Remember ‘Remembrance’

As the executive producer/director of the 30-hour ABC-TV miniseries “War and Remembrance,” I think it important to demur to some points made by Howard Rosenberg in his Feb. 26 column “NBC Can’t Just Rest on Laurels.” When he writes that NBC’s airing of “Schindler’s List” intact “marks a maturation high for network television. . . . Never within memory has one of the major networks shown such nudity or depicted so much violence so graphically . . ., “ I feel compelled to comment.

The dehumanizing of victims, on arrival at their destination of doom, by forcing them to disrobe was central to scenes in the miniseries. We received widespread commendation for these scenes, and ABC deserves much credit for taking a pioneering risk in first allowing me to film them and then broadcasting them without cutting a single frame.

Rosenberg himself wrote on Nov. 23, 1988: “. . . Never before in an American TV drama has the Holocaust been so graphically, uncompromisingly--and profoundly--depicted. . . . Tonight’s scenes of rotting corpses at Auschwitz and the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar in the Soviet Union are excruciatingly and revoltingly real. . . . This is important, landmark TV--hard to take, but even harder to ignore.” The Babi Yar sequence involving the slaughter of hordes of naked Jews, which was a terrible task to film, did however evoke a protest from Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who thought it unendurably graphic; an opinion I respect, but to my best ability I depicted the historic truth, nothing more.

“War and Remembrance,” which won the Emmy as best miniseries of 1988-89, represents several years of my hardest work as a filmmaker. If I am proud of it, perhaps it is a pardonable pride. Certainly no one is looking for bragging rights to graphic violence and nudity, but with regard to the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust, where we pioneered, I want the record to show it.

DAN CURTIS

Dan Curtis Productions Inc.

Los Angeles