Pushkin. I'm Malcolm Glawell and this is Medal of Honor. Stories of Courage our podcast about the heroes who have won America's highest military decoration. In the last episode, we met Tyber Rubin, or Ted as he renamed himself. Born in Hungary, he survived a Nazi concentration camp when he was just a teen. He was liberated by American gis and made a vow that someday, God willing, he would become one of them, and he did. He joined the
US Army and was sent to Korea. When we last saw him there, he had held off an entire enemy force by himself at night. He survived, but he was horrified by what he had done. He hadn't gone to the army to kill people, he wanted to say of them. But on the day after Ted's one man stand, his commanding officer surveyed the scene. He knew that Ted's battle was more than just a bloodbath. He hadn't only safeguarded
a valuable cache of weapons. He had kept the enemy from reaching the main and only road, the one that led directly to the US troops. Yes, he had taken lives, but he had saved countless more.
I kept down town. I say, hey, Hevvy, if you don't kill them, you're gonna get killed. Not only you get killed, your friend said. Everybody said, that's what it shall.
The CEO thought he deserved the Medal of Honor, but one thing stood in the way. Ted's supervisory officer, Sergeant A, the bigoted man who'd put him in that hopeless position on the ridge in the first place. So even though the CEO ordered Sergeant A to write up the paperwork to recommend Ted for the Medal of Honor, Sergeant A never did. He wasn't going to see a Jewish soldier get that kind of recognition, Not on my watch, he said. And Ted kept getting sent into the worst imaginable situations.
Sergeant A made sure of that.
Every time he needed a volunteer, so called valanteer, they always called for me. Say get me that fucking sort of a bitch having got a jew That was me, So perishon. I forget my real name. I figured in the corn I said, I'm a bitch ruck it's me.
No.
I was only twenty year old.
You know.
It became clear to everyone that Sergeant A wouldn't be happy until he had gotten Ted killed.
He actually made a hero out.
Of me, because every dangerous mission Ted got sent on just showcased his bravery, his resourcefulness, and his compassion. Even more than that, Ted never lost his optimism, his hope, his belief in the goodness of others. He risked his life to rescue a fellow soldier, Leonard Ham, from the battlefield against Sergeant A's orders. Re saved him. Then Sergeant A sent Ted into the forest alone on a deadly
scouting mission. He zigzagged from tree to tree, trying to stay hidden, but suddenly right in front of him were three armed North Korean soldiers. Once again Ted was outnumbered, but then he noticed something. They were holding a white flag. One of them, a lieutenant, asked Ted who he was. Ted's mind raised. If they knew he was a private, a soldier of minimal importance, they might kill him, so he lied. He said he was a commanding officer, a major,
and he didn't stop there. He told them that North Korea had lost the war. Kim Olsung was in Tokyo right that very moment, in peace stocks with General MacArthur, and that's how he got two full companies of enemy soldiers, several hundred men to surrender to him.
It was a miracle. You know what I meant. I was stocking broken anguish. There was stocking broken English. I was a sharp looking soldiers. I told them our Major Rubin and they gave up. They captured over four hundred prisoner with horter firing anything.
The North Korean soldiers lay down their arms and Ted told them to wait where they were until they could bring reinforcements. He ran back to camp with the news. Once again, nobody believed him until they went out and saw the hundreds of unarmed surrendered North Korean soldiers, and once again Sergeant A was told to fill up the paperwork for a medal of honor, and because of Bigot is nothing if not predictable, he did no such thing.
Then came the worst battle Ted's units saw. Unbeknownst to the American troops on the ground, the Chinese had entered the war, sending thousands of soldiers to join the North Koreans. Three US Army battalions, including Ted's, were sent to the small city of Unsand, where the attacks were constant and merciless. Ted was there behind a line defended by a single machine gun way out in the open. One machine gunner
after another was killed while operating it. Three men died, and then nobody wanted to go out and hold the line anymore.
Nobody wanted to get on and because it was dangerous.
But it was necessary to save their lives. So Ted stepped forward.
And I'm not because I'm a hero or anything, but I figured that's the only thing we have left, so that's slow them down.
Ted held the position until the ammunition was gone. He took shrapnel to his hand, his chest, his leg, but he wouldn't leave his position. Meanwhile, Sergeant A had retreated behind the lines, telling no one and taking no one with him. He'd run away to safety. The good news for Ted was that his tormentor was finally gone. More reason for optimism, right, But in fact Ted's run of luck was about to end. The Americans were massively outnumbered.
