Documentaries

World's Untold Stories

Episode 76 - No One Left Behind 

The military has a creed: Leave No Man Behind.  It is a promise that in the chaos of war can be difficult to uphold.  With aircraft crashing in remote areas, soldiers or marines scrambling from heavy gunfire -- it can be impossible to account for every service member.  That is where the men and women of the Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command -- or JPAC -- come in.  They are members of a unique unit that combines all branches of the US Military and civilians -- who together work to bring back warriors lost in the battlefield. 

In this months World's Untold Stories, CNN brings viewers into their mission to give answers to the more than 84-thousand US families who were never able to lay their loved ones to rest.  We'll go inside the relentless pursuit of missing service members -- from intense military records research to investigations on the ground -- many times relived through survivors who return to battle scenes and recount every vibrant detail.  We'll see the triumph of recovering remains, the solemn ceremony when remains are returned to home soil, and the fascinating and deeply challenging science of finally putting a name to decades-old bones.  These men and women believe every family deserves an answer, every service member deserves to be buried on home soil, and no one should be left behind.

Episode 75 - Terror in Tuscany 

On June 29th, 1944, during the height of World War II, German troops stormed the Tuscan hamlet of San Pancrazio, Italy, situated about 70 kilometers south of Florence.  Terrified residents were forced from their homes and ordered to the main square.  After sending the women and children away, the Nazis herded the men inside the cellar of a farmhouse.  There, they fired one shot into the neck of each man at close range, killing 73.  Another 151 people were killed in two nearby villages the same day.  Across Italy, the Nazis’ relentless campaign of terror would claim an estimated 15,000-20,000 civilians, including women, children, and the elderly.  Justice for the victims, however, would prove elusive.

Sharing their story with a worldwide audience for the very first time, survivors of the San Pancrazio massacre recount the chilling events of June 29th and the tragedies that befell the community at war’s end. Vividly told through rare historical footage, cherished family photographs, and the evocative landscapes of the Tuscan countryside, their stories are deeply embedded in the collective memory of this close-knit community, and closely guarded for the next generation.   92-year-old Goffredo Cinelli is one of the massacre's oldest remaining survivors.  A war veteran, he describes life under fascism and the chaos that ensued following the collapse of Benito Mussolini’s regime – a pivotal moment in which Cinelli and thousands of other young soldiers abandoned their military posts and returned home, only to be later considered deserters.

The war’s aftermath found San Pancrazio struggling to rebuild.  Yet, no one had been held accountable for these unspeakable crimes.  The story brings into sharp focus the changing post-war landscape – the advent of the Cold War and a new enemy to reckon with – that denied justice to the thousands of atrocity victims for more than half a century.  In 1994, a secret archive containing devastating evidence of the atrocities surfaced in Rome.  The discovery of the archive and its 695 concealed files triggered public outcry, and a demand for justice.  In the remarkable final chapter, the military prosecutor who made it his mission to vindicate victims and their families, reconstructs the facts of the San Pancrazio tragedy – with evidence found in the concealed files – and hones in on an elite SS division that ultimately leads to a conviction.

Episode 73 - Locked Up and Forgotten

Across Kenya there is a terrible secret, hidden from the world. People who barely exist. They live in darkened rooms, if you can call it living...they’re locked up and forgotten.  

CNN’s David McKenzie takes you on a journey into a world of anguish and misunderstanding. A world where mothers are forced to do the unthinkable to protect their children from a society that’s fearful, ignorant, and stigmatizes those who are labeled as different. That "difference" is mental disability.  

There are some three million mentally disabled in Kenya’s slums and remote villages, most are hidden away, often chained up and abused. The vast majority live a lifetime of little or no care, counseling, or therapy of any kind. The handful of psychiatrists in the country tend to the rich, leaving the poor to feel abandoned by their government, society and neighbors.  

Eudias Wambui has given up her life so she can care for her 17 year old son Kennedy.  He’s trapped inside a body suffering from cerebral palsy. His mother Eudias has one goal in life -  to ease Kennedy’s suffering.  Doctors, teachers, politicians have all failed her.  But for the first time in Kennedy’s life, Eudias has some hope.  Edah Maina, one of Kenya’s few advocates for the mentally disabled has come to intervene on Kennedy’s behalf.  Having overcome her own mental disability, Edah knows the effort it takes to bring those suffering from the darkness into the light.

