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Pierre Sauvage is a French-American documentary filmmaker and lecturer, who was a child survivor of the Holocaust. Described by Tablet Magazine as "a filmmaker of rare moral perception."
Sauvage is best known for his 1989-2023 feature documentary, Weapons of the Spirit, which tells the story of what the film calls a "conspiracy of goodness": how a Christian mountain community in Nazi-occupied France took in and saved five thousand Jews, including Sauvage and his parents. Sauvage himself was born in this unique Christian oasis—the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon—at a time when much of his family was being tortured and murdered in the Nazi death camps. But it was only at the age of 18 that he learned that he and his family were Jewish and survivors of the Holocaust.
Weapons of the Spirit won numerous awards, including the prestigious DuPont-Columbia Award in Broadcast Journalism—sharing the documentary award with Ken Burns' The Civil War series. The film had a 50-city theatrical release, received two national prime-time broadcasts on PBS in 1990—accompanied by Bill Moyers' probing interview of the filmmaker—and remains one of the most widely used documentary teaching tools on the Holocaust. A remastered wide-screen edition of the film will be released in 2023.
Also scheduled for release in 2023 are three other documentaries by Sauvage. Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, provides the challenging and eloquent testimony of Peter Bergson, a militant Jew from Palestine who led a determined and controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust. Bergson, interviewed in 1978, rages with a Hebrew prophet’s fury." Yiddish: the Mother Tongue is the 1979 Emmy Award-winning portrait of the unique and tenacious Yiddish language and culture. We Were There: Christians and the Holocaust features the testimony of four French Righteous Christians (Madeleine Barot, pastor André Dumas, Jean-Marie Soutou, and Magda Trocmé), as well as the challenging views of Rev. Franklin Littell.
Upcoming is A ¥ear That Mattered: Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis, Marseille 1940-1941, a feature documentary about the most successful private American rescue effort of the Nazi era. In Marseille, France, after France fell to the Nazis, a New York intellectual named Varian Fry led a tiny group that helped to save as many as 2,000 people, including many luminaries of that time. In a paper presented in 2000 at the Remembering for the Future conference at Oxford University, Sauvage argued that "Viewed within the context of its time, Fry's mission seems not 'merely' an attempt to save some threatened writers, artists, and political figures. It appears in hindsight like a doomed final quest to reverse the very direction in which the world is heading." [1]
While celebrating some remarkable Americans—Varian Fry, Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, Charles Fawcett, Leon Ball, Hiram Bingham IV—the documentary places the story in the context of those challenging times, addressing American policies then towards the unwanted refugees. Sauvage's footage, author Dara Horn reported in her book People Love Dead Jews, introduced her posthumously "to several exceedingly intelligent, colorful, and sincere Americans (none of them Jewish)". [2] One of these Americans is Mary Jayne Gold, who wrote a memoir, Crossroads Marseilles 1940, to which Sauvage inherited the rights. Originally published by Doubleday in the U.S. in 1980, and published in France in 2001, to considerable acclaim, as Marseille Année 40, with Sauvage contributing an afterword, the book is Gold's account of how this heiress from the Midwest participated in and helped to subsidize the Varian Fry rescue mission while concurrently having an affair with a young French gangster.
Retrospectives of his documentaries have been held in Paris, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and the United States.
In June 2004, Sauvage initiated and played a key role in organizing a "Liberation Reunion" that took place in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon for the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Sauvage's efforts contributed to French President Jacques Chirac's decision to make a major address in Le Chambon on July 8, 2004. When Chirac used the occasion to celebrate the values of the Republic, Sauvage wrote an article in the French daily Le Figaro pointing out that the values that had been implemented in Le Chambon were older than the French republic. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, shortly after his election, made time to view Weapons of the Spirit and called it "deeply moving." Sauvage spent five years trying unsuccessfully to create a historical museum in his birthplace of Le Chambon and overseeing a temporary exhibit area in the heart of the village. In 2013, a museum Lieu de Mémoire, spearheaded by then Le Chambon-sur-Lignon Mayor Éliane Wauquiez-Motte, was at last inaugurated in the village, with Sauvage was presenting the French version of Weapons of the Spirit on this occasion.
Sauvage is the son of once prominent French journalist and author Léo Sauvage (born Smotriez), and his Polish-born wife Barbara Sauvage, née Suchowolska. Sauvage was four when he and his parents moved to New York City in 1948, his parents choosing to hide the fact that they were Jewish. Sauvage returned to Paris at 18 to pursue his studies, staying with his cousin, Samuel Pisar, the Holocaust survivor, attorney, and author. The Sorbonne drop-out fell in love with film at Paris' Cinémathèque Française, becoming a film scholar and landing a job there working for the pioneering film archivist Henri Langlois. Veteran émigré producer-director Otto Preminger brought Sauvage back to New York as a story editor.
In the U.S., Sauvage co-authored with Jean-Pierre Coursodon a two-volume critical study of American film directors, American Directors (E.P. Dutton, 1983), characterized in The New York Times by Peter Biskind as "highly informed, literate, trenchant." He is the Los Angeles correspondent for the influential French film monthly Positif.
Although he had contributed to a documentary about the artist Robert Malaval in the '60s, Sauvage settled behind the camera as a staff producer-reporter for Los Angeles public television station KCET-TV, producing over thirty hours of varied programming dealing with a wide range of subjects. His first major success came when he decided to begin exploring Jewish roots he had never known in Yiddish: the Mother Tongue.
