Tibor Rubin’s Medicine (Part 1)
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Pushkin. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.

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It was 1951, and a young American serviceman named Johnny lay dying on the dirty floor of a mud-walled hut. He was a prisoner of war, one of thousands of U.S. soldiers who had the bad luck to be here. A Chinese-run camp in the far north of Korea. Death was everywhere in the camp. Death from dysentery and pneumonia and starvation. Deaths from untreated battle wounds left to fester. And deaths like Johnny's.

A soldier exhausted after months of abuse and captivity, unable to eat or move, slowly abandoning the will to live. The other POWs called it give-up-itis. There was someone else in the room with Johnny, a scrawny 21-year-old soldier with a thick head of hair and an even thicker Eastern European accent. He knelt beside Johnny and said, the Red Cross has just dropped off their newest medicine. I'll give it to you.

But in turn, you have to pull yourself together. You can't give up. Then he gave Johnny a small brown pill. The other prisoners in the camp had noticed this man with the medicine. Something was different about him. When they couldn't stand up and were lying in their own filth, he washed them clean. He picked the lice off them when they couldn't do it themselves. He sneaked bits of food to men who were dying of hunger.

And he made them smile. He cracked jokes and clowned around. He reminded them of the great life waiting for them back home in America. They just had to live long enough to make it there. That guy with the accent wasn't a doctor or a clergyman or even an officer. He didn't have any influence or special training. What he did have was experience. Experience in a camp even worse than this one. A place he'd lived when he was just 14 years old.

A Nazi Death Camp. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States, awarded for gallantry and bravery in combat at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty. Each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.

This show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Today's episode is about Tybor Rubin, the only Holocaust survivor to win the Medal of Honor. His story is about more than courage and bravery. It's about compassion and the simple truth that sometimes hope is the most powerful defense we have.

These powerful stories of those who helped protect our country are brought to you by LifeLock, the pioneer and leader in identity theft protection.

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So start protecting your identity today. Save up to 40% off your first year of LifeLock Identity Theft Protection. Go to lifelock.com slash metal to save 40% off. Terms apply. It's a special thing to be a member of Navy Federal because it's a member-owned, not-for-profit credit union. Their members are at the very heart of our mission.

That's why they offer exclusive rates, discounts, and tools to help you achieve your financial goals, like earning and savings of $461 a year, an average credit card APR that's 6.81% lower than the bank industry average, and 24-7 access to award-winning customer service from their stateside member service representatives.

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I was joking with my producer Jacob the other day, who's one of Pushkin's most valuable employees. I hired him to be my assistant years ago in the most random manner possible. I think he saw a message board posting somewhere and I interviewed him for basically 10 minutes and said, go for it. I made a wild gamble on someone and got incredibly lucky.

But let's be honest, you can't rely on getting lucky when it comes to hiring people. Lightning's not going to strike more than once. You need a system and you need tools. And that's why LinkedIn is so important. LinkedIn is more than just a job board. They help connect you with professionals you can't find anywhere else. Even people who aren't actively looking for a new job.

In a given month, over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites. So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, you're looking in the wrong place. Hire professionals like a professional and post your job for free at linkedin.com slash gladwell. That's linkedin.com slash gladwell to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Tibor Rubin was born in 1929 in a small town in Hungary.

He had a loving family, with four older siblings and a little sister he adored. Parents who took care of him, a nice house. As a kid, he was always getting into scrapes, playing soccer with his big brother, Emery. Typical kid stuff. It wasn't fancy, but life was pretty good. Except that Tibor was Jewish, and the Third Reich was on the rise in nearby Germany. By the end of the 1930s, the Hungarian government had begun emulating the Nazis.

denying Jews equal rights under the law. There were jobs they couldn't hold. They couldn't marry Christians. Then, in 1940, Hungary formally joined the Axis Alliance. Even so, Hungarian Jews were more protected than Jews in other Axis countries. The government refused to deport its Jewish citizens to concentration camps, despite pressure from their Nazi allies.

So the Rubin family felt relatively safe in their home country, even as things turned. After all, Tiber's father was a decorated soldier of the First World War. He was a patriot. More than that, the Rubins believed in the essential goodness of people. They taught Tiber and his siblings to act with compassion. Even when everything in his life argued against it, Tiber never let go of that lesson.

