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Varian Fry "Weapons of the Spirit"

                         PIERRE SAUVAGE

 

Pierre Sauvage is a child survivor of the Holocaust and a child of Holocaust survivors (at right in the arms of Eva Héritier of Le Chambon).  An Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Sauvage is the President of the Chambon Foundation, which he founded in 1982.  The Chambon Foundation was the first nonprofit educational foundation committed to exploring and communicating the necessary and challenging lessons of hope intertwined with the Holocaust’s unavoidable lessons of despair.  In 2005, the Varian Fry Institute was established as a division of the Chambon Foundation.

Sauvage (at left in 1990 with Le Chambon righteous Marie Brottes and Henri Héritier) is best known for his 1989-2019 feature documentary Weapons of the Spirit, which tells the story the conspiracy of goodness of a mountain community in France that defied the Nazis and took in and saved five thousand Jews, including Sauvage and his parents.  Sauvage himself was born in this unique Christian oasis, Le Chambon, 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. 

W
eapons 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 received two national prime-time broadcasts on P.B.S., accompanied by Bill Moyers’ probing 1990 interview of the filmmaker, and remains one of the most widely used documentary teaching tools on the Holocaust.  A remastered widescreen and high-definition edtion of the film will be released in 2017.

2020 will also see the release of his documentary Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and Holocaust (left), as well as Sauvage's 1979 Yiddish: the Mother Tongue, the Emmy-winning portrait of a unique and tenacious language and culture. Also seeing release in 2019 are the two-part documentary We Were There—Christians and the Holocaust.

Varian Fry

Upcoming and long in post-production is And Crown Thy Good--Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis, 1940-1941 (right), a feature documentary about Americans involved in rescue in Marseille, France, after France fell to the Nazis.  While celebrating some remarkable Americans—Varian Fry (right), Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, Charles Fawcett, Leon Ball and Hiram Bingham IV—the documentary will place the story in the context of those challenging times, addressing American policies then towards the unwanted refugees.

 

Mary Jayne Gold and Pierre SauvageSauvage has also long had plans for a dramatic movie also dealing with the Varian Fry rescue mission but based on Mary Jayne Gold's flavorful memoir, Crossroads Marseilles 1940, the rights to which the author willed to Sauvage.  Mary Jayne Gold (left, and right with Sauvage, during production of And Crown Thy Good), a beautiful heiress, participated in the mission, while at the same time having an affair with a young French gangster.  The book was published in France in 2001 as Marseille Année 40  to unanimous acclaim, with Sauvage contributing an afterward.

 

In June 2004, Sauvage initiated and played a key role in organizing a "Liberation Reunion" (picture, left) that took place in Le Chambon 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.  Shortly after his election as the new President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy made time to view Weapons of the Spirit and called it "deeply moving."  In 2013, Sauvage participated with Weapons of the Spirit in the inauguration of the historical museum that now exists in Le Chambon.


The son of prominent French journalist and author Léo Sauvage, Sauvage was 4 when he and his parents moved to New York City in 1948, returning to Paris at 18 to pursue his studies. After working briefly as a journalist
like his father, the Sorbonne drop-out fell in love with film at Paris’ legendary Cinémathèque Française, becoming a film scholar and landing a job there working for the legendary genius Henri Langlois.  Veteran émigré producer Otto Preminger brought Sauvage back to New York as a story editor.

After co-authoring a two-volume critical study of American film directors, American Directors, Sauvage finally got behind the camera himself as a staff producer-reporter for Los Angeles public television station KCET. While producing over 30 hours of varied programming, his first major success came when he decided to begin exploring those Jewish roots he’d never known in
Yiddish: the Mother-TongueSauvage lives in Los Angeles.  He and his wife, entertainment lawyer Barbara M. Rubin, have two children, activist and filmmaker David Sauvage and film editor Rebecca Sauvage.

A lecturer on the Holocaust and its continuing challenges, for over thirty years, Sauvage has been a student of what he has called the American experience of the Holocaust.  His address Did Americans Fight the Holocaust? tackles this thorny subject, drawing notably on his current documentaries—and urging us to look in as well as out.

The subject is also woven into his video-accompanied presentation The Challenge To Us of Holocaust Rescuers.  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.  Sauvage’s lecturing and public appearances, with and without Weapons of the Spirit or excerpts from his other works, are all under the Chambon Foundation/Varian Fry Institute's auspices and help supports their projects.

Texts and addresses by Pierre Sauvage
Public appearances by Pierre Sauvage


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