First came defeat, then came capture. Ted and a straggling group of survivors were rounded up by the Chinese command and marched north. Initially there were a handful of soldiers in the line with Ted. Soon they were hundreds. It was November nineteen fifty, the start of a particularly brutal winter. Ted took breaks from marching to remove his boots and massage his toes. He had seen toes turn black and fall off from frostbite at Mathhausen. The lessons from the
camp were coming back to him. The men walked for days through knee deep snow. Finally they saw it, a dozen single story shacks with a creek running past them, surrounded by loops of barbed wire. They had arrived at the place they would soon call death Valley.
Why they collected dead welly because the guys started dying dead.
Ted couldn't have known, but he was heading into a system of notoriously brutal pow camps. Of the American servicemen who went into these camps, thirty eight percent would die. If the American soldiers thought they had seen death and cruelty in combat, they hadn't seen anything like what was coming. But Ted had more on that after this quick break.
When you become captured, you become a nothing that can't take you out. Any second they shoot you, and that's it. You're just the dead man that can beat you up. I guess start of you that can finish you. And you know more a Yoman bin.
Life in pow Camp five was like this. You got two tiny cups of grain twice a day, and when it was cooked in water please note clean water not available, it turned into a porridge that kept a soldier hovering just above the starvation point. There was no hospital for all the wounded and sick. Well. There was something they called the hospital, but if you went in, you didn't come out. Soldiers knew to avoid it at all costs.
The three thousand prisoners had dysentery, pneumonia, untreated wounds, and they had the dreaded and give up itis, what they called it when an inmate would just stop eating, stop moving, and seemingly lose the will to live. Winter was viciously cold, and the prisoners were dressed in rags that didn't keep out the chill. They stood in the snow shivering while the captors did roll call. Everyone was starving. They would
sleep squeeze next to each other like sardines. Often they'd wake up next to someone who had died in the night. For the American soldiers, this was an unimaginable nightmare. For Ted, it was all too familiar. Remember, he had been in a Nazi concentration camp just five years earlier. But there were key differences between Camp five and Mathausen. For one thing, they looked very different. At Mothhausen, the prison fortress had been designed to last. Camp five was just a series
of hastily built mud huts. And Ted would tell you there was another key difference too. For the Nazis, mass murder was the whole point. But while the Chinese didn't necessarily care if a soldier died, death wasn't the ultimate goal indoctrination was. This was the Cold War communism versus democracy. The Chinese desperately wanted these Americans to buy into their way of life, even if it happened by force. Perhaps you've heard of the movie The Manchurian Candidate. It's a
classic nineteen sixties film starring Frank Sinatra. The whole plot revolves around an American Gi, who is brainwashed in a North Korean pow camp. That Gi wins the Medal of Honor, and then because he's been brainwashed, he tries to kill the Conservative Party's presidential nominee. The film is a psychological thriller with a hefty dose of political satire and surrealism, and camp.
His brain has not only been washed as they say, it has been dry clean.
The gii's mother is in on the assassination plot. She's played by Angela Lansbury, who was at the time thirty seven. The actor playing her son was thirty five. It's all completely nuts anyway. This is all to say brainwashing, or the attempt at brainwashing, was an actual thing in the camps. In Camp five, the soldiers days were filled with information sessions lectures about the ills of American society. They could be tortured if they resisted their re education or engaged
in debate with their captors. Agreeing with the doctrine, on the other hand, might get them cigarettes or food layered on top of the painful hunger, the cold, and the deprivation. The idea was to break the soldiers down and rebuild them as compliant comrades. But Ted had a way to avoid all of this misery. His Chinese captors realized, Hey, here's a guy who can't really speak English. Sorry, Ted,
He's not even an American citizen. He's from Hungry, which is under the influence of the USSR, which is our communist ally. So they came to Ted and said comrade, you don't have to stay here. We'll send you home to hungry. The other soldiers were blown away by Ted's incredible good luck, and they were equally blown away when Ted said no, he would stay with his men, thank you very much. The other guys couldn't believe it. Why would anyone stay in this god forsaken place? But they
didn't realize something essential about Ted. He hadn't become a soldier to gun down hundreds of men on a ridge to take life. He'd become a soldier to give life. And he realized that he could do that in the camp, not just keep people alive, but keep them human.
