Product Description

Basis for the CBS Mini-series Starring Natasha Richardson.

"The words leaped at me from The Washington Post. 'I have decided,' President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced, 'that approximately 1,000 refugees should be immediately brought from Italy to this country.' One thousand refugees....For years, refugees knocking on the doors of American consulates abroad had been told, 'You cannot enter America. The quotas are filled.' And, while the quotas remained untouchable ... millions died."

With this mixture of desperation and hope, Ruth Gruber begins Haven, the inspiring story of one thousand Jewish and Christian refugees brought to sanctuary in America in 1944. As special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, Gruber was selected to carry out this top-secret mission despite the objections of military brass who doubted the thirty-three-year-old woman's qualifications. When Gruber met the gaunt survivors, they told her about hiding in sewers and forests, of risking their lives to save others. As she wrote down their stories, tears often wiped out the words in her notebook.

Gruber became the refugees' guardian angel during the dangerous crossing of the U-boat-haunted Atlantic, and during their eighteen-month internment at a former army camp in Oswego, New York. Lobbying Congress at the end of the war, she also helped the refugees become American citizens. This edition concludes with a new chapter featuring Gruber's look back on her many decades as a crusading journalist, and a special Appendix from the 1946 Congressional Record listing the names of all the camp's residents.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #681561 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-13
• Released on: 2000-06-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Booklist
Before and after World War II, Gruber was a journalist, chronicling, among other stories, the establishment and development of Israel. During the war, however, she worked for New Dealer Harold Ickes. When, in 1943, FDR decided to admit 1,000 war refugees to the U.S., Gruber volunteered, with Ickes' support, to accompany the group from Europe to their camp in Oswego, New York. Gruber's tale of that journey and its aftermath has long been out of print; this revised and enlarged edition coincides with a CBS miniseries on the subject to be broadcast in May_ 2000. Haven is a remarkable story, following a vivid cast of characters from their dangerous sea journey to Fort Ontario in upstate New York to the battle in Congress to allow these refugees to remain in the U.S. once the war was over. Gruber's involving story may offer evidence that literary skill is inherited: its introduction is provided by Gruber's niece, Dava Sobel, author of Longitude (1995) and, most recently, Galileo's Daughter. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Everyone concerned about courage in a grievous time will want to read Haven . . . Ruth Gruber, one of America's finest journalists . . . has given us an enduring and inspiring gift."
-- Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt

From the Back Cover
Everyone concerned about courage in a grievous time will want to read Haven . . . Ruth Gruber, one of America's finest journalists . . . has given us an enduring and inspiring gift."
-- Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt