TV Reviews : ‘Never’: Contemporary Holocaust Nightmare

Ten years ago, a Long Beach businessman and Auschwitz survivor named Mel Mermelstein won a strange legal pronouncement in Los Angeles Superior Court: the first legal notice in a U.S. court that Jews were gassed to death in Poland during the summer of 1944.

Most of us didn’t need a civil case to give us a legal ruling on the matter. But Mermelstein did. Packed off to a death camp with his family in a boxcar, the 17-year-old boy arrived in Auschwitz in 1944 and the next day watched his mother and two sisters disappear into the gas chambers. At the camp, his dying father asked his son to promise him to be a witness, to never let the world forget.

Thirty-seven years later in L.A., Mermelstein kept that promise.

Now, his drama, “Never Forget,” the ordeal of an American family as much as a Holocaust story, has found its place on TNT (it airs four times today, at 5, 7, 9 and 11 p.m.).

Director Joseph Sargent, scenarist Ronald Rubin and Leonard Nimoy, as the determined Mermelstein, have forged a post-war Holocaust nightmare that is utterly contemporary, not a mere replay of historic anguish. For one thing, Mermelstein’s fervor wrecks havoc in the lives of his wife (Blythe Danner) and their three children. The conflict between the father and his older son is particularly credible and dramatic.

Only the roundup of the large Mermelstein family in Nazi-occupied Hungary is dramatized. The horror in Auschwitz-Birkenau is not re-enacted. Mermelstein’s Holocaust museum scenes are sufficient to honor the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.

Importantly, Nimoy’s interpretation balances Mermelstein’s personal resolve with a quiet steadiness that gives the character a rich dimension that Nimoy has never quite captured in his other roles.