Filmmaker Ken Burns Brings World War II to Bunker Hill Community College

Documentarian and filmmaker Ken Burns, creator of The War and 19 other films about American history, told an overflow audience at Bunker Hill Community College today that wars too often happen when nations forget "to listen to history." Burns spoke as part of the College's Compelling Conversations speaker series.

Describing his exploration of World War II as "a tour of hell," Burns told the audience that he had avoided making a documentary about the Second World War until two statistics changed his mind. The first was that 1,000 veterans of World War II are now dying every day, taking their personal experience of the war with them. The second was that a significant number of American high school seniors in a recent survey thought the United States had fought with Germany against Russia in World War II.

"I was concerned that we were losing both our veterans and our historic compass," Burns said. In choosing to tell the story of the most destructive war in history, in which 60 million people died worldwide, Burns decided to make a film from the perspective of the people who had fought it. "The story I wanted to tell, he said, "was not the top-down story of the professional historian, but the simple, personal, bottom-up story of the so-called ordinary people-the 18, 19 and 20-years-olds who helped to save the world."

Burns' impassioned lecture drew a standing ovation from the Bunker Hill audience. At the close of his remarks a Polish woman whose relatives had perished during the war rose to tell him of her project to collect the stories of Polish survivors; a German woman spoke of living through the war and its aftermath in Germany; and an American veteran of World War II stood to thank Burns for honoring the contributions he and his generation had made to the war.

Burns, a filmmaker for more than 30 years, has directed and produced a number of highly acclaimed historical documentaries, including Brooklyn Bridge, The Civil War, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness and Baseball. His new documentary, The War, aired on PBS this fall to rave reviews. Six years in the making, the epic 14-hour film focuses on the stories of citizens from four American towns, covering their experiences on the battle-front and the home- front.

Bunker Hill Community College's Compelling Conversations Speaker Series will host journalist Mariane Pearl on February 1, 2008, and author Gish Jen on March 25, 2008. In the past, the series has featured, among others, Academy Award-winner Richard Dreyfuss, broadcast journalist Juan Williams, civil rights activist Mary Frances Berry, best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich, newscaster Ray Suarez and the former president of Ireland Mary Robinson.

Bunker Hill Community College is the largest community college in Massachusetts. The College enrolls more than 8,800 students on two campuses and at five satellite locations each semester. Some 1,700 students take classes online. BHCC is one of the most diverse institutions of higher education in the Commonwealth. Six in ten students are people of color and more than half of BHCC's students are women. The College also enrolls more than 600 international students who come from more than 95 countries and speak 75 different languages.