PBS could have selected no more appropriate program to show on Veterans' Day than "The Liberators." an astonishing sight-and-sound record of how an African-American battalion marched into the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau and Lambach in the last days of World War II on the European front.
Actually, these black Americans were fighting on two fronts -- against racism at home and Nazism and fascism abroad. Segregated in the very tanks they manned, these unsung heroes had no idea of what they would find when they, members of one persecuted group, moved in to save starving remnants of another.
The skeletal inmates, staggering forward in their soiled striped uniforms. were just as startled as their saviors. Not many of them had ever seen a black man.
Almost half a century later, one must fight back tears reliving this startling moment in modem history.
The editors had their work cut out for them. They had to deal with film footage newly discovered in East German archives and the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial; miles of newsreel clips; graphics of the war years illustrating the incredible, methodical, unrelenting incitement to hatred that fueled the Holocaust. And there was actual Army Signal Corps footage of the liberation of both Buchenwald and Dachau.
"The Liberators, " however, is no mere sado- masochist's delight or Halloween horror show. It is a document that attests to the amazing powers of ordinary people to perform extraordinary deeds of decency -- to help restore to life and to heal total strangers in the midst of a brutal war.
What is not seen on screen is supplied in generous measure by Denzel Washington and Louis Gossett Jr.'s understated yet utterly moving off- screen narration of a taut deliberately low-key script by Lou Potter, William Miles and Nina Rosenblum. Miles and Rosenblum also put this excellent film together.
Even more indelibly searing are the later scenes of a recent reunion of the survivors and their liberators. Together they go back to Buchenwald, in the midst of that bleak landscape braving their memories. They recite a Kaddish that will continue to ring in your ears, a prayer for those who perished many so unspeakably at the hands of their captors, some even in the moment of their liberation by these African Americans of the 761st Tank Battalion.
As a companion piece to "The Liberators," Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has issued a tie-in book with the same title. The 303-page volume, written and assembled by the producers of the television program, is illustrated with 150 photographs, some published for the first time.
The book covers the black experience in America's armed forces from the time when runaway slave Crispus Attucks was killed during the Boston Massacre in 1770 to the day in 1978 when President Carter belatedly awarded the Distinguished Unit Citation to surviving battalion members -- an honor refused when they petitioned for it in 1945.
It is a fine, informative, handsome book, but reading the words somehow cannot compete with seeing and hearing, for example, Preston McNeii of the 761st saying how it was when he first entered the concentration camp gates.
"I walked to the back of the building where this doctor had just put people to give them showers and gas them. And I just cried and cried. I said `I can't believe what I see.' No one in my life span can tell me it's propaganda. Became I really saw it."
Or hearing one of the survivors telling these liberators 46 years later "When you came, you gave the gift of life to 20,000 inmates. Not only that, by saving the remnants, you saved future generations. From these sparks, from these embers, a new generation came -- doctors, sculptors, writers -- from all walks of life ... you planted seeds for the future. My children and grandchildren are grateful to you for their lives."
Can we get along? They proved we can.
"LIBERATORS
UNDER FIRE"