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Dear Doug Collins

Tibor Rubin: The Survivor They Sent Up the Hill Alone, and the 55 Years It Took to Say So

Tibor Rubin survived a Nazi concentration camp as a boy, crossed an ocean to repay the soldiers who freed him, and then — in the uniform of the country that had liberated him — held a hill alone for twenty-four hours, manned the last machine gun at Unsan, and kept dozens of starving prisoners alive for thirty months. His reward, for half a century, was silence: the officers who recommended him for the Medal of Honor were killed, and the first sergeant ordered to file the paperwork was, in his comrades' sworn words, an antisemite who wanted him dead instead. This page is the documented record of what he did, and what his own institution did about it afterward.

The service, and the promise

He was born on June 18, 1929, in Pásztó, Hungary, the son of a shoemaker. In the account President George W. Bush gave at his medal ceremony — drawn from the Army’s own record — Rubin was rounded up by the Nazis at 13 and taken to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where an SS officer told the prisoners none of them would make it out alive. Many did not: both of Rubin’s parents and one of his sisters were lost in the Holocaust. Rubin survived 14 months, until U.S. Army troops liberated the camp on May 5, 1945 — the Army’s obituary identifies his liberators as elements of the 11th Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army, and in his own telling for the Medal of Honor Society, Rubin remembered them breaking down the gate.

That day made the promise. In his own words, recorded by the Society: “I have a debt to pay. So I made a promise. If — Lord help me — if I ever go to America, I’m gonna become a G.I. Joe.” He reached the United States in 1948, worked as a shoemaker in New York, and in 1950 he kept the promise — enlisting before he was even a citizen of the country he was volunteering to fight for. Seven months after taking the oath, by the president’s account, he was in Korea: a rifleman with Company I, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.

The promise an army makes to a man like that is not complicated. It says: do what he did, and the record will say so too. What follows is what that promise looked like when the man keeping it was a Jewish immigrant with a Hungarian accent — and the man holding his paperwork hated him for exactly that.

What happened

The case against Rubin’s first sergeant rests on sworn paper. Nearly a dozen of the men who served with Rubin submitted lengthy affidavits to the Army, and their account is consistent: the sergeant “volunteered” Rubin, again and again, for the most dangerous patrols and missions. In Rubin’s own telling for the Medal of Honor Society, whenever the first sergeant needed a volunteer, he called for Rubin by an antisemitic slur — and Rubin went. Every time.

On July 23, 1950, with his unit retreating toward the Pusan Perimeter, Rubin was assigned to stay behind alone and keep open the vital Taegu–Pusan road link his regiment was withdrawing over. His official citation records what happened next: overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops assaulted a hill defended solely by Corporal Rubin, and in a personal 24-hour battle he inflicted a staggering number of casualties, single-handedly slowing the enemy advance and allowing the 8th Cavalry Regiment to complete its withdrawal. In his own telling, the sergeant had promised the company would come back for him. Nobody came; after days on the hill, Rubin walked down and rejoined a unit that had left him there. When the regiment advanced into North Korea, the citation records, Rubin helped capture several hundred North Korean soldiers.

His commanding officers saw what he was. Two of them recommended him for the Medal of Honor — repeatedly — and both were killed in action shortly afterward. Before they died, they ordered the first sergeant to begin the award paperwork. Comrades who witnessed the order being given swore, in affidavits, that the sergeant deliberately ignored it. Corporal Harold Speakman put it in a notarized statement that has followed the case ever since: “I really believe, in my heart, that [the sergeant] would have jeopardized his own safety rather than assist in any way whatsoever in the awarding of the Medal of Honor to a person of Jewish descent.”

On October 30, 1950, Chinese forces attacked his unit at Unsan, North Korea, in a massive night-time assault. Rubin manned a .30 caliber machine gun at the south end of the line after three previous gunners had become casualties, and kept firing until his ammunition was exhausted — a stand the citation credits with slowing the enemy advance long enough for the remnants of his unit to retreat. Severely wounded, he was captured.

Then came the second captivity of his life: 30 months as a prisoner of war. The Chinese, learning he was Hungarian-born and not yet an American citizen, offered to send him back to Hungary. He refused — in the words President Bush quoted at the ceremony: “I was in the U.S. Army, and I wouldn’t leave my American brothers because they need me here.” Instead he did in the POW camp what he had learned at Mauthausen. The citation records that he sneaked out at night, breaking into enemy food storehouses and gardens at the risk of certain torture or death if caught, and provided food, medical care, and moral support to the sick and wounded. Fellow prisoner Sgt. Leo Cormier Jr. wrote that Rubin “did many good deeds, which he told us were mitzvahs in the Jewish tradition… he was a very religious Jew and helping his fellow men was the most important thing to him.” The citation’s arithmetic is the sober one: his efforts were “directly attributed to saving the lives of as many as 40 of his fellow prisoners.” His captivity ran to April 20, 1953, the closing date of the period his citation covers.

