| TV Review Diana Wichtel
Heritage Rescue can be compelling and moving, despite its reality-TV roots.
History is always up for grabs, literally in the case of those problematic Confederate statues in the US. No tumbling monuments in the first episode of Top Shelf’s Heritage Rescue, but the return of the series saw a shameful historical moment of our own addressed as the team descended on the Featherston Heritage Museum. “Incident” or “massacre”? That was the question at the heart of the town’s darkest day.
In 1943, at the Featherston prisoner of war camp, 48 Japanese prisoners were killed. “One of New Zealand’s bestkept military secrets,” noted the script, although the story has been addressed, including in Vincent O’Sullivan’s 1984 play Shuriken. Japanese prisoners, for whom co-operation with the enemy was a disgrace, staged a sit-in. In one version, guards opened fire to quell a riot. In the other, this was a massacre. Within a minute, 31 prisoners were shot dead. Seventeen more died of their wounds, as did a guard, hit by a ricocheting bullet.
There was a cover-up. For the Heritage Rescue team, matters of how to tell this story – “Give different viewpoints so visitors make up their own minds,” decided host and heritage expert Brigid Gallagher – seriously trumped the problem of the museum’s aesthetically unappealing fluorescent lighting.
It may be of a superior sort, but Heritage Rescue, as its urgent title indicates, is reality television. Gallagher maintains the obligatory nail-biting 60 Minute Makeover meets Hotel Hell vibe. “Only 30 minutes to go until the public arrive!”
The tragic wartime story didn’t prevent a certain pragmatism about the marketing of history: “Turn it into a tourist attraction for the Japanese,” advised academic Jim Veitch, at the site of the shootings. “Let them come and recognise their war dead.”
But in the end, the mix of museum renovation and on-the-hop history lesson proved compelling and moving. The daughter of the guard who died told her father’s story. The granddaughter of a Japanese prisoner who was wounded but survived visited to pay her respects, weeping when she saw her grandfather’s poem newly displayed on the freshly painted wall. “We should never go to war again,” it concluded.
But to war we went, courtesy of a Sunday piece about Mt Hutt ski resort pioneer and “Father of the Mountain” Willi Huber. He also once fought for “Hitler’s infamous SS!” How to tell that story? Not by showing the 94-year-old smiling serenely as he remarked, “I give it to Hitler, he was very clever. He brought Austria out of its dump, you know.” Or by having him show off his war medals. Or by having Cameron Bennett announce – poor choice of words – “There’s no question Willi Huber is a remarkable survivor!”
Bennett asked Huber whether, as a member of the SS, he knew about the concentration camps. “Never!” he said. Not until the “bitter end”, anyway. “And when you learnt about this, were you horrified?” wondered Bennett. “What could we do?” mused Huber. “We all agreed it was wrong.” If he was horrified by what happened, he didn’t say so.
Huber was 17 in annexed Austria when he volunteered. “Anyone who wanted to get ahead there had to embrace the Nazi Party,” explained Bennett. Sheesh. In a 2014 article, Huber was reported to have said that “[having] volunteered for the German Army put him offside with many Austrians”. Joining the SS wasn’t such an obvious choice as Sunday seemed to unquestioningly accept. Huber was very young when he joined up, but he’s had a lot of time to think. Here was a chance to ask some penetrating questions. Instead, we got human-interest blancmange. Huber was allowed to keep control of the narrative. In the end, Bennett and Huber went skiing. At the bottom of the run, Bennett said cheerfully, “As you can see, he left me for dust.” That he did.
HERITAGE RESCUE, Choice TV, Saturday, 7.30pm. SUNDAY, TVNZ 1, Sunday, 7.30pm.
“Turn [the site of the prisoner of war camp] into a tourist attraction for the Japanese.”