades to make them think they faced more than a single soldier. Although his company commander said Rubin's actions deserved a Medal of Honor, the captain was killed before he could submit the nomination. The job fell to the company's 1st sergeant, an anti-Semite who threw away the paperwork. It was Rubin's fellow POW s who, in the early 1980s, began a campaign to have his heroics recognized.
" Godsend. " In a letter written in 1982, fellow POW James Bourgeois described how every day, Rubin would boil a helmet full of snow to clean his bandages and tend to a large open wound on his shoulder; when the wound filled with pus, Rubin foraged for maggots and placed them in the gash to eat away the infection, saving Bourgeois's arm. "He was a godsend to the GI s over there," says Leo Cormier, another fellow POW. "Tibor saved my life, as well as many other guys."
Last week, President Bush awarded Rubin, now 76, the Medal of Honor. -Julian E. Barnes
This story appears in the October 3, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.