"Not without doing nothing: Peter Bergson, the United States and the Shoah" by Pierre Sauvage Retrospective around the documentary work of Pierre Sauvage

In preview

© Varian Fry Institute

What could the United States and American Jews have done to help save the Jews of Europe? And why was this not done? "Not without doing nothing" offers us the powerful testimony of Peter Bergson, a Jew from Palestine who arrived in the United States in 1940 and founded the Bergson Group which did everything possible, starting at the end of 1942, to place Americans – and American Jews – before their responsibilities. "We have lost the war," he says. We could not stop the destruction of the Jews of Europe, but we could have mitigated it, we could have made it smaller.  This film is built around the only two interviews that Peter Bergson gave, to Laurence Jarvik as well as to Claude Lanzmann (who did not include the interview in Shoah).

Varian Fry in Marseille: the refugee crisis, 1940-41

© Varian Fry Institute

This screening will be followed by the screening of excerpts from the working copy of the documentary that Pierre Sauvage will devote in 2020 to the Fry mission in Marseille in 1940-1941.

Varian Fry, the first American honored as Righteous among the nations, led the American Relief Center which helped 2,000 people – including great Jewish or anti-Nazi artists and intellectuals – to escape from France and find their way to America, despite the opposition of the American government.