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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.
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 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.
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.
Sauvage 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-Tongue. Sauvage 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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© Copyright 2017, Chambon Foundation. All rights reserved. Revised: May 7, 2017