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

In preview

© Varian Fry Institute

What could the United States and American Jews have done to help save European Jews? And why was this not done? 'Pas sans rien fait' offers us the powerful testimony of Peter Bergson, a Palestinian Jew 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 Europe’s Jews, 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 retain 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 a Righteous Among the Nations, headed the American Relief Center which helped 2,000 people – including great artists and intellectuals, Jews or anti-Nazis – escape from France and find their way to America, despite the opposition of the American government.