Allen Wells Interviewed on Maine Public Radio

Allen Wells was interviewed about his new book Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa, on Maine Things Considered yesterday. The book tells the story of 750 Jewish refugees who were offered an unlikely sanctuary from Nazi Germany in the Dominican Republic. Wells is the son of one of those refugees. He says, "I sort of grew up with the story, it was like a fractured fairy tale. My dad talked about it all the time, he spent seven years at this farming settlement in the Dominican Republic and like any good fairy tale it had heroes, it had villians. The heroes were refugees who had heroically fled Europe and rebuilt their lives in the tropics, and the villain was Hitler who of course drove them out. I was a little more ambiguous about the dictator Trujillo and the U.S. government at that time.  They were very grateful for the fact that this rascist dictator had opened the doors and let them in when very few places would take these settlers in."