Wouk was a screenwriter for the miniseries as well as being author of the book. War and Remembrance completes the cycle that began with The Winds of War. The story includes historical occurrences at Midway, Yalta, Guadalcanal, and El Alamein as well as the Allied invasions at Normandy and the Philippines .
War and Remembrance completes the cycle that began with The Winds of War. The story includes historical occurrences at Midway, Yalta, Guadalcanal, and El Alamein as well as the Allied invasions at Normandy and the Philippines.
In the book, there is no definite description as to how Berel dies. At the end of the book, there is a suggestion that he is killed while coming to retrieve Louis Henry from the Czech farmer he originally hid him with. Berel is the moral center of War and Remembrance. He bears witness to the worst acts of the Nazis,...
Berel Jastrow — Berel, Aaron's cousin, is captured with the Red Army in 1941 and sent to Auschwitz as a prisoner of war. He is transferred to a work kommando led by a Jew named Sammy Mutterperl, and the two participate in the construction of the Birkenau section of Auschwitz.
Aaron Jastrow — Aaron Jastrow is a Jewish American expatriate professor who has lived for years in Siena, Italy. As the book opens, Jastrow, his niece Natalie, and Natalie's son Louis are aboard a steamer in Naples, waiting to attempt the illegal and perilous sea voyage to Palestine.
Pug Henry is, of course, a fictional character. One real-life American officer, however, actually touched many of Pug's far-flung bases, hobnobbed with most of the same famous people, and played a considerably more significant role in planning and managing the Allied war effort. That officer was Albert Wedemeyer.
Watching it on History Channel was an education, as historians discussed the movie during the break. They agreed that War and Remembrance was incredibly accurate in its depiction of the war. Of course, having John Gielgud in the cast didn't hurt!
Because the miniseries was being shot out of sequence, Jane Seymour's long hair could not be cut for the scenes at Auschwitz, which were the very first she filmed. Instead, make-up artists took shears to a full scalp wig for her to wear for those scenes instead.
Jan-Michael Vincent's alcoholism was a major problem during filming, and may be why he was not cast in War and Remembrance (1988). The official explanation was that he was unavailable for the second series due to prior commitments to Airwolf (1984).
They are brilliant books and are among the finest fictionalized accounts of war available (i.e., the places and events are real but the characters are fictionalized amalgams of real people). Each book is about 700-800 pages long and it was wonderful to see them brought to the small screen instead of the theaters.
Leslie Slote (David Dukes) stayed with the State Department and, in the early '60s, helped mastermind the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was then assigned to Iran, where terrorists had him exiled rather than endure him as a hostage. He is now in charge of U.S. foreign policy in Central America.
Wouk raises the question of how much America knew about Germany's genocide. Leslie Slote, a fictional foreign service officer played by David Dukes, is demoted for bringing reports of the death camps to his superiors. Some rebuff him.
And they had 79-year-old Ralph Bellamy playing a real-life person who was in his 50s during the events of the series. Out of those five I mentioned, only Mitchum and Bellamy reprised their roles in “War and Remembrance.” And Mitchum was nearly replaced with James Coburn because he was ill during production.
The novel features a mixture of real and fictional characters that are all connected to the extended family of Victor "Pug" Henry, a fictional middle-aged Naval Officer and confidant of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
It was followed by a sequel, War and Remembrance, in 1988, also based on a novel written by Wouk and also directed and produced by Curtis. With 140 million viewers of part or all of Winds of War, it was the most-watched miniseries at that time.
Jane SeymourHe carries himself very well and it helps that he doesn't have to carry this series as much as he did in "W of W." He is barely in the first two episodes. Jane Seymour, the queen of miniseries, has taken over Ali MacGraw's part as Natalie Jastrow, the Jewish wife of Pug's son, Byron.
The saga of the Henry family, begun in "The Winds of War" continues as America is attacked by Japan and enters World War II. For Victor Henry, an upwardly mobile naval career sets him in command of a cruiser with sights on selection for the Admiralty.
