A Family Drama

It’s a true-life story that sounds like a Hollywood blockbuster: A World War II disaster at sea. Nazis. Stolen art. A daughter’s love. And a happy ending.

In fact, Garland Waller (’80) has already made the movie. Her documentary, The Silent Soldier and the Portrait, stars her 94-year-old father, John Waller, and tells the story of his guilty conscience and his return to Normandy, France, to set things right after nearly 75 years.

On Christmas Eve 1944, over 2,000 troops were aboard the SS Leopoldville, crossing the English Channel to join the Battle of the Bulge, when the ship was torpedoed. Private John Waller of the Army’s 264th Battalion was saved, but more than 800 on board died.

When Waller, an assistant professor of television, was helping her father move in 2016, they came across a photo album of his time in France. For the first time, John Waller told her of his near-death experience and how he and his buddies later found an abandoned chateau ransacked by the Germans. He said they blew open a safe they found there and that he took a tiny painting from it, a watercolor portrait of a woman, dated 1813. He carried the picture with him after that—a secret shame, as he considered it stolen property.

Waller and her husband, TV veteran Barry Nolan (Hard Copy, Evening Magazine), began filming her conversations with her father, and eventually traveled to France with him to find the family that owned the chateau—ultimately providing her father, and the film, with a dramatic moment of closure.

The film has won multiple awards, including at the Telly Awards and the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards.