Wartime Witness News

Gabe Carimi Thanks

2011-06-10

My thanks to fellow Cottage Grove native and UW alum Gabe Carimi for co-hosting the Meeting History event at the Glacial Drumlin Middle School last Saturday. The following news article ran in the Herald-Independent newspaper:

Cottage Grove native meets history

Josh Hilgendorf
Herald-Independent Reporter

A Cottage Grove native and graduate of Monona Grove High School with a love for history is developing a documentary series to spread the compelling and inspirational stories of individuals who lived through World War II.

Jeff McAllister, Monona Grove class of ’82, presented the pilot episode of his series at Glacial Drumlin School last Saturday.

Along with creating the project, McAllister wrote and directed the series. The films are produced by Witness Productions LLC.

According to McAllister, he decided to create the film series after experiencing how history is taught in high school and college.

“Americans learn about WWII through military and political situations,” he said. “Americans don’t have an understanding about what it was like to be a civilian during the war.”

So McAllister traveled throughout Europe and completed 157 interviews with individuals who lived through WWII. These interviews serve as the basis for his documentary series.

“When I started living in Europe, I encountered different people who were surrounded by the war and had a wealth of stories,” he said. “Anyone over the age of 75 had a story to tell. The only way to preserve and document these stories was to commit to this film series.”

After deciding to create the Wartime Witness series, McAllister let his interview subjects shape the content of the documentaries. He said he had some ideas of what he wanted to do, but ultimately let the interviews guide him.

For example, McAllister said he had no idea he would be doing an episode titled “Inside the Wire,” stories about the lives of individuals inside concentration and labor camps.

“I kept hearing unique and personal stories about daily life inside the camps that most people have no idea about,” he said.

“Inside the Wire” is scheduled to be the second episode in the series. The first episode, “The Selection” was shown at Glacial Drumlin School on Saturday.

“The Selection” tells the story of seven Hungarian Jews transported to Auschwitz during the summer of 1944. The film centers on the many selection rounds endured at the hands of Dr. Josef Mengele, commonly referred to as the “Angel of Death.”

Following the screening of the film, three Auschwitz survivors were on hand to answer audience questions.

While the audience provided their undivided attention, Magda Brown, a survivor who currently lives in Skokie, Ill., explained how she and a few friends managed to escape from their captors by crawling through tall grass during a march. Brown sought shelter in a nearby barn where she hid until she was liberated by the American military.

Brown, along with the other survivors in attendance, Erzsebet Szemes and Eva Fahidi, relayed stories about sabotaging German grenades and returning to Hungary following the war to find strangers living in their homes.

“’We can’t fathom what these people went through’ is the number one response I get when I talk to others about these interviews,” McAllister said.

Along with the three Auschwitz survivors, McAllister is touring the United States to draw attention to the amazing stories documented by the Wartime Witness series.

“These are the stories not in the history books,” he said. “They are stories of the liberated, not the liberators, that you usually only find being told around the kitchen table.”

According to McAllister, a lot of the people he interviewed were telling their stories for the first time. He said because some held everything inside for 60 to 70 years, finally being able to tell others about their experiences provided release and a catharsis.

McAllister said the amazing network of Holocaust survivors in Europe helped him find interview subjects.

“When you know one Hungarian Holocaust survivor, you know 10,” he said.

As he continued to work on the film project, people started to approach McAllister with the hopes of telling their story.

While all of the interviews for the series are completed, several reenactments need to be shot before the project is complete.

McAllister said the time it takes to complete the project will depend on the level of funding he receives.

“Seventy million people died in WWII and two out of every three deaths was civilian,” he said. “Yet the focus was on the military dead. You don’t hear the stories underneath that.”

McAllister’s Wartime Witness series plans to finally bring hundreds of these civilian stories to life.