In the New York Times, A.O. Scott spoke of 'The Children of Chabannes' as “A moving record of the unassuming, uncompromising heroism of ordinary people.” The film tells the true story of 400 Jewish children who were separated from their parents during World War II and ended up together as refugees in an unlikely bucolic little village in unoccupied France. 'The Children of Chabannes' is timeless in its themes of love, courage, and our collective desire for meaning. It reminds us - as we always need to be reminded - of the importance in overcoming the fear and passivity that sometimes prevent us from doing what we know is right.
In this year, the tenth anniversary of your Emmy-award winning documentary, could you take us back and tell us how you found yourself making such a film?
In 1996, I was working with a director/producer named Dean Wetherell, making corporate films for Verizon. We were talking about making a documentary together when my father told me about a reunion in Chabannes bringing "the children" of Chabannes together with the people who saved them during World War Two. My father Peter and uncle Werner were 8 and 5 and living in Berlin when their mother, Charlotte, made the brave decision to send her sons to France in September of 1939. She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. My father and uncle were 2 of the more than 400 Jewish refugee children saved in Chabannes during the war.
My father learned about the reunion from two extraordinary women, sisters named Reine and Renee Paillassou, who were local schoolteachers in Chabannes when the war broke out. My father sought out Reine and Renee in the 60s, to thank them for helping to save them during the war. And, when I lived in Paris after college they became my surrogate grand aunts. Long before I knew I would become a documentarian, I thought they would make amazing subjects for a movie. True heroes and heroines see themselves as ordinary people. These women were extraordinary.
Reine and Renee not only sent my parents the information about the reunion, which was to take place four weeks from the day they received the letter. The sisters also enclosed a contact sheet with the "children" and their saviors who had stayed connected thanks to the child welfare agency in France that helped saved them, and still exists today: l"Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (O.S.E.) After speaking with my father, I called the Paillassou sisters and some of the survivors who were living in the U.S.--and quickly learned there was a much bigger story than a reunion: a story about people risking their lives and livelihoods to save so many Jewish refugee children, simply because they were children.
I called Dean as he was driving to Home Depot and told him what I'd learned. And, within the course of 15 minutes, we decided to put a good chunk of our life's savings into not only filming the reunion in Chabannes, but in telling the larger story. We spent 6 weeks filming and doing research in France. And, what emerged was a story with characters who still move me to my core. Of teachers and townspeople and resistance fighters who followed their conscience, and not popular politics, to save the mostly orphaned Jewish children.
Did you hear much about the war as a child? Did your father talk of this often? I wonder if it was difficult for these people to tell their stories, and if the town itself was interested in remembering this...
I had a sense of my father's story from a very young age but didn't know many of the details before Dean and I started filming. Growing up, the idea of my father's story informed my identity and sense of personal history. That, from the age of 8 my father was a caretaker of his younger brother, that they embodied the spirit of self-made Americans, emigrating to the U.S. at age 12 and 9 (thanks to the Joint Distribution Committee and the American Friends Service Committee) and lived in foster homes in Brookline, MA. That my father went to Harvard and Harvard Law School on scholarship at a time when universities had quotas about how many Jews they would accept. My father is not someone who dwells in the past. He is a pragmatist. Because he was never in a concentration camp, he doesn't consider himself a survivor. Perhaps for this reason, the weight of the Holocaust, of his past, wasn't present in my daily life. He and my mother, Nancy, made a home in Wayland, MA, where my father has been the Town Moderator, an elected position, for more than 25 years. My father still practices law in Boston. The only time I remember seeing my father cry was when we went to Auschwitz, and later, Yad Vashem--when he learned for the first time, the train my grandmother was on and that she was exterminated the day she arrived at Auschwitz. Until that day, even though it defied all reason, on some level my father hoped that his mother was still alive.
So, my father did not talk a lot about his childhood. (I am named after his mother, Charlotte, whom people used to call Lotte.) He is not able to watch films about the Holocaust (except for "The Children of Chabannes:) because revisiting that part of his past is too painful for him. (Chabannes is a more celebratory film.) My father is someone who believes in being a productive member of society. His response to his own personal tragedy wasn't to feel sorry for himself or bitter, but to make family a priority, to embrace an inclusive and progressive form of Judaism, to be involved in social justice and cultural institutions and to to give back through philanthropy.