The producers considered replacing seventy-year-old Robert Mitchum with fifty-nine-year-old James Coburn, due to concerns that Mitchum was too old and ill to reprise the role of Victor "Pug" Henry.
By what name was War and Remembrance (1988) officially released in Canada in English?
From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima with Herman Wouk and the Henry family: an even longer book than The Winds of War (1971), with even greater emphasis on "scrupulous accuracy of locale and historical fact" at the expense of emotional involvement.
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
In August 1942, Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and governor general of occupied Poland, arrived in Lvov. “We knew that his visit did not bode well,” a Jewish resident later recalled. That month, writes Philippe Sands, Frank gave a lecture in a university building “in which he announced the extermination of the city’s Jews”.
Lauterpacht’s emphasis was on individual rights, Lemkin’s on crimes against the group. This is the best kind of intellectual history. Sands puts the ideas of Lemkin and Lauterpacht in context and shows how they still resonate today, influencing Tony Blair, David Cameron and Barack Obama.
Williams is also troubled by what he sees as flaws in the British legal system. Defence lawyers focused ruthlessly on the inconsistencies of witnesses, forcing them to recall the most terrible ordeals. One particularly devastating account of a cross-examination raises questions about the humanity of the process.
His central argument is that these were not a victory for rational and civilised behaviour – the widespread assumption that they were, he writes, is simply a myth. Williams has plenty of insights and is especially good on the Allies’ lack of manpower and resources in 1945.
Frank and other leading Nazis were tried at Nuremberg after the war. It was, writes Sands, “the first time in human history that the leaders of a state were put on trial before an international court for crimes against humanity and genocide, two new crimes”.
Six years later, in 1921, Raphael Lemkin also began his law studies in Lvov; in 1944, he coined the term “genocide” in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe . Both Lauterpacht and Lemkin, like Leon, lost members of their family during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Now in Ukraine, the city changed hands (and names) eight times between 1914 and 1945 – it is known today as Lviv. This is where his grandfather Leon Buchholz was born in 1904. Leon had over 70 relatives. He was the only one to survive the Holocaust. In 1915, Hersch Lauterpacht came to Lvov to study law.
The Reich planned to keep the Jews in ghettos until they died naturally of starvation and exposure, von Roon says. But humans have a remarkable ability to adapt even to the direst conditions. “The slow rate of attrition became worrisome,” he says. “Plagues broke out, and plague germs do not distinguish between captors and prisoners. The weakened Jews therefore became a standing menace to the local populations and to our armed forces.” In this context, von Roon describes the “switch to euthanasia” (that is, the advent of the gas chambers) as merciful: “Since these people were in any case condemned to death, would not a quick, unexpected, painless end free them from long woes?” For him, Auschwitz and the other death camps emerged out of “essentially humane considerations.”
Little, Brown and Company. Wouk is often grouped with middlebrow writers of popular historical fiction — James Michener and Leon Uris, say — but his novels are better understood as pointillistic character studies in historical settings.
As a novelist, Wouk could do things a historian couldn’t: enter not only the living rooms but the minds of a diverse range of characters. Take Rhoda, for instance. She is a little frivolous, easily distracted, occupied more by her private life than by politics. In other words, she is a lot like many of us.
The novelist Herman Wouk. Credit... At the beginning of Herman Wouk’s novel “The Winds of War” (1971), the book’s hero, Victor “Pug” Henry, is offered a post as the United States Navy’s attaché in Berlin. The year is 1939. Pug discusses the job with a fellow naval officer, a man named Tollever who previously held the position.
But the main reason the novels still feel urgent has to do with the nature of Wouk’s ambition. He didn’t set out merely to write a family saga or to smuggle a history lesson into a story. Wouk wanted to know how so many people in Europe and America allowed the Holocaust to happen.