SAVING THE FEW NO ONE KNEW THE STORY OF RUTH GRUBER AND THE WORLD WAR II REFUGEES UNTIL DECADES LATER.

Byline: Valerie Kuklenski Staff Writer

Manya Breuer rearranged her long, blond hair underneath her ``Jurassic Park'' baseball cap and straightened the collar on her silk leopard-print turtleneck, mildly complaining that she hadn't prepared to be photographed.

But her eyes sparkled as she recalled another time she was caught off guard by a photographer: When Alfred Eisenstadt snapped a 20-ish Manya in the foreground of a line of refugees picking up towels and soap at Fort Ontario in upstate New York. It was the new home in 1944 of 982 European Jews spirited out of Italy on a U.S. troop ship, the only group of Jews our government rescued while World War II raged on.

Breuer said she received sacks of fan mail from that photograph in Life magazine and even was ``adopted'' by the students at a North Carolina college. It was the kind of intense instant celebrity the media still bestow on average individuals. And apparently it was every bit as fleeting then as it would be today.

Ruth Gruber, the former Interior Department employee who escorted those refugees from Naples to the fort in Oswego, N.Y., is the central figure in ``Haven,'' the CBS miniseries airing tonight and Wednesday, and she wrote the book on which it is based.

She calls the story of their ocean voyage, their 18 months at Fort Ontario and their ultimate assimilation as legal residents of the United States ``the best-kept secret of World War II.''

Gruber kept the story under wraps while their transport, the liberty ship Henry Gibbins, was at sea and threatened by U-boats and the Luftwaffe, but she was anxious to bring it to light as soon as she could. Reporters initially were interested in the story of these refugees, many of them, like Manya, concentration camp survivors and others who spent years running and hiding for their lives.

But no one paid much attention after that photo essay in the Aug. 21, 1944, edition of Life. Those involved have different opinions on why the story went away.

``Every time I'd write a book, my editors would say, 'What's your next project?' '' said Gruber, who had written books on her early journalism career, her travels to the Arctic Circle and the early years of the state of Israel. ``I'd say, 'Well, there's this wonderful story of a thousand refugees.' They'd say, 'World War II? Who cares? Refugees? Forget it.' The time was never right.''

Breuer, who now lives in Culver City and volunteers at the Jewish Federation's Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, suggests it was because the country's priorities shifted. ``We started a new life. The war had just ended. America was full of problems, you know, soldiers coming home. We couldn't even find an apartment. We were locked up in a struggle to get started, and so was America. So I guess that had something to do with it.

``And the history books did not pick up on it because most people didn't even know we existed until (Gruber's) book came out in 1983.''

John Gray, who directed the miniseries, had another theory. ``I consider myself a bit of a history buff, and I never ever heard that we even took in refugees, never mind what we did to try to keep them out,'' he said, referring to documented State Department orders denying visas to Jews, even after officials knew about the Germans' extermination plan.

``The only thing I can think of is there is a need for our country to see our role in World War II as being a totally heroic one, which of course it was on almost every level,'' Gray said. ``But I think this is a dirty little corner that I don't think people want to think about, that we probably cost tens of thousands of lives by not taking people into this country when they tried to apply for citizenship and all the things the State Department did to try to keep people out.''

Gray has written most of the history-based scripts he directed, including ``The Day Lincoln Was Shot,'' ``The Hunley'' and the post-World War II drama ``An American Story,'' but he said he found Suzette Couture's treatment of Gruber's book powerful and irresistible.

He knew he wanted Natasha Richardson for the Gruber role, but she hesitated to accept it. She doesn't do much television, and the London-born actress was unsure of her ability to pull off Gruber's Brooklyn accent.

``She didn't want to play this character as someone who was always pontificating and speeching and, you know, being gooder than good,'' Gray said. ``And I assured her that the writer and I were working to just make it about this woman who has no real idea that what she's doing does have pretty big historic ramifications. She's just trying to solve the problems that are in front of her.''

