THE GREAT EXODUS

Virginia Cowles was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1910, and gravitated to journalism in her early 20s. In 1936, after working on the gossip columns of the Hearst newspapers in Boston and New York, Cowles went to Spain intending to become a war correspondent, and soon she was filing stories on the Spanish Civil War for Hearst, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sunday Times. After leaving Spain, she reported from all over Europe, chiefly as a roving correspondent for the Sunday Times. She was in Berlin the day Germany launched its assault on Poland, in Helsinki as the Russians invaded Finland, and on her way to Paris as the Germans marched on the capital and most of its inhabitants were on the roads in a great exodus to the south. She witnessed the first day of the London Blitz and continued