I find that Haven is extremely engrossing, inspiring enough for me to invite a number of people to watch its four hour length and to wake up thinking about it months after seeing it for the first time. It is not mawkish. It is about a harsh reality and it is about history and it is also about telling us about society in the time of WWII. It might not be comfortable for some of us to accept the reality of rejection, of discrimination, of the Holocaust and of the genuine responsibility of governments of the world who looked away from Nazism and its genocidal
maniacs. The anti-American slant of at least one of the reviews smacks of a
parochial nationalism that hides the historical truth that Canada ALSO was
guilty of looking away from victims of the Holocaust. Had the U.S. president Roosevelt lifted one political finger things could have been a lot better for them. Hitler took advantage of the fact that no one would take Jews into their borders before and during the war to carry out his demoniacal plans and no one with
political power tried to stop it It nor did the Allies even bother to bomb the gas chambers nor the railroads going to the concentration camps. It took the
courage and moral fibre of the little man from Missouri, Harry S. Truman , and little people like Ruth Gruber to make their mark. This film makes this
abundantly clear. This might not be a popular position but I can assure the
readers, that in my experience, he and she are held in the highest regard and FDR is now considered a moral failure amongst survivors. The film points this out along with many allusions to the prejudice of the State Department against even these poor victims of the Holocaust. If facts and well acted theatre can interact then this film does it all.
