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One by one, they tell their war stories directly to the camera. They all weep. Mirako Sano, a little girl from Tokyo at the time of the war, watched her daily rations dwindle to a few grains of rice. She witnessed her friends orphaned by bombings, and turned into street beggars.

Cole Richman, a black veteran of the U.S. Navy, faced discrimination during his years of service and was even denied recognition after the war. He survived a Kamikaze strike in the Pacific Ocean, and had to scrape the remains of his friends from the side of his boat.

Whitelaw "Whitey" tells of his experience as a pilot flying over thousands of war ships in the English Channel. He chokes up with emotion recalling a story when a young girl asked him if he ever killed anyone. He answers, that yes he did, and the girl asks only, "Why?"

George Galvin was among the soldiers who liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. He came face-to-face with survivors, their Nazi captors, and those who did not make it.

Though the awfulness of this horrific war may seem far away, in distant lands and in a distant past, its surviving victims and aging veterans still live amongst us. Their testimony and wisdom garnered through a long life are being preserved for posterity in Sheila Dunec's "Life Stories" class at Foothill College.

What began as a writing workshop at Foothill has grown into collaboration with high schools' history classes, and is now a documentary film, entitled "Remembering World War II: First-Person Accounts" scheduled to premiere Sunday, Nov. 1, at Foothill's Smithwick Theatre.

Funded by its subjects, as well as by corporate and private donations (including $5,000 from the Palo Alto Weekly), the film premieres after almost a decade of production. Dunec collected 15 hours of footage from 42 local subjects. This has been compressed into three hours and overlaid with still shots from private collections, as well as with footage from Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive and other national archival museums. The original uncut primary sources will be available as free downloads on iTunes.

In addition to yielding a resource for students of history, the experience was also meaningful to the veterans and survivors.

"Couples who took the class together turned to each other and said, 'I never knew that about you!' So many people bury (their stories) as a way of coping," Dunec said. "In the rush of mid-life, we are too busy to be interested in these stories."

Inspired by the death of her parents and her counseling work at the VA Hospital, Dunec sees her mission as preserving the "wisdom accrued by the elderly. Everyone who has heard these stories has become convinced that these personal accounts need to be collected. ... The purpose of this project is to honor the members of the generation who went through World War II and to help keep the war experience alive in hopes that yet another world war may be avoided."

Dunec contrasts her film with the Ken Burns documentary "The War," which she said glorifies war as many Hollywood films do.

"Young people are lured to war as a way to show courage and prove themselves," she said. But "Remembering World War II" seeks to expose the hardship of war, and to do so from various angles.

In addition to American perspectives, the film features voices from Japan, Germany, England, Holland, China, Finland, Denmark and North Africa.

The film strikes a balance between admiration of those who fought honorably and an anti-war message. "Listening to the war veterans' interviews and seeing the war footage clears all the doubts in the mind that peace is priceless," said Prithvi Pal, a De Anza College film student who has been editing the film for the past 14 months.

"I don't want anybody," said Mirako Sano shaking her head vigorously, "Anybody, absolutely anybody, to go through what I went through." On the door to her Palo Alto home, there is a sticker denouncing the atomic bomb, alongside a quiet Japanese rock garden and Shoji screens. Sano, who grew up in Japan during the war, is a member of the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center. She says that over the years, she and her husband talked little of the war, and that working on the project reminded her of "those harsh days."

She attributes Japan's speedy recovery from the ruins to an intelligent occupation determined "not to destroy Japanese culture." Sano said she is saddened to see current military occupations not doing the same, and does not believe that the world is a better place today than it was before World War II.

Jim Wong was a radar technician for the U.S. Navy during the war. Too short to be a navy pilot and too skinny for the U.S. Army Air Corps, he trained as an electronics specialist for the military, which launched his career at the forefront of technology. Also a Palo Alto resident, he tells his story in the film and also volunteered hundreds of hours scanning and organizing 400 previously undocumented photos along with 600 National Archive photos.

Working on the film has "deepened his understanding of the conflict," he said. He says in a clear voice that the "main reason for working on this project is to show young people that war is not the solution to solve problems."

All involved with the film convey this message. And with the message's repetition from each interviewee, instead of becoming stale it resonates louder and louder, strengthened by the credibility that only first-hand experience can bestow.

"We shouldn't do this." Wong repeats, his eyes misting up, "We just shouldn't do this." n†

What: Premiere screening of "Remembering World War II: First-Person Accounts"

Where: Smithwick Theatre, Foothill College, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills

When: Sunday, Nov. 1, 1 p.m.

Cost: Free, but tickets are required. To request tickets or more information, call 650-949-6965.

Event: Narrators and their families will be in attendance, with a reception during intermission.