Episode 72 - Filling the Blank
Imagine you forget your children. Imagine your mother, sisters and brother forgets you. Imagine you start forgetting who you are when you are 38 years old, you don't recognize your family when you are 45 and you die in a fetal position when you are 51. Alzheimer's is a horrible, cruel and deadly disease that erodes the humanness of people and steals their lifelong memories. Now imagine you have a 50% chance of getting one single gene that can turn your young life into a story cut short. Imagine the terror of the uncertainty, because there is nothing you can do. You can't imagine that? This CNN documentary will make you face the most feared disease of our times in an unprecedented, raw, dramatic and real way. This is the story of Early-Onset Alzheimer's Disease families in the world, their extremely horrific struggle to survive and the amazing historic study that a group of doctors and researchers are about to implement in Colombia. The intimate access to families, the raw emotions of the main characters, and the possibility of finding a cure for the disease transform this documentary in a worldwide event, a story no one will ever forget.

Episode 70 - Trafficked in Plain Sight

Given Kachepa was 10 years old when he was offered the opportunity many poor children around the world only dream of: travel to the United States and earn money to support your family and community. His singing voice was his ticket, and he vowed he would use it to help better the lives of those he loved. Soon, however, Kachepa realized the promises made in Zambia would not be kept in the United States.

In this episode of World's Untold Stories, CNN brings viewers the story of Kachepa and the Baptist minister who forced him and other choir members to perform in churches and schools across the U.S. for no pay. We'll learn how the minister convinced the boys to come to the United States, used fear and manipulation to profit from their talents and how one women's detective work eventually led federal investigators to rescue the choir from his control. We'll also discover the unlikely series of events that brought Kachepa into her home, and how her family is helping him turn the dream he had as a child into reality as a man.

Episode 69 - They Called Him Dr. Death

Co-workers called him "Dr. Death".  And that's how the world would come to know him as well.  But it took three decades, and a shocking trail of mistakes, lawsuits, life-altering injuries and deaths that spanned the globe, for the real story of Dr. Jayant Patel to emerge.

In June 2010, the former director of surgery at Australia's Bundaberg Base Hospital was convicted of manslaughter, in connection with the deaths of three patients.  A fourth patient was found to have suffered "grievous bodily harm".  But that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  Australian authorities had linked Patel to many more deaths, accusing him of hundreds of botched procedures, unnecessary operations, misdiagnoses and conducting surgeries he wasn't even qualified to perform.  And perhaps most notably, he was accused of hiding his long history of similar complaints in the United States.  He had been reprimanded, sued and accused of harming and carelessly killing patients long before he ever got to Australia. 

World's Untold Stories follows the long trail that took Dr. Jayant Patel from the operating room to an Australian prison cell.  Wherever he worked, colleagues had concerns, his co-workers complained, and patients died.  And yet none of this stopped him from moving on to Australia and adding to his disturbing record - until a persistent nurse, a curious journalist and the weight of decades of accusations led to his downfall.  We'll examine the startling story, explore why no one stopped Patel years before, and ask what can be done to prevent another "Dr. Death" from emerging in the future.

Episode 68 - Secret Jew

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Poland is experiencing a rebirth of Jewish life. Hundreds of Poles are now discovering they have Jewish roots that have been submerged for decades in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Communist oppression. The program meets Pawel, a former neo-Nazi skinhead. He has gone from greeting fellow right-wingers with the Nazi salute, and beating up local Jewish kids, to discovering both he and his wife were Jewish, and consequently converting to Orthodox Judaism. World's Untold Stories examines this curious phenomenon and delves into the lives of individuals who are being transformed by these revelations.

Episode 67 - The Last Patriarch?

Patriarch Bartholomew is the living embodiment of one of the world’s oldest institutions…the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople. There has been a patriarch in Constantinople for 14 centuries, ever since this city was the capital of Byzantium and the Eastern Roman Empire…ruling over the Eastern Mediterranean and much of the Middle East. To this day, Orthodox Christians around the world recite prayers to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the "first among equals." Some describe him as the equivalent of the "pope" for the world’s Orthodox Christians.  

But Bartholomew, who is now 70, may become the last in a line of some 270 bishops in Constantinople. The reason: the Turkish government refuses to recognize Bartholomew’s title as "Ecumenical Patriarch." Twenty-five years ago, the Turkish government shut the seminary where Greek Orthodox clergy traditionally trained. Greeks who do not hold Turkish passports are barred from becoming clerics.  