The reason my parents, aunt and uncle went to the reunion was to give thanks to the individuals who saved them. That was the spirit in which my father participated in the movie.
For others in the movie, particularly Jerry Gerard and Wolfgang Blumenreich, who both survived more than 13 concentration camps, telling their stories was not easy. Dean and I were very sensitive about what our line of questioning would evince. By the 90s, many of the "children" of Chabannes, including Norbert Bikales and Ruth Keller, felt a sense of obligation to bear witness. At the time we were filming in 1996, some of the characters in the movie had shared their life stories with Steven Spielbergs Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Project. I do know that my being a daughter of one of the children, and Dean being so compassionate as a director, made gaining everyone's trust much easier. In fact, when we were filming in Chabannes, really a hamlet of a town called St. Pierre de Fursac in La Creuse region of France (three hours South of Paris), the whole town turned out to help us.
A charming and generous couple, Andre (Dede) and Ginette Lelong, were extraordinary to our crew on our two shoots in the region in 1996. Dede was a contemporary of the Jewish children and remembered them very clearly. Dede was our constant companion and guide and helped with all aspect of filming. If we needed a location, he found it. If we needed to meet people who had memories of the Jewish children during that period of the war, he found them. When we needed a vintage 1939 typewriter for some recreation footage he found it. In turn, Ginette cooked the most magnificent meals for our crew, culling cepes and morel mushrooms and other delicacies from her garden, and sharing wine from their wine cellar. Others, including the mayor at the time, Raoul Vaugelade, also helped in our research. On one sunny day, he helped wrangle a heard of Limousin cattle into the sunlight for a shot we wanted to get. Ninette Lelong, whose father was a schoolteacher in Chabannes during the war, also was incredibly generous throughout our filming.
We also had the privilege of getting to know Georges Loinger, a Jewish resistance fighter and physical education teacher who worked in many OSE homes and helped save over 1,000 Jewish refugee children during the war. And, Jewish Rachel Pludermacher, who took care of the younger children in the home and taught them to be stronger than their fear.
Did making this film have any effect on you in terms of how you thought of war or conflict?
What quickly emerged in filming the teachers, OSE staff and townspeople was that they were incredibly brave but didn't see themselves as brave. They did what their consciences told them to do based on the circumstances that faced them. They not only saved the children. The OSE and an organization called ORT, gave the young Jewish people training in professions so that they could use during and after the war. Many of the children of Chabannes joined the French resistance after they left the chateau. The bonds the "children" have are deep and many are still connected today. I would say they are all thankful. If they were angry, and they have the right to be as so many were orphaned because of the Nazi and Vichy regimes, they didn't express it to us. What we found with all of them was great humanity, sadness and, in some cases, trauma. But, more gratitude that they were saved. And, appreciation for their savoirs.
In the 1940s, Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil," the idea that ordinary people committed extraordinary crimes during the Second World War by either directly perpetrating crimes or turning a blind eye when they could have helped to save lives. "The Children of Chabannes" is a antidote to the banality of evil. It is a film about a group of people who risked their lives and livelihoods to help Jewish children, simply because they felt it was the right thing to do. Dean and I made "The Children of Chabannes" after films like "Night and Fog," "Shoah," "The Sorrow and the Pity" had been made, which spoke to the horrors of the concentration camps and the indifference of people in Germany and Poland to the plight of the Jews. Because so much documentatation already existed about the horrors of the Shoah, Dean and I had "permission" to focus on the positive. On the goodness that came out of this dark period in history. Annette Indsorf referred to "The Children of Chabannes" as a "celebratory Holocaust film" in her book "Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust." In his review of the movie in The New Republic, Stanley Kauffman said of Chabannes, "It's not a film about the mystery of evil, but an equally important mystery: the mystery of good."
As a Jewish documentarian, making a film about the Israeli Palestinian conflict for the past 7 years, I believe one of our questions as Jews is "how do we live with the legacy of the Holocaust?" Do we stay rooted in the suffering of the past or do we work on social justice and bettering the entire world in the present? My documentaries are about the best in us and about what is possible.