Sauvage lives in Los Angeles, with his wife, entertainment lawyer and professor Barbara M. Rubin. They have two children: master empath David Sauvage and movie and television trailer editor Rebecca Sauvage. In 2020, at a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, Sauvage was named a knight in the French National Order of Merit. He says he plans to continue galloping as long as he can.
For 40 years, a lecturer on the Holocaust and its continuing challenges, Sauvage has long been one of a pioneering handful of experts on rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust—"righteous Gentiles"—and contends that they still have much to teach us. He has also focused his efforts on what he has called the American experience of the Holocaust, urging Americans to look in as well as out. A key mentor for Sauvage in this effort was historian David S. Wyman, who died in 2018 and to whom Sauvage has paid tribute.
Varian Mackey Fry was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He was the first of five Americans to be recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations", an honorific given by the State of Israel to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a commune in the Haute-Loire department in south-central France.
Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with Varian Fry, helped more than 2,500 Jews to escape from France as Nazi forces advanced.
André Trocmé and his wife, Magda, were a French couple designated Righteous Among the Nations. For 15 years, André served as a Protestant pastor in the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, in south-central France. He had been accepted to the rather remote parish because of his Christian pacifist positions, which were not well received by the French Protestant Church. In his preaching, he spoke out against discrimination as the Nazis were gaining power in neighboring Germany and urged his Protestant Huguenot congregation to hide Jewish refugees from the Holocaust during World War II.
Mary Jayne Gold was an American heiress who played an important role helping European Jews and intellectuals escape from Nazi-occupied France in 1940–41, during World War II. Many had fled there in preceding years from Germany, where oppression had mounted.
Miriam Davenport or Miriam Davenport Ebel was an American painter and sculptor who played an important role in 1940 helping European Jews and intellectuals escape from German-occupied France and the Holocaust during World War II.
Hillel Kook, also known as Peter Bergson, was a Revisionist Zionist activist and politician.
Nieuwlande is a Dutch village located in the north-eastern province of Drenthe situated in the municipality of Hoogeveen. The population, as of 2023 is 1419. Nieuwlande is one of only two villages in the world that collectively received the Righteous Among the Nations award for its Holocaust Rescue story where nearly all of the towns residents hid and saved the lives of hundreds of Jews as well as resistance fighters and German deserters during World War II.
The Collège Cévenol—later known as Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International—was a unique and historic international secondary school located in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the département of Haute-Loire, France. It enrolled day students from the local area, along with a substantial body of regional, national, and international students from around the world who boarded at the school. The last President of its governing board was Claude Le Vu; the last director was Patrick Sellier.
Père Marie-Benoît was born Pierre Péteul. As a Capuchin Franciscan friar he helped smuggle approximately 4,000 Jews into safety from Nazi-occupied Southern France. On 1 December 1966, he was honored with the Medal of the Righteous among the Nations for his courage and self-sacrifice. His actions to save Jews during the Holocaust were the reason for his epithetFather of the Jews.
On three cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their Jewish population during the Holocaust. In other countries, notable individuals or communities created resistance during the Holocaust which helped the Jews escape some concentration camps.
Château de Chabannes was an orphanage in the village of Chabannes in Vichy France where about 400 Jewish refugee children were saved from the Holocaust by efforts of its director, Félix Chevrier and other teachers. It was operated by Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) from 1940 to 1943.
Waitstill Hastings Sharp was a Unitarian minister who was involved in humanitarian and relief work in Czechoslovakia and Southern Europe during World War II. In 2005, Sharp and his first wife Martha were named by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations, the second and third of five Americans to receive this honor.
José Arturo Castellanos Contreras was a Salvadoran Army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva during World War II, and in conjunction with Jewish-Romanian businessman György Mandl, helped save up to 40,000 Central European Jews, most of them from Hungary, from Nazi persecution by providing them with fake Salvadoran citizenship certificates.
Jacques Sémelin is a French historian and political scientist. He is a professor at Sciences Po Paris and senior researcher at the CNRS. His main fields of study are the Holocaust, mass violence, civil resistance and rescue in genocidal situations, and more recently the survival of Jews in France during the Second World War. In 1998, he created a pioneering course on genocides and massacres at Sciences Po Paris. He is the founder of the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence.
The Holocaust in France was the persecution, deportation, and annihilation of Jews between 1940 and 1944 in occupied France, metropolitan Vichy France, and in Vichy-controlled French North Africa, during World War II. The persecution began in 1940, and culminated in deportations of Jews from France to Nazi concentration camps in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland. The deportation started in 1942 and lasted until July 1944. Of the 340,000 Jews living in metropolitan/continental France in 1940, more than 75,000 were deported to death camps, where about 72,500 were murdered.
Daniel Trocmé in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France. He taught physics, chemistry and natural sciences. He became the principal of a boarding school in 1941. Daniel Trocmé got sent to different detention camps until he died in 1944 from exhaustion and sickness. He was recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France.
Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France is a 2014 book by Caroline Moorehead.
Varian's War is a 2001 joint Canadian/American/United Kingdom film made-for-television drama. The film was written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd, based on the life and wartime exploits of Varian Fry who saved more than 2,000 Jewish artists from Vichy France, the conquered ally of Nazi Germany. Varian's War stars William Hurt, heading an all-star ensemble cast of Julia Ormond, Matt Craven, Maury Chaykin, Alan Arkin and Lynn Redgrave.
Justus Rosenberg was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College. Before that, as a teenager he began playing a role in saving many lives when the Nazis overran France, working first as part of a French-American network organized to help anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists escape from Vichy France to the United States, and later as a member of the French Resistance during World War II, providing assistance as well to the US Army.
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