Here he is talking about them in that super thick Hungarian accent I told you about. My mother used to always tell us, don't say anything bad about anybody. If you don't know anything good, you don't ever hurt anybody. Because maybe we have a different religion, but according to the good Lord, that's your brothers and sisters. Everything changed in March of 1944.

The Nazis seized power in Hungary. Almost immediately, plans were drawn up for the transportation of the country's Jews, about half a million people, to extermination camps. The Hungarian authorities didn't stand in the way of the plan. And as the Nazis began rounding up Jews, or just killing them on the spot, it became clear that the world wasn't working according to the Rubin family values.

Soon, Tibor was hearing whispered conversations between his parents. Refugees were coming through their little village on the run from the Nazis. The world was getting darker. Emery was 20, and their parents worried he would be pressed into military service. So they sent him across the border to Czechoslovakia, where an aunt lived. She had arranged for Emery to hide with a friend who was a Gentile.

Tiber worshipped his brother and was panicked to watch him go. But Emery promised Tiber he'd be back soon. Just a few months later, a group of Polish men were passing through town on the run for Switzerland. Tiber's parents met with the men and made a wrenching decision. Tiber should leave with them. He had to try to escape what was coming. They sent their son off with a group of total strangers. They were that desperate to save him.

Tiber, was 14. After days of trekking, the group reached the Swiss border, only to be captured by the Nazis. They were sent to a concentration camp named Mauthausen in Austria. It looked like a stone fortress on a hill. It had been constructed carefully, not just to house Jews, but political prisoners, conscientious objectors, enemy soldiers from almost every country in German-occupied Europe.

It had some of the harshest conditions and one of the highest death rates of any of the Nazi camps. I don't need to tell you how bad concentration camps were. No food, no hope, hard labor, guards who would shoot inmates for sport. The living and the dying crammed into the same putrid spaces. Tiber was just a terrified kid. When he arrived at the camp, an SS officer told him, none of you Jews will make it out of here alive.

So many people died there every day. There were so many people, mountain of people dead. They didn't even have time to burn them, you know. The life over there was no future, nothing to look forward, just when I gonna be next. But Tybara was smart and resourceful, and he learned the ways of the camp. One prisoner taught him to pick the lice off every single day so he wouldn't get typhus.

When Tiber got sick from the rotted potatoes and dirty water they were feeding him, a man in his bunk made him eat charcoal to settle his stomach. The Polish guys he had traveled with showed him how to steal food from the officer's garbage dump. He thought of himself like a rat: cunning, quick and silent, doing whatever he could to survive. We wasn't no human being anymore. He tried not to make connections with other prisoners.

Friendships felt dangerous. Other teenagers could be unruly and get them all into trouble. Plus, the friends he made seemed inevitably to die. Even in the crowded bunk rooms, he became more and more isolated, alone. Then one evening, during roll call, he saw a familiar face across the prison yard. Tiber stared. He couldn't believe it. It was his brother Emery.

He pushed his way through the other prisoners to get to him. Emery and Tiber hugged. They held hands all through that roll call. It seemed like a miracle. Tiber felt like he knew who he was again. A little bit of his humanity was restored. Emery had been caught in Czechoslovakia and had spent months doing forced hard labor. Then, without warning, he'd been loaded on a train to Mauthausen.

Emry was assigned to a different barracks than Tibor, and because he was a carpenter, he was often sent on construction projects outside Mauthausen itself. The brothers rarely saw each other, but just knowing Emry was there reminded Tibor that he was loved, and that kept him going.

The famous Viennese psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl would later write about this exact phenomenon. He said that those in the death camps who lost their faith in the future would die a kind of emotional death. The loss of hope would hasten the loss of the will to live. He wrote that it was, quote, possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp.

Frankl believed that if we react to terrible circumstances with courage and kindness and unselfishness, then life can take on a deeper meaning, even in the face of inhumanity. Emory's arrival was that beacon of hope for Tibor. He held on to it and to the lesson it taught him, that faith in the future was powerful.

Tiber was in Mauthausen for more than a year amidst the death, hatred, and squalor. 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 their captors did roll call. Everyone was starving. They would sleep squeezed next to each other like sardines. Often, they would wake up next to someone who had died in the night. That's where Tiber turned 15.

