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Stories of war and resistance
War stories project culminates in video presentation after nine-year effort

by Renee Batti

Lew Southern and Lee Boucher no doubt have many good stories to tell of mutual experiences and adventures stemming from their 40-year friendship, begun when they first met at a Menlo Park Newcomers gathering.

But the stories of their lives decades before they met — during the years of their early adulthood, when the world was wracked by war — couldn't have been more different.

The lives of both men, now in their mid-80s, were profoundly disrupted by the advent of World War II.

For Mr. Southern, now a Menlo Park resident, that meant shipping off for Italy and witnessing wrenching events that would never fade from memory. It was in the Italian mountainside that the 19-year-old Southern was seriously wounded; he would spend the next two years in Army hospitals.

Portola Valley resident Lee Boucher chose another route during the war years: He attained conscientious objector status, and spent more than three years in camps in this country, first in service camps designed to allow COs to perform tasks for the public good, then in a government camp that housed COs who refused to cooperate with the government in protest of war and conscription.

The two men are among 42 area residents who tell their wartime stories in the video presentation, "Remembering World War II: First-Person Accounts," which will be premiered on Sunday, Nov. 1, at Foothill College. The program is the culmination of a nine-year effort, begun as a "life stories" writing course led by Sheila Dunec, a Foothill College instructor who has offered the course for many years at the Menlo Park Library and in Ladera.

The program, which begins at 1 p.m., also includes a display of photos, letters and documents, and music from the period. Many of the war stories participants are expected to be present for the screening and a reception.

Years in the making

The idea of videotaping dramatic readings of the war stories evolved as Ms. Dunec, program writers, and supporters such as the late Al Jacobs, a Menlo College professor whose expertise included theater and literature, worked to weave portions of written stories together for a live stage presentation.

Gradually, the project was seen as an opportunity to introduce high school students to videotaped first-person accounts of a war they typically would read about in a textbook.

Ms. Dunec says one of her main goals in leading the project is to give a voice to those who lived through the pain and hardship of the war, and to keep their stories alive in hopes that future world conflicts might be avoided.

Mr. Boucher is the only conscientious objector who participated in the project. But there are others who did not experience the front lines of combat who tell their stories in the video, including nurses and other medical professionals, war brides, support personnel, Holocaust survivors, and Americans whose racial background led to abuse and discrimination, but who nonetheless served heroically.

Witness to genocide

Sophie Stallman of Ladera was a high school student in Warsaw, Poland, when she and her fellow students were ordered to report to the Jewish Ghetto to work. They were to gradually replace Jewish workers "who were to be 'resettled,'" Ms. Stallman writes in her war story contribution.

"We knew exactly where the resettlement was," she continues. "Recently Oswiecim's crematoriums were sending more smoke than ever into the skies."

Ms. Stallman's girlhood experience in the factory includes witnessing civilians shot in the street outside the building, and watching with heavy heart as more and more Jews in the factory were forced to join a "new column of ghost-like people ... lining up on command and walking to their death on command."

She writes with deep affection of Helen, who was kept on for a time to oversee the workers in Ms. Stallman's factory hall — and with great sorrow of the day Helen, too, was taken away.

She concludes her story: "It was 59 years ago. I never forgot that day, and the beautiful Jewish girl named Helen, and I am still crying."

Lessons of war

Mr. Boucher ended up spending extra time in a camp during the war because, while being a conscientious objector was allowed if the CO agreed to work in service camps, he chose a more difficult course mid-way: "I decided to be a non-cooperator. That was my protest against conscription," he writes.

That decision led to a transfer to the "hard core government camp" at Minersville, in the California Trinity Alps. It was the same camp where Roy Kepler, founder of Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park, spent many of his wartime days.

In his story, Mr. Boucher quotes President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a 1953 speech: "Every gun that's made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Although Mr. Southern took a course different from his friend, Mr. Boucher, he is no fan of war. In his story, he recalls the words of General George Patton: "Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge — it brings out all that is best. It removes all that is base."

Mr. Southern acknowledges that he "did see examples of 'the best in men' — courage and concern, with tenderness for injured soldiers and devastated civilians, but I can't say, 'It removes all that is base.' In my limited war experience, both good and bad qualities seem to get magnified."

He writes that perhaps, in the history of the world, "we have probably needed people like General Patton. ... But I would like to see the day when we would stop needing and stop breeding the kind of mind-set and value systems that men like him represent.

"That mind-set has been useful in fighting wars, but it is also instrumental in starting them."

INFORMATION

"Remembering World War II," a video presentation, begins at 1 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 1, at Foothill College, on El Monte Road in Los Altos Hills, just off Interstate 280. Admission is free, but seating is limited and tickets are required. For tickets, call 949-6965.