I did not dream then that he would call me three years later to invite my wife and me, among the 190 guests he was allotted, to the White House. There we would watch in awe as the president awarded this Holocaust survivor the Congressional Medal of Honor for many actions above and beyond the call of duty during the Korean War.

As President George Bush noted from the citation, Rubin's actions during a 24-hour battle singlehandedly inflicted staggering casualties and slowed an enemy advance. It also allowed his regiment to withdraw from the field of battle in the face of overwhelming forces. In a later action, he helped capture several hundred North Korea soldiers.

Rubin was severely wounded while manning a machine gun and was eventually captured. During 30 months in captivity, he performed wondrous deeds, noted Sgt. Carl McClendon, one of the 35-40 soldiers whose lives Rubin saved.

"Rubin had to be very careful to keep a low profile because if he ever got turned into the Chinese or North Koreans or was caught, he would get shot on the spot.

"When the Chinese found that Rubin was talking against their teachings, he was assigned to clean toilets, carry buckets of waste and to burial detail.

"But nothing broke his morale. The more the enemy pushed him, the braver he became. The Chinese and North Koreans did not have much food for themselves, so stealing their rations would hurt them more than killing them. Every night when we slept, Rubin was crawling on his stomach, jumping over fences, and breaking into supply houses while guns were looking down on him.

"He tied the bottom of his fatigue pants and filled up anything he could find. He crawled back and distributed the food he had stolen and risked his life for us."

Among the wounded, the very sick and dying, he washed us, took care of our wounds, force-fed us. He talked to us about not giving up. In daytime, he carried the very sick to the toilet. Cleaned their rears from dysentery. Washed up the dying ones.

"Rubin told us that no way would he ever go back and leave his comrades. They needed him here. And no way would he bring shame to his family back in the good old U.S.A."

In his letter to the Army Awards Unit, fellow POW James Bourgois described how every day Rubin would tend a large open wound in his shoulder. When the wound filled with pus, Rubin forged for maggots and placed them in the gash to eat away the gangrenous infection. It was a treatment Rubin learned in Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was incarcerated for 14 months as a teenager and where his parents perished.

Rubin was rescued from Mauthausen by the American Army. He promised that if he ever got to America, he would join the army, which he did before he became a citizen.

While in service and in a POW camp for 30 months, Rubin did extraordinary things. His extraordinary acts earned him multiple recommendations for the Congressional Medal of Honor. But due to his anti-Semitic sergeant and some bureaucratic snafus, those letters of recommendation never reached the Pentagon. The efforts of soldiers in his unit, who wrote many letters over the years to the Military Awards Unit describing what Rubin had done, finally influenced the Pentagon to award him the medal he richly deserved.

At the Pentagon, the Army chief of staff said that Rubin's actions in combat were in keeping with the Army motto "Finish the mission," and his refusal to accept the Chinese offer to return to Hungary was in keeping with another Army motto: "Leave no one behind."

Like the vast majority of Americans who have never seen combat or been POWs, I cannot comprehend the ties that bound Tibor Rubin to his comrades and they to him.

The flurry of articles about Rubin and the events in Washington on Sept. 23 will subside in the press for more sensational news. But together with those who fought with him and were sustained by him in POW camps, his friends and his family will never forget him.

His actions were in keeping not only with timeless Army mottos, but also with the philosophy that in his actions, every Jew holds the honor of his faith and of his entire people in his hands.

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