Documentary profiles unsung Holocaust hero

The Germans were terrified of the disease, which had long been wiped out in their country, explains Bank.

Lazowski played on their fears -- secretly injecting Jews with a compound that gave false positive readings for typhus and mimicking the seasonal ebb and flow of "outbreaks." Rules required him to share blood test results with the Germans, which led to widespread village quarantines and spared "infected" folks the fate that awaited some 6 million peers.

Bank first caught wind of the tale three years ago.

Then 17, the young filmmaker appeared on a Chicago television station discussing the award-winning documentary he'd done on homelessness in the city's ritzy northshore suburbs.

Shortly after, he got a call from Lazowski, who was getting on in years and was finally ready to let someone document his story.

Bank says he "fell in love" with it, and he's working feverishly to get it on film.

He's formed Clayton Entertainment productions and directed an international film crew on a 16-day shoot in Poland last fall -- capturing the joyful reunion of villagers from Rozwadow (one of quarantined communities), gut-wrenching scenes of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and Lazowski's first visit to his homeland in 56 years.

Bank hopes to add interviews with a member of Poland's former royal family who lived in the affected area and additional archival images to the 25 hours of video.

He needs to raise about $120,000 to cover post-production costs such as editing, sound work and so on.

He'll personally appeal to Jewish and Polish groups and others in hopes of attracting backing.

Does he ever consider his youth to be an impediment to his efforts?

"That doesn't occur to me. But it does occur to other people," the boyish, bespectacled Bank says with an easy laugh.

"It's tough calling people up, and once they find out you're 20, sometimes it's tough getting phone calls back. Some people have completely blown me off," Banks says. "And I feel it's their loss. Not because they don't get to work with me, because God knows I'm not much of a threat, but because they're missing out on this great man and this story.

"I've found it just takes persistence and dedication. Dr. Lazowski is 87, and I think we owe it to him to get this done while he can see it."

Holocaust hero -- Ryan Bank, a 20-year-old cinema-photography major at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, is documenting the heroism of Dr. Eugene Lazowski, a little-known hero who helped save an estimated 8,000 Jews from Nazi death camps. The hourlong work details the heroism of 87-year-old Lazowski, who managed to fake typhus epidemics in a dozen Polish villages that resulted in life-saving quarantines.