With her perfect memory (and plenty of zip), ninety-five-year-old Ruth Gruber - adventurer, international correspondent, photographer, maker of (and witness to) history, responsible for rescuing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II and after - tells her story in her own words and photographs. In Witness, Gruber writes about what she saw and shows us, through her photographs - taken on each of her assignments - the worlds, the people, the landscapes, the courage, the hope, the life she witnessed up close and firsthand: the Siberian gulag of the 1930s and the new cities being built there (Gruber, then untrained as a photographer, brought her first Rolleicord with her) ... the Alaska highway of 1943, built by 11,000 soldiers, mostly black men from the South (the highway went from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, 1,500 miles to Fairbanks) ... her thirteen-day voyage on the army-troop transport Henry Gibbins with refugees and wounded American soldiers, escorting and then photographing the refugees as they arrived in Oregon, New York (they arrived in upstate New York as Adolf Eichmann was sending 750,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz).

The author describes her youth in Brooklyn, her education at the University of Cologne on the eve of Hitler's reign of terror, and her trips to the Soviet Union during Stalin's dictatorship

Inside of Time is a book for everyone eager to read about the personal and human side of our stirring times. The vivid recollections of a trailblazing eyewitness to history, combined with stories of Gruber's intimate friendships with luminaries of the century, has created a book to cherish. In the Roosevelt administration and as a foreign correspondent with the New York Herald Tribune, Gruber worked with, wrote about, and was mentored by a cast that included Harold Ickes, FDR's Secretary of the Interior, who in 1941 appointed Gruber as his personal representative to Alaska; Helen Rogers Reid, Herald Tribune publisher and Gruber's boss, who scheduled her to speak at lecture forums where Gruber shared the podium with Churchill and DeGaulle; Golda Meir, with whom she swapped kitchen table confidences about their families; David Ben-Gurion, whose prophetic voice made him the most inspiring leader Gruber ever knew; and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Gruber shepherded to Israel in the early 1950s. Spanning 1941–1955, Gruber also recalls the fierce anti-Semitism she overcame in Congress, the DP camps she saw in Germany after WWII, and traveling with the Israeli army during the War for Independence. Sixteen pages of photographs add to this enthralling autobiography by one of America's best journalists.