New Entry in TV’s Holocaust Diary

Genocide has no gradations of evil, whether the slaughtered masses are Armenians in Turkey, Tutsis in Rwanda, Kurds in Iraq or Bosnians in the Balkans.

Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claim victimhood in that regard, too, as a new government in Jerusalem charts a course whose outcome no one can predict.

With the possible exception of slavery imposed on African Americans, though, no epic horror or sadness has been more visible in movie houses and TV than the Nazi-driven anti-Semitism connected to World War II.

Its title--the Holocaust--evokes images of savagery from the land of Goethe, Kant and Beethoven that continue to defy rational explanation. How does one account for millions of Jews, as well as Gypsies, Slavs and others, being reduced to ash and bone fragments by Hitler’s ovens? Or the living cadavers liberated from his death camps at the war’s end? Watching early newsreel footage of them, how can anyone who wasn’t there comprehend what those eyes had seen?

Still, we try. Among this nation’s prominent Holocaust museums is television itself, where the sins of the Third Reich began resonating in prime time during the early postwar years. And as early as 1953, “This Is Your Life” visited this domain by honoring Holocaust survivor Hanna Bloch Kohner--who had made it through Mauthausen--amid commercials for Hazel Bishop No-Smear Lipstick.

When famed host Ralph Edwards escorted her to the “Hazel Bishop Stage,” followed by a bit of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, viewers got a preview of how mass liquidation and popular culture soon were to be merged irrevocably on TV. It happened most notably in 1978 with “Holocaust,” a four-night NBC miniseries that commendably gave prime-time exposure to the atrocities of Europe’s unprecedented pogrom--that was the good news--while being the big-splashing essence of Hollywood entertainment. More heart than brain.

And now, Ruth Gruber, this is your life.

Some of it, at least. Gruber, 89, is a New Yorker anyone would want to know. She spent no time in a concentration camp or hiding from Nazis. Yet the Jewish author and former journalist looms large in “Haven,” an uneven CBS two-parter tracing her pivotal role in escorting 982 European refugees to the U.S. from Italy in 1944, and then fighting government plans to throw them out after the war because they were allowed in outside immigration quotas. Most were Jews.

Natasha Richardson plays, with mixed results, the feisty, determined, resourceful Gruber, whose book, “Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America,” is the basis for this TV newcomer to Holocaust lore written by Suzette Couture.

Gruber is a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes (Hal Holbrook) in 1944 when she persuades him and others on the War Refugee Board to let her fly to Naples and sail back on an Army transport, the Henry Gibbins, with “approximately 1,000” refugees authorized immediate entry into the U.S. by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Call it limited White House benevolence. These chosen few are a tiny minority from all across Europe who have gravitated to Italy late in the war expecting kinder treatment.

During the perilous 13-day voyage, Gruber gives refugees English lessons against the muted sounds of distant guns, and listens to their harrowing stories of persecution and institutionalized mass murder, becoming a human archive of the horrors confronting them under Nazism. She also witnesses the anti-Semitism of U.S. servicemen who resent having foreign Jews occupying space that could have been used to ship home their wounded comrades.

Hindering the refugees on board also is a rigid, sneering, vastly overdrawn State Department functionary (Robert Joy). He does everything but click his heels and say Sieg Heil while appearing to be a composite of an actual government bureaucrat who was imposed on the real Gruber and Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, whom she deeply resented for campaigning against loosening quotas on Jewish refugees.

Director John Gray has Part 1 of “Haven” steaming more slowly even than the Henry Gibbins, and one wonders if, as skipper of this production, he advised Richardson against that disconcerting grin she maintains through even some of the dicier moments of the voyage.

She and “Haven” are both stronger in much of Part 2, when the State Department is a larger focus and refugees are moved by train--the Third Reich’s own chosen transport for victims--to a stark Army base in Oswego, N.Y., that reminds them of some of the Nazi camps from which they escaped. Gray pumps up the frightening imagery here, wanting viewers to see this through the prisms of refugees who had come through one terror only to face what looked to them like another. We’re seeing barracks and a chain-link fence, they’re seeing Dachau.

With Holocaust varieties galore preceding it, though, “Haven” tries occupying the slenderest of niches without managing to quite squeeze in. Individualized Holocaust accounts have been told far more movingly, profoundly and realistically than those related in this miniseries. Nor should it be surprising that anti-Semitism was interwoven through segments of U.S. society during this period.

Yet less known--the Ruth Gruber story that “Haven” is uniquely equipped to tell but largely submerges in melodramatic cliches and schmaltzy, manipulative music--is how deeply anti-Semitism appeared then to be embedded in U.S. immigration policy. Each time “Haven” looks toward these shadows, on comes a diversion, usually a romance or personal misfortune, that has it U-turning the other way. As in Gruber accusing the government of anti-Semitism, for example, followed by someone arriving with sad news: “Ruth, it’s your father.”

Meanwhile, the script takes a big liberty by never mentioning that 108 of the Oswego refugees were not Jewish, according to Gruber’s book. “Haven” also turns up the heat of her romance with a German in the 1930s. And did she really gain an audience with President Harry Truman to argue for letting the refugees remain in the U.S. after the war? And just as he was making up his mind to do that, while watching the first grisly footage of the liberated death camps?

Holocaust and entertainment: TV partners for evermore.

* “Haven” airs Sunday and Wednesday at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated Part 1 TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for coarse language). Part 2 is rated TV-PG-LS (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for coarse language and sex).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.