KOREAN WAR Jewish hero to receive honor

He was recommended three times for the medal.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
WASHINGTON -- He's 77 now, with kidneys half gone, a handful of implanted stents keeping his heart ticking, bad arthritis and an old war injury that's left his right leg all but unusable.
But this week, former Army Cpl. Tibor Rubin will marshal every ounce of his remaining strength for a cross-country trip to take a permanent place in the history of his adopted country.
With a U.S. Army major and a master sergeant as escort, Rubin and his wife, Yvonne, will fly this week from Garden Grove, Calif., to Washington. At the White House on Friday, the Hungarian immigrant and death-camp survivor will finally receive America's thanks for his extraordinary acts of bravery and devotion that saved the lives of dozens of his fellow GIs during the Korean War.
In a solemn East Room ceremony -- delayed for more than 50 years at least partly because of the anti-Semitism of one of Rubin's sergeants -- President Bush will drape the nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor, around Rubin's neck.
"If I don't die first," Rubin quipped this week, breaking into a peal of the cackling laugh that has carried him, time and time again, through some of the worst that life can bring.
Background
It's not easy to kill Teddy Rubin. Just ask the Nazis, the communist Chinese and the North Koreans.
Born to a shoemaker in a Hungarian village of 120 Jewish families, he was rounded up at 13 and sent to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria. His mother and 10-year-old sister died in an Auschwitz gas chamber; his father, a World War I hero in the Hungarian army, was killed at Buchenwald.
Rubin survived the horror for two years, until May 5, 1945, when U.S. soldiers liberated him and some 70 other Jews who had cheated death at the camp. Then, as now, he was moved by the compassion the GIs showed. "We stunk, had terrible diseases. Still, they picked us up and brought us life," Rubin recalled recently.
In 1948, he worked his way to New York City, where he labored as a shoemaker, then a butcher's assistant. In 1950, though not a U.S. citizen and barely conversant in English, he enlisted in the Army as a way to pay back the country that rescued him, and for the doors he thought it would open for building a new life in America.
In battle
Within months, he was on the front lines in Korea, a 20-year-old private first class in I Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. His first act of bravery came soon, when his sergeant assigned him to hold a strategically critical hill so his battalion could withdraw to safety.
Single-handedly, for 24 horrendous hours, he fought off wave after wave of enemy soldiers. He ran around and around the crest of the hill, rolling hand grenades down and firing from different directions so the North Koreans would think they were battling more than just one man.
After the battle, scores of the dead and dying littered the hill. Rubin vomited at the sight of all the lives he had taken. "Tibor, you just earned your first Medal of Honor," Rubin recalls his captain saying.
"I didn't know what the hell he was talking about," Rubin said last week. "I'll never be proud of" the carnage that war makes men commit.
Later, he disobeyed his sergeant's orders to leave a wounded GI behind, and crawled several hundred yards under sniper fire to help his shrapnel-filled buddy. He "saved my life by carrying me to safety," then-Cpl. Leonard Hamm wrote in a nomination of Rubin for the Medal of Honor. Rubin himself was wounded twice.
In the end, although two unit commanders recommended him three times for the Medal of Honor, the first sergeant in charge of Rubin's unit never prepared the papers. A half-dozen of Rubin's fellow GIs later signed affidavits stating that the virulently anti-Semitic sergeant snubbed Rubin because he did not want the combat honor to go to a Jew.
Perhaps Rubin's greatest heroism came during the two and a half years he spent in Chinese prisoner-of-war camps. Nursing a broken leg when overrun by the enemy, he was one of hundreds of U.S. soldiers, wearing only light uniforms, who were forced to march for days through freezing weather to a camp they called "Death Valley."
There, and in a second camp in which he was held, Rubin used what he had learned about survival from the Holocaust. For his fellow prisoners, all near starvation, he made soup from grass and picked wild plants for their medicinal and nutrient qualities. He nursed many through sickness and infections, cleaning wounds with rags and water he boiled in his helmet. He stayed up all one night picking lice off a soldier too weak to lift his hand. And he plucked maggots from the filth in latrines, which he placed in soldiers' festering wounds to eat the gangrene growing there.
"This, I am sure, not only saved my left arm -- which I have full use of today -- but also my life," former Sgt. Leo Cormier, a fellow POW, wrote in an affidavit.
It was not until 1985, after he showed up at a convention of former prisoners of war, that an effort began to bring Rubin his due. Several ex-POWs, who had thought Rubin was dead, formally recommended him for the Medal of Honor, and Jewish and Korean War veterans groups signed on as well.