Pierre Sauvage, the award-winning documentary filmmaker, celebrates the quiet heroism that contradicted armies of the morally silent in the Holocaust.
His films include “Weapons of the Spirit,” about Christian peasants who hid 5,000 Jews in Le Chambon, France, and “Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust.”
“And Crown Thy Good,” his latest work, is the saga of Varian Fry, a New York intellectual who arranged safe passage to the US for 2,000 Jews and non-Jews stranded in Nazi-occupied Marseille, France, between 1940-1941.
“It’s rare for intellectuals to get their hands dirty and enter the ring,” Sauvage told the IJN from Los Angeles prior to his Oct. 28 talk at the annual Fred Marcus Memorial Holocaust Lecture in Denver.
“No one ever imagined that mild-mannered Varian Fry was the kind of person who would risk his life and do this.”
Selected for the daunting task by the Emergency Relief Committee in New York, Fry was assisted by Hiram Bingham IV, US consul in Marseille; and an intriguing network of Americans.
Fry and his group forged documents and established clandestine escape routes over the Pyrenees to Lisbon, where boats waited to take Jewish and anti-fascist refugees trapped in Nazi-occupied northern France to the US.
Under the “Surrender on Demand” clause of the Franco-German armistice issued June 22, 1940, authorities were ordered to extradite non-French Jews and anti-Nazis to Germany, where they were deported to concentration camps.
Thanks to Fry, cultural icons Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipschitz, Hannah Arendt, Andre Breton and Franz Werfel managed to escape to the US, as did thousands of lesser-known anti-fascists.
“Some people complain that this was an elitist organization,” Sauvage says. “That’s a bum a rap, for many reasons.
“First, many of the artists were particularly vulnerable to the Nazis. Secondly, the mission quickly expanded to include others. Finally, Fry was rescuing people he cared deeply for as a lover of the arts and an intellectual. They really meant something to him.
“There’s an old Jewish value that says you start by caring about the people who are closest to you, and then enlarging that circle of responsibility. That’s exactly what Fry was doing.”
Authorities in Marseille placed Fry under constant surveillance and detained him on several occasions.
His activities also angered the US State Department, which did not want to rock the diplomatic boat.
Fry was expelled from France in September, 1941. He returned to the US, where he repeatedly warned Americans about the dire situation in Europe.
As the editor of The New Republic, Fry wrote an impassioned article called “The Massacre of the Jews” in December, 1942.
His words fell on deaf ears.
Sauvage turns his camera on rescuers in the Holocaust because they reflect his own story — a lie perpetuated by his well-meaning parents for 18 years.
Born in France in 1944, Pierre was the son of once prominent French journalist Leo Sauvage and his Polish-born wife Barbara.
The family moved to New York when Pierre was four.
Sauvage had no idea his parents were Holocaust survivors, or even Jewish. Apparently they didn’t want to expose Pierre and his siblings to the indignities that almost claimed their lives.
“When I was 18, I decided to go back to France for school and planned on staying with a cousin,” Sauvage says. Although he didn’t know it then, this cousin was a survivor of Auschwitz.
“My parents must have realized that they could no longer hide their secret, even though our French relatives had respected their wishes. So I found out I was Jewish.
“They told me the facts — but they also said that those facts didn’t really matter. I accepted that characterization for a long time, until I realized that it did matter.”
His parents survived the Holocaust in Le Chambon, a sanctuary for French Jews that ultimately became the subject of Sauvage’s film, “Weapons of the Spirit.” The humble Christian peasants of Le Chambon saved 5,000 Jews from being deported.
Sauvage does not consider his successful documentary film career a tribute to a disowned past. “That’s not exactly the way I view my films,” he says. “I see them as both a tribute and a challenge.
“In my mind, the challenge part is crucial, because I’ve often said that rescuers challenge us because they set the standard by which we measure ourselves.
“My focus with regard to the Holocaust is not the murderers. I’m interested in how people reacted to the persecution and slaughter of other human beings.”