What the institution did afterward

Rubin came home, became a citizen, settled in California, and worked in his brother’s Long Beach liquor store. And the Army that had lost his paperwork lost him, too. For years his comrades assumed he was dead. When former prisoners found him alive in the 1980s, they took up his cause, filing the affidavits and formal recommendations the record had been denied in 1950. The Jewish War Veterans of the United States joined the campaign and, in 1988, urged Congress to recognize him. Lawmakers pressed the Pentagon for years. Nothing moved.

One thing this page will not do is name the first sergeant, and the reason belongs on the record. The accounts conflict: some tellings drawn from the case file — including the Jewish Virtual Library’s account — name him as First Sergeant Artice Watson; others, including HistoryNet’s account, name a Sergeant Arthur Peyton. No official source this page relies on — not the citation, not the president’s ceremony remarks, not the Army’s own obituary of Rubin — names him at all. Where the record cannot agree on a man’s name, this site describes the conduct the affidavits swear to and leaves the name out, rather than risk fastening the wrong name to the deed.

What finally moved the case was not a man’s conscience but a statute. After an Army-commissioned study of discrimination in the awarding of medals, Congress — through the Leonard Kravitz Jewish War Veterans Act, carried in the fiscal 2002 defense authorization — directed the services to review the records of Jewish American and Hispanic American war veterans to determine whether any should have received the Medal of Honor. By the standard accounts of that review’s conclusion, the Army determined that Rubin had been the subject of discrimination because of his religion, and that he should have received the medal in the first place.

On September 23, 2005, in the East Room, President George W. Bush placed the Medal of Honor around the neck of a 76-year-old man — 55 years after the hill, the machine gun, and the camp. “By awarding the Medal of Honor to Corporal Rubin today,” Bush said, “the United States acknowledges a debt that time has not diminished.” And he said the quiet part to the man’s face: “As a Jew and a non-citizen serving in uniform, he had experienced prejudice in the Army. And he knew that the America he fought for did not always live up to its highest ideals.” Rubin was subsequently inducted into the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes. His own summary of the medal, repeated for the rest of his life, was that it belonged to all the prisoners of war, and to the heroes who never came home.

Where it stands now

Tibor Rubin died on December 5, 2015, at his home in Garden Grove, California, at 86, and is buried at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles. He is described by the Army Times and his own division as the only Holocaust survivor to receive the Medal of Honor. His medal itself is with his regiment: the Medal of Honor Society records its location as 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters at Fort Hood, Texas, where his family presented it to the division in June 2022.

His afterlife in the institution he served is just as concrete. For decades Rubin had been a regular volunteer at the VA medical center in Long Beach — the National Medal of Honor Museum credits him with more than 20,000 hours of volunteer work there. On December 16, 2016, President Obama signed Public Law 114-313, naming the VA health care system in Long Beach the Tibor Rubin VA Medical Center, and in May 2017 the center was renamed in his honor.

But notice what it took, because that is the pattern this site exists to document. The heroism lasted from July 1950 to April 1953. The accounting took fifty-five years, a shelf of sworn affidavits from the men he saved, a veterans’ organization that would not drop the file, and an act of Congress ordering the Army to re-read its own records. He won the fight the same way he held the hill: by still being there when it was over.

The ledger

Rubin is this section’s “finally accounted” exhibit — the one they finally got right, 55 years late.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Rubin lived long enough to tell his own story on camera, and he told it often. Six films: Rubin in his own words, twice over; the Society’s Living History portrait; the Army’s 2007 profile; the PBS documentary’s telling; and the VA’s tribute. The 2005 ceremony itself survives in the White House record and on C-SPAN; its remarks are in the Sources below.

In his own words. The U.S. Army's film of Rubin recounting the camp in Austria, the promise he made there, Unsan, and the POW camp where a comrade says flatly: "He saved my life." (U.S. Army video.)

The Society's portrait. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society's Living History film — the whole arc, from Pásztó to the hill to the medal, in Rubin's own voice. (Congressional Medal of Honor Society.)

The oral history. Rubin interviewed for the Medal of Honor oral histories project — the longest of his on-camera tellings. (MedalOfHonorBook.)

The Army's profile. The Soldier Media Center's portrait, produced in 2007 — the Army telling, at last, the story it had mislaid for 55 years. (Soldier Media Center Videos.)

The documentary. Rubin's segment from Florentine Films' Medal of Honor, aired on PBS in 2008. (Florentine Films / Sherman Pictures.)

The VA's tribute. The VA's own #HonoringVets film — Mauthausen, the hill, the refusal to leave his brothers — from the department whose Long Beach center now bears his name. (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.