I would help anybody. If I am Abro and my mother was a SEMBI I'll show my friend there was a semi. And that's one thing she teach us that I through help your fellow men, the regardless the black yellow, but they were a nationality.
Ted had already endured the Holocaust. This would be a central fact of his life, as it was for all who survived it. But almost none of those fellow survivors had to live it again. Ted did, and then he chose to stay there and put what he had learned to work. He started mapping the camp. When the guards took the prisoners up the mountainto chop wood, Ted stared back at the prison buildings, scanning them. This is where
the storehouses are, This is where the guards sleep. When they needed prisoners to bury dead bodies, and they were always dead bodies. Ted's hands shot up, I'll go. He took every opportunity to get the lay of the land. The moment he figured out where they were keeping the food, he started stealing it. Every night, he snuck into the storehouses and stuffed the legs of his uniform with bits of bread and meat or potatoes, whatever he could find. Then he brought his loot back and shared it with
everyone he could. The men were grateful, but they were terrified on his behalf. They all understood that if Ted were caught, he would be killed. The men in his camp called him brave. Ted thinks it was something else.
They have to be notch and I all of this was match, you know, rather than Jewish Michigan.
I love that word with Sugarno. Leo Cormier was one of the men in Ted's hut. Years later, he remembered what Ted did.
Theysed have grinding mills for flowering, stuffed his pants pull of flower to chank for all the guys in camp they eat. Yeah, he rested his wife in it, but I'm stealing out flower, cut the neck off, and uh we didn't take grass and well regular grass and make soup out of it.
And I shouldn't help a lot of guys or make sure they got their food rounding.
Just like he learned back in Mathausen, Ted convinced his bunk mates to strip down and pick every single louse and bed bug off their bodies. He knew what would happen if they let the vermin take over.
I seen them one night spend the whole night checking lice off one of the guys that then had the stunt to look to head up. And Ted's stayed there all night picking lice off the guy on that charcoal fire. So yeah, what now would do that a.
Man like Ted?
I was not just a soldier, not just a funny looking jew. I was there of and they need me, I feed them. I was dead handy man doctor nurse friend.
Ted desperately tried to keep POW's out of the so called hospital where the weakest were sent to die. So he'd find sick men and watch them carefully. He brought them hot water in his helmet and washed their wounds. When they were too weak to get up and were lying in their own filth, he cleaned them. He did that for Leo.
He got so bad.
I had dysentery and I couldn't go to the bathroom. Ted would kick me up. I don't want to hell. He got the shrink to carry me, but I don't really waiting about paid homes daily natty pounds on it. He cary me down to the river or wash me.
So why did Ted do it? Maybe because he remembered the feeling of holding his brother's hand in the concentration camp and how that fleeting moment of connection restored his sense of humanity. Maybe because after all of those enemy soldiers he killed on the ridge, he wanted to even the tally make up for the lives he'd taken. But I think it's even bigger than that. It's because Ted Rubins saw the possibility of greatness in every single man he saved.
They all be saved, and you save alife, you save maybe a nation.
When you save a life, you save a nation. Ted didn't see men who were skin and bones, crusted in filth, beaten down. He saw future fathers, community leaders, people who had the potential to do good in the world. He saw the American life he had always dreamed about, even when the worst America had to offer spat in his face. So he put his own life on the line to safeguard that dream for everyone else.
Oh my life to him, and you know I would have just perished in that clearing camp and the mid of Ted. Okay, I'm not sugar a lot quite a few other guys whom frown without Ted and gave them the courage to go on living.
Which brings us back to Johnny. You remember him from the last episode. He was a dying soldier on the floor of the mud hut, the young serviceman with give up itis, too sick to move or eat or keep going.
You don't want to eat. He was just giving off. I see, Johnny, I say a red Cross us. Yes, there, you bring us new medication. I will gave chamoum, but only one thing I ask you, And that's all you have to promise. Johnny, You've gonna help you shall because your parent's waiting for you. Your brother is she stare waiting for you. What's gonna be, Johnnie? You wanna die or you wanna help? You shed?
Johnny promised to help himself, and Ted kept giving him that medicine. He visited Johnnie three times a day for a week, carrying those little brown pills. After five days, Johnny was sitting up and talking again. Two weeks later, he was on his feet thanks to the amazing medicine that Ted had given him. But here's the thing. There was no medicine in the camp. The Red Cross hadn't been there. Those little brown balls were And I think this is beautiful. So I'm sorry for what I'm about
to say. Goat poop. Ted fed him goat shehit. He knew that what Johnny really needed was something to believe in. What the hell? It worked?
