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Special to the Jewish News
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BIRMINGHAM
ommercial television
is not a hospitable
medium for the treat-
ment of serious subjects. The
endless quest for the lowest
common denominator reduces
genuine drama to simple for-
mulas, emotional nuances to
sledgehammer symbolism.
But these same qualities
can sometimes work to
heighten impact; the unbe-
lievable and the incom-
prehensible, filtered through
TV's machinery of mass ap-
peal, can take on an im-
mediacy that the gritty
realism of documentaries can-
not approach.
lb listen to network officials
at ABC, the marathon mini-
series based on Herman
Wouk's novel "War and Re-
membrance" is the seminal
retelling of the World War II
story.
In reality, the 30-hour
series, to be shown in in-
stallments beginning on Sun-
day evening, reduces much of
the war to a kind of extreme-
ly long soap opera.
But Herman Wouk had an
underlying purpose to his
modern version of "War and
Peace." Wouk wanted to
create an indelible impres-
sion of the Holocaust in the
minds of readers attracted by
the book's adventure and
romantic content. He ac-
complished this feat by blen-
ding a horrifyingly graphic
and detailed account of the
Nazi killing machine into the
melodrama of his plot.
The producers of "War and
Remembrance" were true to
this purpose. Amid a long-
winded plot populated with
cardboard characters, they
have woven Holocaust im-
agery that no viewer is like-
ly to forget. The fact that
these images have been
cleaned up and Americanized
to provide a frame of reference
comprehensible to the mass
audience only contributes to
the awesome power of the
show's account of the
Holocaust.
"War and Remembrance"
tells the story of Pug Henry
and his family. Henry, a naval
officer, is conveniently singl-
ed out by Franklin Roosevelt
for special missions that place
him at just about every im-
portant event in the course of
the war. What Henry misses,
his equally active family
catches.
But nestled between the
episodes involving the Henry
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men in battle and the women
in assorted romances is a se-
cond story — that of Natalie
Henry and her uncle, Aaron
Jastrow. Natalie is married to
Pug Henry's youngest son, a
submariner. Natalie and
Aaron are caught in Italy as
the war opens; their hair-
raising attempts to escape
Europe provide the mini-
series' primary element of
suspense.
And their odyssey through
Nazi Europe provides the
backdrop for Aaron Jastrow's
personal journey back to his
Jewish roots, a theme that
allows Wouk to come away
from his graphic look at the
Holocaust with a strong
underlying optimism.
In the book, Wouk was not
reluctant to use somewhat
implausible devices to lay out
the immensity of the Final
Solution. Natalie Henry's
former boyfriend is a State
Department employee who is
given early evidence of the
Nazi genocide; Jastrow's
cousin, Berel, is a Polish Jew
whose various escapes al-
lowed Wouk to document the
progressive madness of the
Holocaust, from the first mass
killings by Einsatzgruppen to
the organized genocide of
Auschwitz.
And this last contrivance
sets the stage for the series'
nightmarish centerpiece —
the long, painstaking se-
quence documenting the
death camp at Birkenau.
The mini-series' raison de
etre comes in the second in-
stallment. Berel Jastrow, a
slave laborer working on the
construction of the camp at
Auschwitz, witnesses one of
the first gassings — a special
"action" designed to
demonstrate the camp's
remarkable efficiency to the
visiting Gestapo chief,
Heinrich Himmler.
What follows has a power
that will leave few viewers
unaffected. The cameras
follow a trainload of special-
ly selected Jews through their
brief and horrifying stay at
Auschwitz: the selection pro-
cess, the undressing rooms,
the desperate sprint to the
death chambers, the shop
talk among the German of-
ficers about the problems of
body disposal.
The sequence was actually
filmed at Auschwitz, parts of
which were reconstructed for
the shooting -- and the ordi-
nariness of some of the scenes
is juxtaposed against the
overwhelming horror in ways
that make the immensity of
the Holocaust easier to grasp.