While heroes have been praised and memorialized from the time of Homer to 9/11, it is not uncommon for rescuers in the Holocaust to pass unnoticed for decades.
“I have a theory about this,” says Sauvage. “The heroes of Sept. 11 did not challenge us. Most of us could not have done what they did. The way they responded to that crisis was phenomenal — but it doesn’t make us feel guilty.
“And that is a very important distinction.”
Asked about America’s indifference to the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, Sauvage launches into a multi-pronged examination of ultimate responsibility.
“This question haunts me, and fascinates me,” he says. “In the Fry film, there is an excerpt from author Herman Wouk who says that once WW II broke out, it was hard to think about anything else.
“I’m not completely satisfied with that explanation.”
Sauvage says the majority of American who were alive at the time claim they were unaware of what was happening to the Jews in Europe — and even if they had known, their hands were tied.
“That’s nonsense,” he says tersely. “If America was helpless, how do you factor in the actions of people who knew what was happening and did something?”
Sauvage says Americans may have genuinely lacked the ability to comprehend the larger implications, but there also was an obvious unwillingness to intervene — and the American Jewish community contributed to this attitude.
This was the focus of his film on Peter Bergson, a militant Jew from Palestine who led a controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust — largely to no avail.
“The lack of interest in my film was monumental because it was too hard to swallow,” says Sauvage. “The reality is that the American Jewish community did not pressure the Roosevelt administration to act.”
He says that America’s negligent behavior toward desperate Jewish refugees exemplified a general dearth of moral responsibility in a world gone mad.
“My fundamental belief is that responsibility during this time was more widespread than we are willing to admit.
“That isn’t to say the Nazis don’t bear the primary responsibility. Of course they do. They were the murderers.
“But when a horrible crime is committed, and people refuse to intervene, attenuate or even impede the situation, then responsibility does not fall solely on the criminal.
“It also rests with the bystander.”
Sauvage chose the title “And Crown Thy Good” for his film, which is a work in progress, to emphasize his contention that Fry and his network embodied core American principles.
“The phrase, in case some people out there don’t know it, comes from ‘America the Beautiful’ — ‘And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.’
“The sense of solidarity was one of this country’s formative values. What happened during the Holocaust represented a fundamental break in solidarity between human beings.”
Although Fry’s post-Holocaust existence never measured up to the life-and-death drama of Marseille, he enjoyed a satisfying life as a husband, father, editor, author and teacher.
His pursuits ranged from wine tasting, gardening and bird watching to serving on the boards of the American Civil Liberties Union and the International League of the Rights of Man.
France honored Varian Fry for his refugee work during the Holocaust a few months prior to his death in 1967 at the age of 59.
In 1996, Yad Vashem designated him as the first American Righteous Gentile. Two years later he was awarded commemorative Israeli citizenship for rekindling “the light of humanity during the Nazi era in Europe.”
Sauvage, who has faithfully rescued Fry, Bergson and an entire French village from oblivion, admits he might embark on a new cinematic direction.
“I’m not sure what I’ll be doing next, but it might not deal with rescuers in the Holocaust,” he says.
“To begin with, we’re living in a very frustrating time. The last witnesses to the Holocaust are leaving us. It’s an awkward time of transition.
“At the same time, this subject continues to fascinate me.
“The fact that I was raised under taboos — that my parents hid the fact that I was Jewish — has sensitized me to the whole area of taboos, how they operate and how we get rid of them.”
Sauvage applauds Varian Fry’s mission because it openly defied America’s closed-door policy toward Jewish refugees during WW II.
“What Fry and his colleagues accomplished was the polar opposite of American indifference, which in the end allowed six million Jews to be murdered. I don’t think I’ll ever lose the desire to probe this issue in some way.
“Maybe I really am like the dog who keeps searching for his bone.
“We shall see.”
Information: www.maccjcc.org/jaamm or call (303) 316-6360.
