WORTH NOTING ON TV,

* FRIDAY

... talking with David Frost (PBS, 10-11 p.m.): Never mind how F. Lee Bailey is doing with the prosecution in the O.J. Simpson trial. How's the renowned defense lawyer -- Frost's guest -- going to do with the chatty British interviewer? Frost, who has interviewed Bailey several times in past years, is expected at press time to bring a more reflective and perhaps revealing approach to the inevitable discussion of the Simpson trial, as well as to Bailey's own publicized career and the legal profession.

* SUNDAY

Nightmare's End -- The Liberation of the Camps (The Discovery Channel, 9 -10:30 p.m.): Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said something to the effect that the Holocaust can't really be analyzed because it is beyond human expression. You cannot meaningfully speak of the unspeakable, he maintained, and efforts to do so tend to belittle the events by pretending they are comprehensible enough to describe.

Yet this period is the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Hitler's concentration camps, and the TV medium, understandably, has been airing programs about those events. The saving grace of this film -- one of the best of the bunch -- is its freedom from fatuous commentary. The fearfully memorable documentary recounts the ghastly discoveries not through survivors' eyes, a more familiar perspective, but in the words of the soldiers -- American, British, Soviet, Polish -- who first came upon the terrible camps and liberated them.

The liberators tell their own stories, sometimes matter-of-factly, sometimes emotionally, as -- half a century later -- they recall what they saw. Plenty of gruesome footage is used, but the most telling moments may be the symbolic sights that most struck some of the combat veterans. One Soviet general, for instance, movingly tells of how shocked he was to come upon piles of women's eyeglasses, false teeth, and seven tons of their hair, and to realize how many women had to have been murdered to collect it all.

Please check local listings for these programs.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
QR Code to WORTH NOTING ON TV,
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/1995/0420/20132.html
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe