Ruth Klüger-Aliav

Ruth , born Klieger Aliav Polishuk , was a lady of the Mossad for Aliya Beth. Born in 1914 in Chernovitz , Romania , she graduated from Vienna University , knew nine languages and went to Israel after marriage in 1936 . She joined the Mossad in 1939 and was sent to Romania. The head of operations in Romania sent the "Tiger Hill" September 1939 and the "Hilda" January 1940. She escaped to Istanbul , Turkey and there together with other Mossad agents organized the dispatch of the Darien II in March 1941 . A full account of these deeds is in her autobiography The Last Escape , which was a best seller in 1974 . She was the Mossad agent in Cairo from 1941 to 1944 . In 1944, with De Gaulle 's help, she arrived in a liberated Paris and was the first Mossad agent to contact survivors of the Holocaust . In October 1945 , Ruth accuired a troopship, the "Ascania", from a colonel on Dwight D. It was planned for the vessel to take orphans to Israel and was soon crammed with 2600 Holocaust survivors. On arriving in Haifa , the British government of Palestine had no choice but to let them in. The colonel wanted to do another trip but Eisenhower vetoed that because of British pressure. In October 1945, David Ben-Gurion arrived in Paris, and to avoid eavesdroppers he and Ruth went for a 4 hour walk in the Bois de Boulogne . Ben Gurion wanted to know if the Holocaust survivors would be ready to sail in the cramped Mossad "nutshell" ships. Ruth convinced him that after the Holocaust the refugees would be ready for any hardship in order to reach the new homeland. Paris then became the headquarters of Mossad; soon afterwards Ruth left for South America and the USA , raising money and buying ships. After Israeli independence in 1948 she was public relations manager at ZIM , the Israeli shipping company. Ruth divorced in 1940 . There is an urban legend that she was Ben Gurion's lover, but this has never been proven. Ben Gurion suggested to Ruth a new Hebrew surname: Aliav. (V and B are the same Hebrew letter.) Ruth died in 1979 from cancer.¹