Time ground on. But then, Tiber started to hear whispers. Rumors spreading. The Germans were losing the war. The Allies were on the way. But Tiber wasn't sure what to believe. Until one day, in April 1945, the prisoners heard the drone of Allied planes overhead.

One day,

Five tanks showed up. They break down the gate. When we see the American troops, you know, well, everybody was crying. The people go and they kiss their feet. We call them the G.I. Joe's.

One of the soldiers who was there that day remembered what it was like to liberate the camp. His name was Charles Sandler. He was in the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Army. Here he is talking about his experiences in an interview from the 1980s. You have to picture this huge monument. This is not just a shack. Mauthausen Camp

proper, it was like a huge castle on a high ground, a very permanent, if it weren't a concentration camp, I'd say it was a beautiful structure.

As we approached, one of the strongest impressions, which I still very clearly recall, was that of the scent. What we smelled was the smell of death, of bodies rotting, hundreds of bodies stacked like cordwood, bodies still in the crematoria. The prisoners, at least those who were strong enough to stand, greeted the army with elation.

Well, unmistakable, just never to be forgotten joy and screaming and hollering. And the gates were open. They have to picture a situation of 15,000 souls

Souls that were just beyond description. Starving, beaten, abused. And they just wanted to break out of captivity. I could have been elected anything that day. I will never forget and always grateful that I had that opportunity of performing that small service. What Tiber noticed about the American soldiers was that they were more than fighters. He couldn't believe how kind and compassionate they were.

They gave life. They weren't just taking it away. The medic pick us up, filthy, stink. They have to wash us and clean us. And the take care was unbelievable. This was something you never forget. Tiber and Emery were skin and bones, days away from death. But the Rubin brothers were two of the lucky ones. At least 95,000 people had died in Mauthausen.

Tiber and Emery returned home to their tiny town in Hungary. Their sister Irene had survived as well, and she found them there. Of the 120 Jewish families in their town, members of just three had returned. Among the missing were Tiber's parents and his little sister, who had been only 10. Eventually, Emery told Tiber the news. All three of them had been murdered at Auschwitz.

When they divided the prisoners who could work from the ones who would immediately be killed, Tiber's mother had insisted on accompanying his little sister to the gas chamber. She didn't want her to die alone. His mother's sacrifice, the American G.I.'s, both set Tiber on his life's course of holding fast to what makes us human, even when inhumanity surrounds us.

Hungary was occupied by the Russians, and the Rubin siblings got out of the country as fast as they possibly could, before the borders closed. They made it to a camp for displaced persons that was run by the United Nations and the U.S. Army. Tiber spent three years there before he finally got his wish, permission to move to the United States. In 1948, he boarded a boat to New York.

As the ship entered the harbor, Tiber went to the deck to see the Manhattan skyline. He opened his suitcase and, in a grand gesture, he threw his clothes from the old country overboard. He watched them flutter down into the water. He was going to start fresh. Hope had sustained him in Mauthausen and in the camps as he waited to start this new life.

Where other survivors of the war might have bitterness or regret, Tiber instead had an unflappable optimism, faith in the future, and grand plans for his new life in the United States. Once he was there, he was going to fulfill a vow he'd made the day the American soldiers liberated Mauthausen. I made the promise, if Lord help me, if I ever go to America, I'm going to become a G.I. Joe.

These powerful stories of those who helped protect our country are brought to you by LifeLock, the pioneer and leader in identity theft protection.

Now you may think, I'm smart, I'm careful with my data, I don't need to worry. But the truth is, a lot of your personal information is in the control of others, like your doctor's office, your bank, your insurance provider. All it takes is one breach of any organization that has your info and you could become a victim of identity theft.

LifeLock is a leader in identity theft protection and empowers you to take control of your identity, alerting you to more uses of your personal information and fixing identity theft if it happens. Guaranteed. Or your money back. LifeLock offers extensive, proactive protection, and all plans include the LifeLock Million Dollar Protection Package.

So start protecting your identity today. Save up to 40% off your first year of LifeLock Identity Theft Protection. Go to LifeLock.com slash metal to save 40% off. Terms apply. It's a special thing to be a member of Navy Federal because it's a member-owned, not-for-profit credit union. Their members are at the very heart of our mission.