So when he was completely recovered, event you sat on my bet. You make meat all the shit. But thank god I'm alive. He kiss me and everything. You are so happy.
Ted's special medicine didn't save Johnny's life. Hope did. Finally, after thirty months in Camp five, the men started to go home.
Red officers come forward to deliver another consignment of you and prisoners to the custody of Allied officials, a total of six hundred and eighty four.
From then on, red.
Ambulances disgorged the stark proof of man's inhumanity to man.
The conflict was slowly reaching its end.
Even as these fortunate ones turn their steps homeward, thousands of others remained to an unknown fate. But for those who can smile again, all America is thankful.
They sent the sick home first, and by then Ted was one of them. That old shrapnel wound in his knee had become infected. He arrived in the US on a stretcher. Thousands of men had died in Camp five, but Ted had managed to save at least thirty of them. He had kept them alive, and he had kept Hope alive too. When Ted got back to the States, he became an American citizen. He reconnected with his siblings, who had finally gotten permission to immigrate to the US and
who had been waiting for him. And in the final strange twist to his story, he became famous. His picture made the papers. Remember what I said about how handsome he was. Hollywood saw that too. He was invited to Premier's in publicity events, Starlet's on his arm. There was talk of turning his life story into a movie, but Ted was uninterested. He didn't want to talk about his experiences in Modhausen or in Korea. Like so many survivors of his generation, he preferred to put it behind him
focus on his American life. He got married, he had kids, He settled down in California. He worked at his brother Emory's liquor store, And even though he had been told on two separate occasions on the battlefield that he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor, he had never thought about the fact that no medal had ever materialized. In fact, he had been recommended four times, four practically
unheard of. Good Old Sergeant A had refused to file the paperwork for two of those recommendations, and two others from the battle at a Sane and from his heroism at Camp five, had gotten lost in a shuffle. But the men who remembered, including Leo Cormier, spent years advocating on his behalf. They knew what he deserved. Then in the nineteen nineties, the military started looking back through the records. They wanted to see if any Jewish serviceman had been
overlooked because of anti Semitism. Right at the top of the list was Ted. In September of two thousand and five, he finally got his medal awarded by President George W.
Bush, and by awarding the Medal of Honor to Corporal Reuben Today, the United States acknowledges the debt that time has not diminished. By repeatedly risking his own life to say brothers corporate, Ruben exemplified the highest ideals of military service and fulfilled a pledge to give something back to the country that had given him his freedom. And he knew that the America he thought for did not always
live up to his highest ideals. Yet he had enough trust in America's promise to see his commitment through.
Ted still didn't think he deserved a medal. Ted just did the thing he thought human beings were supposed to do.
I said, listen, yesterday, I was just a schmock. Today they called mesaur and to get a medal of all, you know, that's a big thing. I never know that I gonna be a superchu. I'm joking. No, I'm not superd I'm just a regular guy.
Between his actions in combat and at the camp. The Army puts the number of people that ted Reubin saved that close to one hundred. I think he was able to do that because he valued the humanity in every person he met, even those who treated him with bigotry or scorn, even those who saw him as a funny foreigner with a crazy accent and of religion, they didn't understand. He was taught the value of life when he was only fourteen, in a place that didn't value life at all.
He learned the power of hope and compassion that he kept those lessons with him. They gave him strength, and with that strength he gave strength to others. Ted Rubin died in twenty fifteen at the age of eighty six. Proud of his service and proud most of all to be a citizen of the United States of America.
It is the best count in the world, and I'm part of it now.
Medal of Honor. Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Constanza Gallardo, and Izzy Carter. The show was edited by Ben daph Haffrey, Round design and additional music by Jake Gorski. Recording engineering, by Nita Lawrence, fact checking by Arthur Gombert's original music by Eric Phillips. Special thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and
the book Single Handed by Daniel Cohen. If you want to learn more about our Medal of Honor recipients, follow us on Instagram and Twitter. We'll be sharing photos and videos of the heroes featured on this show. We'd also love to hear from you dm us with a story about a courageous veteran in your life. If you don't know a veteran, we would love to hear a story of how courage was contagious in your own life. You can find us at Pushkinbods. I'm your host, Malcolm Grappler