CPTV Programs Will Observe

Holocaust Remembrance Month

This April, Connecticut Public Television will commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Month with a wide variety of programs, including the television premiere of the director’s cut of Schindler’s List, airing on Thursday, April 19, at 8 pm.

In addition, the resilience of Jewish heritage in a new homeland will be celebrated in the premiere of a two-hour CPTV presentation, They Came for Good: A History of Jews in the United States, airing on Monday, April 9, at 9 pm, with a repeat air date of Sunday, April 15, at 2 pm.

Steven Spielberg, whose movie Schinlder’s List won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, found a perfect home on public television for his new director’s cut of the film. Starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, and Embeth Davitz, Schindler’s List is the true story of an unlikely hero: a Nazi party member and womanizing industrialist who saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. The film will be shown without any breaks and in letterbox format.

A comprehensive look at the story of Jews in America from colonial times through 1880, They Came for Good: A History of Jews in America details the history of a people who had considered  themselves, in Benjamin None’s words, “…inhabitants everywhere, but citizens nowhere.”

The lineup of informative and inspiring programs continues throughout the month with A Conversation with Elie Weisel, an hour-long interview with author and activist Elie Weisel, airing on Tuesday, April 10, at 11 pm; Sculpture of Love and Anguish, airing on Thursday, April 19, at 11:30 pm, which tells the story of Miami’s memorial to the six million victims of the Holocaust; and Witness: Voices of the Holocaust, airing Sunday, April 29, at 4:30 pm, which tells of the atrocities of the Holocaust from the perspective of 19 survivors of Jewish concentration camps.

The extensive testimonies for witness originated from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, the world’s first project gathering individual testimonies of the brutalities that occurred in Auschwitz. Since 1980, scholars at the Yale Archive have gathered Holocaust testimonies from survivors and witnesses in more  than 25 US cities and various countries all over the world.