That's why they offer exclusive rates, discounts, and tools to help you achieve your financial goals, like earning and savings of $461 a year, an average credit card APR that's 6.81% lower than the bank industry average, and 24-7 access to award-winning customer service from their stateside member service representatives.

Plus, they offer resources like best cities after service to help ease veterans into civilian life and best careers for military spouses to help military families. So if you're a member of the Armed Forces, a veteran, a DOD employee, or a family member, you're eligible. Become a member today at NavyFederal.org. Navy Federal Credit Union. The members are the mission.

Navy Federal is insured by NCUA, equal housing lender. Dollar value shown represents the results of the 2023 Navy Federal member giveback study. Value claim based on 2023 internal average APR assigned to members compared to bank industry average credit card APR published in the Federal Reserve's G-19 consumer credit data release.

I was joking with my producer Jacob the other day, who's one of Pushkin's most valuable employees. I hired him to be my assistant years ago in the most random manner possible. I think he saw a message board posting somewhere and I interviewed him for basically 10 minutes and said, go for it. I made a wild gamble on someone and got incredibly lucky.

But let's be honest, you can't rely on getting lucky when it comes to hiring people. Lightning's not going to strike more than once. You need a system and you need tools. And that's why LinkedIn is so important. LinkedIn is more than just a job board. They help connect you with professionals you can't find anywhere else. Even people who aren't actively looking for a new job.

Fast forward a couple years. Tyber was 20.

I'm going to take a second here to tell you what he looked like, so you can get a mental picture. He wasn't a super tall guy, a puberty spent eating dirty scraps and moldy bread will mess with your growth spurt. But he looked like a movie star, like a young Marlon Brando. He'd gotten a series of jobs once he settled in Manhattan. He worked at a garment factory and in a slaughterhouse, briefly. Then he got hired in a fancy grocery store on Broadway.

He couldn't really speak English, but he charmed the ladies into buying whatever he was selling. He was an outrageous flirt. And right around this time, he changed his name to the very American, Ted. So I was in heaven. This was America. Ted hadn't forgotten about his vow to join the army. In fact, he kept trying to join, but he kept failing the admissions test.

He tried in New York twice, and then in the fall of 1949, Ted moved west, ever optimistic about finding more opportunity. He settled in Oakland, California, where he went to the Army Recruitment Office again. And there, he finally passed the entrance exam on his third try. He might have had a little extra help. Not saying he cheated, but he could talk his way into pretty much anything, even in his broken English.

He qualified for a sharpshooter badge, and his unit was sent to Okinawa for training. And then war was declared in Korea. The troops got ready to ship out for combat, but the captain told Ted he couldn't go with them because he wasn't a U.S. citizen yet. He had to go to a safe zone instead. He says, Captain, I cannot go any safe zone because I made a promise. And when I make a promise, I have to keep it.

He said, you order your mind? I said, I just have to go because I order. To the soldiers who liberated me, saved my life, I was going to Korea with a regiment. And I did. So Ted had asked, willingly, to be sent with his unit to a war zone. And once he arrived in Korea, he got way more than his fair share of danger. This was because of one guy. We're going to call him Sergeant A.

In interviews, Ted never wanted to give this guy's real name. It's there in his service records, but it was important to Ted that he never identified him. I don't want to mention any name because you see, this is, the man is dead. He cannot hurt me anymore, so I don't want to mention his name. I'm going to respect Ted's wishes. Just trust me that Sergeant A was a real person, unfortunately.

Sergeant A was a foul-mouthed World War II vet from Texas and an equal opportunity bigot. He hated the South Korean troops who were serving alongside the Americans. He hated Black people, Mexicans, Italians, though fortunately for those folks, none of them were assigned to his company. And Sergeant A really hated Jews. He couldn't believe that he had the bad luck to get Ted assigned to his unit.

He said, "No, the Jews would be coming here to fight a war." I said, "Well, you're looking one of them because I'm here." So he said that to me, "You are the stupidest son of a bitch fucking Jew I ever met." All of a sudden I said, "I have to show to him I'm going to be as good as him." This is example 5000 of Ted's refusal to let hatred chip away at his essential faith in humanity.

