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Star Twin

Actress Natasha Richardson portrays Ruth Gruber in the miniseries "Haven."

NAOMI PFEFFERIvLAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Ilir

hen Natasha Richardson starred in Paul
Schrader's 1988 biopic Patty Hearst, she
drew inspiration from a Holocaust-
themed tome plucked off a shelf in her
father's Los Angeles home. The book was If This Is a
Man, Primo Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz,
and in its pages the 25-year-old Brit gleaned crucial
insights into the psyche of her brutalized character.
"There are enormous differences between life in a
concentration camp and living in a closet," the tall, wil-
lowy actress said during an interview at the Ritz-
Carlton Hotel in Pasadena, Calif., a Vogue cigarette
dangling from her slender fingers.
"But I found certain similarities I could use — the
trauma of just trying to stay alive, moment to moment,
one day at a time. In all my work since, I've been very
affected by the writings of the Holocaust."
Memoirs like Levi's have helped her tap into the
despair of protagonists braving "extreme adversity,
oppression and fear": a woman incarcerated in the sex-
ist dystopia of The Handmaid} Tale, for example, or the
doomed chanteuse Sally Bowles of Cabaret. They have
fueled the urgency she conveys as a Holocaust rescuer
in the CBS mini-series Haven, based on a true story
from World War II.
Richardson plays Ruth Gruber, the Jewish-American
journalist who fought U.S anti-Semitism to escort
nearly 1,000 Holocaust survivors from war-torn
Europe to America. She accepted the role with eyes
open. She knew there would be the inevitable compar-
isons with her husband, actor Liam Neeson, who
earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as
Holocaust rescuer Oskar Schindler in Schindlers List.
"And then I thought there might be quite a few peo-
ple wondering, 'Why on earth did they want this
English gentile to play Ruth Gruber?"' Richardson said,

between sips of, Diet Coke with lemon. "But after read-
ing the script, I felt compelled to do the movie.
"I'm fairly well read on the subject of World War II,
yet I had absolutely no idea that the U.S. government
went out of its way to keep Jewish refugees out of this
country during the Holocaust. I was deeply shocked by
that."
As she prepared to play Gruber, Richardson recalled
her trip to Auschwitz while visiting Neeson on the set
of Schindler's List.
"I am not a proponent of the death penalty, but I
was furious to learn that the camp's commandant had
been merely hanged to death," she said. "I thought,
`The inmates had to endure agony for months and
years, and he died so easily?' I would have liked to have
done to him what he did to all those people."
Though Richardson was born in 1963, World War II
was a presence in her early life. She grew up hearing her
family's war stories and watching the World War II-
themed films (The Dam Busters, The Captive Heart)
starring her grandfather, the esteemed actor Sir Michael
Redgrave.
During the blitz, her mother, actress Vanessa
Redgrave, and her uncle, Corin, then children, were
whisked out of London to an elderly aunt's home in
the country. "I learned about the rationing, and being
separated from parents, and my mother's recollection,
as a very little girl, of seeing an entire town obliterated
by bombs," Richardson said.
When Natasha was a teenager, Vanessa starved herself
and bloodied her scalp to portray an Auschwitz inmate
in the Arthur Miller teleplay Playing for Time. But the
teen was even more disturbed by the media controversy
that ensued when some Jewish groups insisted the viru-
lently anti-Zionistic Redgrave had no right to play a
Holocaust victim.
"It was — and is — deeply hurtful to me that any-
one could construe my mother is anti-Semitic," says
Richardson, who grew up in Vanessa's radical circles. "I

A Survivor's Story

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

IfIE

anya Hartmayer Breuer, a docent at the
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust,
usually doesn't watch Holocaust films.
They stir up too many painful memo-

ries.
But last week, the Culver City, Calif., resident
watched — and cried through — all four hours of the
upcoming CBS miniseries Haven, the story of 982
Holocaust survivors whisked from war-torn Europe to
America.
Manya's reasons were personal. She was one of the

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2001

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survivors escorted to safety by the Jewish-American
journalist Ruth Gruber; and she was the first bride to
marry in the U.S. Army camp where the refugees were
interned in 1944.
In the miniseries, we first encounter Manya as a tall,
thin teenager with haunted, sunken blue-green eyes, as
played by actress Tamara Gorski.
During an interview, the real Manya, who also is tall
and slender, described how she survived five concentra-
tion camps; in one, she endured a beating so severe that
she huddled in a corner for weeks, unable to move.
After fleeing over the Alps to Rome, wearing only
summer clothing, she hid in a convent where she sub-
sisted for months on nothing but moldy chestnuts.

learned more personally about the
Holocaust and what happened to the
Jewish people from her than from anyone
else."
She also learned a thing or two about
acting, a career to which she aspired from
an early age. She was 4 when she played a
bridesmaid in The Charge of the Light
Brigade, starring Vanessa and helmed by
Natasha's father, the director Tony
Richardson.
Eighteen years later, Michael Redgrave,
then suffering from advanced Parkinson's
disease, was taken in a wheelchair to view her perform-
ance as Ophelia in Hamlet. "She is a true actress," he
proclaimed of Richardson. He died a week later.
Richardson's Tony-winning work in Sam Mendes'
brilliant 1998 revival of Cabaret taught her what was at
stake for the Haven refugees.
"We had a kind of Holocaust ending," she said.
"The MC, who has a yellow star and is also homosexu-
al, took off his clothes, and then the whole stage went
white, and there was the noise of electrocution, and
you just knew that all these people were dead.
"Some nights I would get so upset about what hap-
pened to the characters that I couldn't stop crying for
half an hour after the performance."
While Richardson kept a copy of If This Is a Man in
her Cabaret dressing room, she surrounded herself with
Gruber's books for inspiration on Haven.
She also met for tea with the 89-year-old journalist to
quiz her about how she dealt with the sexism and anti-
Semitism of U.S. officials circa 1944. By the time she
arrived on the Haven set in Toronto last year, she could
recite the contents of a suitcase of Gruber's that appears
in the film but is never opened on camera.
The performer was unprepared, however, for the
emotional toll of the shoot. First she learned that her
husband had been injured in a motorbike accident and

One day, while walking through the city with false
papers, she stood before a little synagogue in the shad-
ow of the Colosseum and felt as hunted as the early
Christians who were martyred in the Roman
amphitheater.
"When I was liberated, my first step was to go back
to that little synagogue to thank HaShem," she says. It
was while she was in the shul that she met the U.S.
officials who helped her secure a coveted spot on
Gruber's mission.
When a fellow refugee named Ernst Breuer fell in
love with Manya and proposed marriage, the survivor
was reluctant, as depicted in the miniseries. She was too
worried about her parents to contemplate the future:
She had last seen her mother in the Gurs concentration
camp; the Nazis had arrested her father.
At one point, he had given Manya his shirt to protect
her from the cold; she refused to take it off long after
she arrived at the Army camp in Oswego, N.Y. In one