Gruber, now 89 and living in New York, agrees with that assessment. ``The last thing I ever dreamed of would be a miniseries with such wonderful actors - like Natasha, that gorgeous creature, playing me, and Anne Bancroft, that magnificent actress, playing my mother.''

The shoot last summer in and around Toronto required a real ship, and the producers learned that the liberty ship John W. Brown, now a museum vessel crewed by World War II vets, would be in the Great Lakes at that time. The film crew needed to make the pristine ship look war-ravaged, so they poured a mixture of gravy and sugar out the portholes to replicate rust.

In several small ways, the miniseries altered the facts to heighten the drama, such as Gruber's relationship with a German student in Cologne, shown in flashbacks. Gruber said the movie made it much more romantic. ``It's OK with me. When I think that 40 million people will at last know the story of how America opened its arms to survivors of the Holocaust, I don't mind. They could take some liberties,'' she said with a laugh.

But Breuer said the film doesn't go far enough in showing the terror the refugees felt while the ship was trying to evade a German U-boat.

``We were choking on the smoke,'' she recalled in her German accent. ``And the panic I cannot give you back. We all thought we'd die. I thought, 'Uh-oh, we were going down now,' because I thought a bomb hit us.

``My prayer was, 'Please, dear God, don't let me die now. I want to see America first.' And Ruth stood behind me, and she wrote it in her journal. Can you imagine? After so many years, reading my own words in the book 'Haven,' what I said that I thought nobody heard.''

Gruber and Breuer agree that, not only were the refugees recovering from disease, malnutrition and injuries - they were also in the early stages of what psychiatrists years later named post-traumatic stress syndrome.

They had been living for years with an urgent, fight-or-flight type of self-preservation, and only once they were settled in Oswego did the reality of their terrible experiences hit them. Breuer drew a parallel Southern Californians understand well.

``When, God forbid, we have an earthquake, how long does the earthquake last? Thirty seconds? They bring children to psychiatrists, they bring them to doctors to comfort them, they want them to be stabilized again,'' she said. ``We were going on and on and on, 24 hours a day, day in, day out, month after month, year after year, deprived of everything - deprived of freedom, of food, of comfort, of medication. Nobody cared for us. We were totally abandoned.''

Breuer did not want to talk about her 2 1/2 years in the Gers concentration camp. But tears rolled down her velvety cheeks as she recalled her flight from St. Martin Vesubie in France through the Alps to Italy, only to find more German soldiers on the other side. She had left her mother, very sick with typhoid fever, back in the concentration camp, and her two brothers and father were captured on the trek over the mountains.

When she arrived in Oswego, she and 981 others were led to Fort Ontario, at first a disturbing sight with its high barbed-wire fences, lookout towers and searchlights.

``I thought they made a mistake or something ... that this is for the prisoners,'' she said. ``But when we actually walked through it, I was not scared. The reason was, I knew I was in America. I knew nobody's going to kill me.

``I constantly consoled myself with this one thing: Don't be afraid because this is America. They are in the middle of a war, and we are coming from enemy country and we bring diseases or spies or who knows what.''

Breuer said even years after the Jewish Federation settled her with her husband, Ernst, and baby Diane in Reseda, she suffered nightmares about being cornered by soldiers with bayonets, and found herself looking behind on the sidewalk for Nazis and flinching when planes flew overhead. But meditation, faith, family, friends and even working in the Holocaust museum amid such vivid reminders of her painful past have helped her to heal.

``I am the most grateful person in the world,'' she said. ``Every day in my life is a present. Every day is a beautiful present.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo: (1) Manya Breuer was one of the refugees escorted to the U.S. from Italy by Ruth Gruber in 1944. Beside her, at the Jewish Federation's Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, is a picture of her childhood synagogue in Berlin.

Tina Burch/Staff Photographer

(2) The real Dr. Ruth Gruber, now 89, portrays a refugee in ``Haven,'' the CBS miniseries about her work to rescue Holocaust victims during World War II.

(3) Natasha Richardson, left, stars as Interior Department employee Ruth Gruber, center, in the miniseries ``Haven,'' airing on CBS tonight and Wednesday.