One day, his company was ordered to join a formation several miles to the south. The enemy was coming their way and they needed to move to a safer location. There was a problem. They had more ammo than they could transport. They needed to travel to the next position, get some trucks, and drive back to pick it up. Sergeant A yelled, Find me the Hungarian.

And he said that we have a lot of ammunition and weapons and everything. You're going to be a guard. And he said, we're going to come back and pick it up. Ted was being left behind, alone, on top of a ridge. A ridge that was the only thing standing between the approaching enemy and the U.S. troops. He was supposed to wait there and guard a giant pile of weapons by himself.

This was not a good situation. It was obvious to everyone. A single man wouldn't be able to keep an enemy patrol from taking the ammunition or from advancing on the company's new position. But Ted couldn't and wouldn't say no. And Sergeant A promised they would be back to get him before dark. Then the company packed up and left.

The hours ticked by. The shadows grew longer. Ted kept looking at his watch, kept waiting, hoping to hear the rattle of trucks. Then it was dark. By midnight, it was clear to Ted that the trucks weren't coming. And he realized an entire enemy company could get to the top of this ridge in a matter of minutes. It would be dozens against just him. To anyone else, the situation would have seemed truly hopeless. Not Ted.

He looked at the giant pile of ammunition and started squirreling grenades into the foxholes along the ridge. Then I have my M1 rifle. I load them down, a few of them, and put in some ammunition. He gathered as much machine gun ammo as he could handle and placed that in strategic positions too. He needed to trick the North Koreans into believing that there was more than one soldier on guard. Then he waited for the enemy to arrive.

And arrived they did. The moon moved from behind a cloud and Ted saw them. A hundred or more North Korean soldiers silently scaling the hill. Then it was whistles and yells and the sound of a bugle. The onslaught had begun. Ted hurled grenades one after another as fast as he could pull the pins.

Bone-rattling blasts of mortar shells came back at him. He crawled behind a machine gun and started firing into the darkness. Bullets zipped through the air in his direction. Then I shoot with my rifle. Then I shoot my carbine. I throw it all over. You become hysterical. I did it four and a half hours. I went bananas. Four and a half hours. One man against 100.

Finally, as dawn came, Ted heard the sound of American planes overhead. What was left of the enemy scattered. The battle was over. He was alive. But still, nobody was coming for him. So he started walking. He was shell-shocked, moving like a zombie down the dusty road. When he finally reached his company, he told Sergeant A what had happened. Sergeant A didn't believe him.

But Ted insisted that they go back and look. He wanted proof for his commanding officers and for himself. What they found was a pile of bodies. The far side of the hill was carpeted with dead and dying North Korean soldiers. Ted was horrified. He cried in a way that he had never cried before, not even when Emery had told him about his parents and his little sister. Then I have the guilt feeling, what the hell I did here?

I said, I kill even the enemy, but I kill somebody's father, brother, and all that, you know? But here's the irony, right? He had become a soldier to save lives. His first reaction wasn't relief at having survived an unsurvivable situation. It was to see the terrible costs.

Ted knew what war was, what soldiers did. He knew that they weren't just the life-giving GI Joes who had saved him from death in Mauthausen. They killed people, sometimes in a way that felt needless, cruel. Up until this moment, Ted had convinced himself that he could get through the war with his moral code intact. Now he had to face what it actually meant to be a soldier, and he had to figure out a way to balance the scales.

How he did would change not only Ted's life, but the lives of dozens of others. The extraordinary story of Ted Rubin continues next week on Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage.

Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Constanza Gallardo, and Izzy Carter. The show is edited by Ben-Nadav Hafri, sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski, recording engineering by Nina Lawrence, fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz, original music by Eric Phillips. Special thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and the Buffalo Jewish Federation.

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 Pushkin Pods. I'm your host, Malcolm Gladwell.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.

and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.

This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. Hey there, you've got to check out season two of Lord of the Rings, The Rings of Power. It's going to be epic.

To catch you up, Sauron has returned and nobody in Middle-earth is safe. Season two is all about the greatest villain of all time. And if you're like, I'm not into that stuff, think again. If you love action, fantasy, or drama, you'll love Rings of Power. Season two of The Lord of the Rings, The Rings of Power, premieres on August 29th, only on Prime Video.

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both in service and in life. And when times get challenging, AMU is here for you with 24-7 mental health support. Always prepared. That's you. Learn more at amu.apus.edu.