By Jessica Davis, JTNews Correspondent
“The Perilous Fight: America’s World War II in Color” (working title), a new four-part series produced by Seattle’s public broadcasting station, KCTS, will combine previously unseen color film from the 1930s and 1940s with passages from diaries and letters of American soldiers and their loved ones.
The series avoids any use of black-and- white film, as well as any still photographs or interviews from anyone in the present. “It really puts you back into that time,” said associate producer Blair Foster. “It immerses you completely for 54 minutes into the past as much as it can.”
Drawing from more than 1,000 hours of color footage collected for the documentary, the series is broken into four episodes, each an hour-long. The first episode covers what led up to the war, the second episode follows the war’s history up until D-day, the third episode spans from D-day to V-E Day and the final episode spans from midway to the end of the war.
“It’s an additional way at looking at history,” said series producer Martin Smith. “It doesn’t answer everyone’s questions. It raises a few more.”
Most of the footage used in the documentary was shot by the military and is property of the U.S. government. PBS also received a large amount of amateur films from the public.
“It’s remarkable that there’s so much color of the time,” said Smith.
“It’s a hard decision to know what to put in,” commented Foster.
During the making of the documentary, PBS researcher Polly Pettit discovered color films donated to the Library of Congress by George Stevens, Jr. His father, Hollywood director of “Shane” and other films, had color film of World War II from August 1944 right up until the end of the war. Some of it included the liberation of Dachau and Rabbi David Max Eichhorn addressing the Torah in the first Shabbat service ever to take place at a satellite camp in Dachau.
Despite the Polish prisoners’ wishes against the service, filmmaker Stevens went ahead with filming the service at Dachau, said Foster. The service took place on June 5, 1945. Footage shows 15 Hungarian women singing “God Bless America,” which Rabbi Eichorn taught them.
Eichorn was a patriotic man, said associate producer Greg Palmer. When the rabbi arrived in France, the Jews had just been liberated. Eichorn brought back from the French Resistance, a Torah that is now on display at the Statue of Liberty.
Eichorn was one in a group of rabbis who reported to the Jewish Welfare Board. He looked for Jewish populations after the war and found many that had been in hiding. Along the way, he recovered hidden torahs.
PBS tracked down Eichorn’s grandson, Mark Zaid, in Washington, D.C. Although he did not own any footage of World War II, he did have access to letters written to the Jewish Welfare Board in New York (overseer of all the Jewish chaplains) and to the family. The PBS program flew Zaid to Seattle to record his voice reading from one of Eichorn’s letters. “It’s eerie, scary and sad all at the same time,” Zaid said.
The rabbi never spoke of the war up until his death in 1986, when Zaid was 19. “This was just areas he did not discuss,” he said.
War changed him over the years, said Palmer. This is evident through his letters. “Without saying how he feels, you can feel how he feels,” he said.
As a result of his work on the series, Zaid and Palmer are co-editing a book, expected on shelves by the time the series airs. The majority of the book takes place from June 1944 to August 1945 with Eichorn’s letters home, reports he made to the Jewish Welfare Board and some excerpts from his unpublished autobiography.
“The Perilous Fight: America’s World War II in Color” is a co-production of KCTS/Seattle Public Television, international producer and distributor TWI and Britain’s Carlton Television. TWI/Carlton previously produced the multi-award-winning “The Second World War in Colour” and “Britain at War in Colour,” two of the highest-rated documentary series broadcast in the United Kingdom.
Although the series is a British-American co-production, “It’s looking at the American experience,” said series producer Martin Smith.
“The Perilous Fight: America’s World War II in Color” is tentatively slated to air nationwide on PBS in winter, 2003. Visit www.pbs.org/perilousfight for information.