Instead of being the spiritual leader of his faith, Bartholomew has become a symbol of the dwindling community of ethnic Greeks still living in modern-day Istanbul. After nearly 90 years of Turkish government discrimination, there are only around 2,000 ethnic Greeks left in Istanbul. The last members of this community are gradually dying out…but they still cling tenaciously to the churches and schools their ancestors built in what was once the capital of a Greek empire.

Episode 66 - La Bestia (The Beast)
Jessica is a petite 21-year-old Salvadorean girl with big brown eyes and a crooked smile. When her mum got cancer and Mara gangsters started extorting her mechanic father for cash in San Salvador, she decided to head out in search of the American Dream. The day she left, her mum was too choked up to say goodbye. Jessica was too choked up to tell her two-year-old daughter she was leaving, so instead lied and said she was just popping out to the corner store. She crossed illegally through Guatemala and into southern Mexico, heading for a railhead and a ride on what generations of migrants ominously call "The Beast" or the "Train of Death." It's a cargo train where the poorest migrants ride for free, clinging on the top of wagons and exposed to the threat of robbery and death by bandits and organized crime gangs. A few hours into her trip, Jessica became dehydrated, disoriented and fell asleep. She fell off the train and onto the tracks. When she regained consciousness two days later she realized the “Train of Death had severed her right leg.

That was a year and three months ago. Olga Sanchez – who set up a hostel for migrants multilated by "The Beast" took Jessica in and organized for her to get a prosthetic leg. For Jessica there is no turning back – "there's nothing there for me. There's no work and my daughter is growing up and needs things." She has temporary work in a seafood restaurant and sends almost all her 200 dollars per month wages home. She hasn't given up on finally achieving the American Dream and crossing illegally into the United States…she's trying to save a little cash to make the trip.

When we met her, Jessica was about to head back to the railhead where she began her fateful trip last year. She said she wanted to see "The Beast" again, "out of curiosity," she said…it was her way of facing her demons. As we get there, hundreds of new migrants are waiting to jump on the cargo train in search of their brighter future. Jessica sits on the platform and a tear rolls down her cheek…"I'm not afraid of the train any more. It just makes me think, though, about the past and what happened."

As she waits, by coincidence, an old friend from her neighborhood of San Salvador shows up. He is on his way north and the two find time to catch up on old news. As the train prepares to pull out, Jessica decides she wants to ride a short way on the cargo train "out of curiosity." With her false leg, she hauls herself up onto a cargo wagon with hundreds of other migrants. But while those hundreds are embarking on a dangerous physical journey of hundreds of miles in the hope of crossing illegally into the U.S., Jessica is on a personal and emotional journey to confront the past, the loss of her limb and weigh up the true cost of the American Dream.

Episode 65 - The Scars of Racism
They make up Europe's biggest minority group, 12 million Roma, who are disparagingly called "gypsies." The Roma people migrated to Europe from India centuries ago, but they've never found a welcoming home there. Hitler's Nazi regime tried to wipe them out. Now their descendents are facing increasing violence in both Eastern and Western Europe. In the Czech Republic, Natalka, a bright-eyed girl, was severely burned just before her second birthday when far-right extremists threw Molotov cocktails into her home. We will follow Natalka’s story and examine how Europe's oldest minority have become its latest scapegoat.

Episode 61 - Body from Scratch

At the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Dr. Anthony Atala's lab is the largest in the world "manufacturing" body parts.  We're not talking about prosthetics here, and not robotics - this is growing new, living organs - and they are yours – made up of identical tissue found in the rest of your body. Growing a finger from the ground up: layering cartilage, bone, then muscle.  A beating, engineered heart valve that's learning how to pump blood before it's implanted.  It's regenerative medicine and the goal is to help the tens of thousands of people worldwide waiting for organ transplants.   In Pittsburgh, Dr. Steven Badylak has discovered a compound that tricks the body into repairing itself, much like the body knows how to do when it's in the womb. The U.S. military has invested $250 million in regenerative research aimed at helped soldiers with severe battle injuries, regrowing muscle and skin for burn injuries, as well as transplant technology for lost limbs.  Jon Mann reports in the next "World's Untold Stories."