Documentary
Timewatch Friday 27 April
9:00pm - 9:50pm
BBC2
3/5 - The Hidden Children
When the Vichy government in France collaborated with the Nazis, it was similarly implacable in its persecution of Jewish people. Entire families were deported to concentration camps from France. But some children were rescued and concealed by sympathetic French men and women. In a series of moving films and interviews, Timewatch cameras follow four survivors as they return to places of enormous personal significance. For one elderly man, it's the French railway station where, at the age of 12, as an uncle hustled him to the countryside away from the Nazis, he last saw his brother. For another, it's the church tower of a country school where he hid when soldiers came to look for him and a handful of other Jewish children. One lady looks out of the window of her childhood home, where she and her family hourly awaited arrest by Nazi soldiers. When they finally did turn up, she recalls her father's chilling words. "He said, 'They're here', and everything stopped." This lady was lucky - a neighbour saved her. Thirty thousand children escaped in such ways, though many more were not so fortunate, and the programme is interspersed with readings from heartbreaking letters written by deported children who knew what awaited them at the camps. Yet those who survived often did so at enormous personal cost. Suzanne Rappoport surveys a French memorial which bears the names of her murdered parents: "Everything was stolen [from me]. My education, my childhood, my family above all. A name on a wall for a life. It's nothing."
RT reviewer - Alison Graham
VIDEO Plus+: 327094
Subtitled, Widescreen
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