An Unforgettable TV Movie : Film: The battle by an Auschwitz survivor, a Huntington Beach businessman, to preserve and defend the memory of the Holocaust is portrayed in ‘Never Forget.’

The modest, handmade Holocaust exhibit perched on the edge of Mel Mermelstein’s lumberyard here is a far cry from the paneled, curated lobby of the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Los Angeles’ Westside.

But each, on its own scale, fulfills a promise on the part of the Jewish people never to forget the European genocide. And both provide settings for a cable television movie based on Mermelstein’s battle to preserve and defend the memory of the Holocaust.

Filming has just been completed for “Never Forget,” produced for Ted Turner’s TNT by Robert R. Radnitz and Leonard Nimoy, who also stars as Mermelstein. The 98-minute film, stretched over two hours to accommodate commercials, is scheduled to air in April to coincide with annual international Holocaust memorial observations.

“Never Forget” tells how Mermelstein, the sole member of his family to survive Auschwitz, took on a worldwide array of “revisionist” historians including France’s Robert Faurisson, who in the late 1970s began to raise doubts about the extent and even the existence of the Nazi death camps. The clearinghouse for these historians was a Torrance-based organization called the Institute for Historical Review, which ultimately offered a $50,000 reward for anyone who could prove the existence of the Holocaust.

In 1980, after a letter Mermelstein wrote to the Jerusalem Post about the institute, the Torrance group “challenged me,” Mermelstein recalled last week, to prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Institute officials wrote him a letter, threatening to expose him if he refused their challenge.

Or, as Nimoy recalls Mermelstein telling him: “They thought the Jew would cave in. At the simplest level, that’s what’s going on here.”

Mermelstein sought assistance from the Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation League and other organizations, all of which advised him to disregard the challenge, suggesting that it was a setup, a kangaroo court designed to gain publicity for the institute. In the script, even his son asks whether he’s overreacting.

But Mermelstein refused to give up. Finally, with the assistance of an Irish Catholic lawyer--played by Dabney Coleman--who wouldn’t take a fee, Mermelstein lured the institute into Los Angeles Superior Court and, nine years ago this week, won.

What makes the script compelling is that--unlike some other film and television stories about the Holocaust--this one evokes the European horror, rather than portrays it. “Never Forget” is really the story of Mermelstein’s stubborn, persistent efforts to save the middle-class, Southern California family he built, while defending the memory of the Czech family he lost.

When the tension surrounding the court case begins to hurt his business and fray the family’s fabric, Mermelstein’s distraught son says: “It seems like all you’ve ever really cared about is your first family, your European family. . . . How are we supposed to compete with them? We’re alive and they’re dead!”

Nimoy was the original force in bringing the project to the screen. Through a Washington lawyer, Nimoy learned of the case about five years ago, later spending time with Mermelstein at his Long Beach home and his business in Orange County.

“Leonard was very anxious to do it,” Mermelstein recalls. “He looked at my exhibit. . . . He is perfect for the role. I have faith in him and his whole crew. To see and hear them express this gratitude that they’re having an opportunity to do this. . . .”

“Forty-five years after the fact, a lot of young people don’t know what the Holocaust was all about,” Nimoy explained in a telephone interview. “The further away from the period we get, the easier it is to forget. . . . The whole idea of ‘Never Forget’ means never, never, never. Why should we ever let go of this memory?” The timing for the picture is right, Nimoy said. “There are a lot of dark clouds around.”

Nimoy brought the project to Radnitz, who is best known for producing feature films like “Sounder” and “Cross Creek.” He recognized it as just the kind of tale that has attracted him over the past 30 years.

“It’s the story of someone who stands up for what he believes--no matter what anyone says. Mel could see even more clearly than those of us who were brought up here. . . .,” Radnitz said. “We’ve been far too complacent.”

Radnitz believes that “you should tell a story in the place where it happened”; in this case all the locations were nearby. For example, the complex of sheds and warehouses that make up Mermelstein’s business is surrounded by a wire fence and bordered by a railroad spur where boxcars are often parked. The layout, as the script notes, “is eerily reminiscent of a concentration campground.” Mermelstein’s longtime employees work as extras.

Mermelstein’s private Holocaust exhibit--a 1,000-square-foot wooden rectangle--is on the edge of his business, tucked away in a small industrial area of Huntington Beach. The structure was so modest that the filmmakers built on a modest porch to make it look less stark. Mermelstein frequently plays host to small groups of schoolchildren, portrayed in “Never Forget” by children from Huntington Beach’s Ocean View school district.

Watching the children ask Mermelstein and Nimoy questions about the exhibit before they recited their lines, Radnitz said: “If there was ever any question as to why we’re making this picture--there’s the answer.”

Other locations included the Huntington Beach post office and Long Beach’s Wilson High School. TNT Productions in Culver City stood in for the offices of the Anti-Defamation League, and Malibu Canyon became the Carpathian Mountains for the opening segment, when the picnicking Mermelstein family glimpses the approaching Nazis.

Mermelstein plays his own father in the scene, a decision that was not easy. “When I looked in the mirror when I was all made up, I was frightened,” he recalls. “I saw my father in me.”

Radnitz says that while film workers sometimes can “be inured to sentiment,” there’s “no sense of that on this picture. . . . People have come up to me--in the crew, in the cast--and said: ‘I’m proud to be working on this picture.’ ”

He acknowledged that within the feature film community “there is still kind of a raised nose about cable and television,” an attitude “that’s wrong.” Radnitz would not reveal the budget for the feature, which took 21 days to shoot, other than to say it was “low par for the course in TV.”

Cognizant that more than 250 made-for-television movies and miniseries are scheduled in the next year, Radnitz is planning a 10-city tour to promote “Never Forget” in the weeks before its airing. He wants to make sure as many of the estimated 48 million American homes wired to TNT are tuned in, since the weeklong run will limit the possibility for word-of-mouth to build.

To direct, he chose Emmy award-winning television veteran Joe Sargent. With a story like this, Sargent said, “there’s a temptation to be terribly pompous and self-righteous. You have to find that balance between a heaviness of content and a quotient of humor. . . . The big hope here is that we reach young minds.”

Mermelstein is a normally soft-spoken, single-minded man, a persistent witness much like Nobel Prize-winning Elie Wiesel and no less eloquent for his choice of occupation. For more than two decades, he has been speaking at schools and various community forums and leading tours of his museum. A man who understands the impact of film as a medium, Mermelstein delivered a lecture about the Holocaust between showings of the award-winning documentary “Shoah” when it opened in Orange County in 1986.

Ironically, the crew was shooting some of the last scenes for “Never Forget” at Mermelstein’s yard on Kol Nidre, the beginning of Yom Kippur fast, the holiest night of the Jewish calendar. On the scene to observe the filming and to be available for consultations, Mermelstein shrugged off the apparent contradiction. “God and I have made a deal--I’ve fasted enough. I observe in my soul. . . . I’ve been forgiven. We agreed.”