A Personal Story

Growing up, I have always had a strong personal connection with GI of World War II. I still do. Perhaps it’s because from a very early age, I heard the stories of my mother being liberated by those "nice American boys" who treated her so kindly when they saved her. Maybe it’s because I naturally juxtaposed visions of the good GI with those of the evil Nazi and saw an easy to understand dividing line between good and evil. . . something that is important for a kid. Or maybe it was, as I am now just beginning to understand, a personal anger at another generation of men, the European Jewish male that I fallaciously blamed. As a kid, I accused them for a lack of guts in letting the blond, German Aryan "superman" humiliate and degrade them. The questions in my mind as a boy were always: "Why didn’t you fight back? Why did you let them shove you into the gas chambers like sheep? Why did you just stand there passively and let them do that to your women. . . daughters, sisters, mothers?" At this point in my life, as a filmmaker/historian of World War II, I now understand my mistaken perceptions. But that was not the case growing up.

So I attached my identity to the American GI of the books, movies and television. I considered myself more like them than those men who were my family members.

For me, SAVING FELA is a film that deals with these emotions that I grew up with. Hearing the pain that my mother experienced from a tender young age, I always felt I had a duty to somehow "go back in time" and protect her from the bad things that were done to her.

SAVING FELA closes the gap between that generation of world-saving "good guys" - who did the manly things like fly fighter planes and command destroyers and submarines, who were unshaved tough infantry grunts firing Tommy guns, pulling grenade rings with their teeth - and my vulnerable mom waiting to be saved.

It is that gap that I explore in the film by trying to understand the truths and fallacies of this war and any war.

With each war following World War II - Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, the first Gulf War and Iraq - the crisp black and white of World War II has become a muddied grey for most of my generation. But by trying to understand what World War II was really all about from the single human being’s perspective, perhaps we can better understand how to judge all war.

And that is what SAVING FELA is truly about.

- Max Lewkowicz

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