- Ruth Klieger Aliav
Ruth Klieger Aliav, née Polishuk (1907-1979), was a
Jewish Zionist activist, assisting in theAliya Beth before and afterWorld War II , and later a figure in theMossad . Born inChernivtsi (then inAustria-Hungary until 1918, afterward part of theKingdom of Romania , and nowadays inUkraine ), she was a graduate from theUniversity of Vienna who could speak nine languages.Early activities
Klieger Aliav went to Palestine after her marriage in 1936 and later joined the Mossad, being sent on missions to Romania. The head of operations in Romania sent the "Tiger Hill" September 1939 and the "Hilda" January 1940. After Romania became an Axis Power, she escaped to
Istanbul ,Turkey and there together with other Mossad agents organized the dispatch of theDarien II in March 1941. A full account of these deeds is in her autobiography "The Last Escape," which was a best seller in 1974, and filmed asThe Darien Dilemma 2005.She was a Mossad agent in
Cairo from 1941 to 1944. In 1944, withCharles de Gaulle 's help, she arrived in a liberatedParis and was the first Mossad agent to contact survivors of theHolocaust .1945
In October 1945, Klieger Aliav acquired a
troopship , the "Ascanious", from an American,Colonel Ernest Witte, ofDwight D. Eisenhower 's staff. It was planned that the vessel would convey orphans to Palestine and it was soon crammed with 2,600 Holocaust survivors. On arrival inHaifa , the British government of Palestine had no choice but to let them in. The colonel wanted to repeat the passage, but it wasveto ed by Eisenhower because of British pressure.In October 1945,
David Ben-Gurion arrived in Paris and, to avoid eavesdroppers, he and Klieger Aliav went for a four-hour walk in theBois de Boulogne . Ben Gurion wanted to know if the Holocaust survivors would be ready to sail in the cramped Mossad "nutshell" ships. Klieger Aliav convinced him that after the Holocaust, the refugees would endure any hardship in order to reach the new homeland.Later career
Paris then became the headquarters of Mossad; soon afterwards Klieger Aliav left for
South America and the United States, raising money and buying ships. After Israeli independence in 1948, she was public relations manager at ZIM, the Israeli shipping company.Klieger Aliav 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).
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