You may or may not remember reading about my friend Gustav Potthoff in The Not-So-Lost Soul Companion. He was captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the construction of the Thailand-Burma Railway when he was just 18.

Back then he survived scorpion bites, malaria, jungle rot, cholera, and dysentery, and, now, to help remember all of the prisoners who didn’t make it out alive, Gustav obsessively paints.

A while back, to help him tell his story to a larger audience, I started a short video project for my local cable access TV station, but I never finished it. Instead, a couple of my friends — and a slew of war veterans, professional television folks, and kindly donors — stepped in to create something much, much better. It took several years, but eventually “Lest We Forget” was completed and aired on WFYI.

And now I ‘ve just learned that many other public television stations across the U.S. are planning to run “Lest We Forget,” and the film has earned a Cleveland Regional Emmy Award for Best Special Program. Fantastic!