The heirs – educational support for the film

On the occasion of the National Day of Remembrance for the victims and heroes of the Deportation, marking the ^75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps, the Shoah Memorial invites you to the exceptional online screening of the film Les héritiers de Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, with Ariane Ascaride, Ahmed Dramé and Léon Zyguel in his own role.

The National Day of Remembrance for the Victims and Heroes of the Deportation was established by the French Republic in 1954, on the initiative of the Réseau du Souvenir, an association that also created the Memorial of the Martyrs of the Deportation on the Ile de la Cité in Paris.

Every year, the official procession goes to the Shoah Memorial and then to the Deportation Martyrs' Memorial, before reviving the flame of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.

The distribution of the film is accompanied by educational resources, designed with the help of Anne Anglès, the teacher who inspired the film:

THE HOLOCAUST AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMP UNIVERSE

The extermination of Jews by the Nazis during World War II caused the death of about 6 million people. This genocide is called in Hebrew Shoah, catastrophe.

The persecution of Jews is an essential component of the politics of the Third Reich, based on an ancient anti-Judaism and a racial vision with political and supposedly biological foundations, justifying the existence of races and their inequality. The Jews are excluded by the Nazis from the human species and assimilated to parasites that it would be necessary to extirpate from a society now based on the supremacy of a supposed race called "Aryan". From 1941, the Jews of Europe became the target of a physical extermination on the scale of the entire continent, implemented by homicidal gassing, mass shootings and organized famine. The genocide of European Jews thus takes place on the fringes of the Nazi concentration camp system, in the killing centers of Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka, not without these criminal policies sometimes intertwining, notably at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in January 1933, a dictatorship was gradually established in Germany, suppressing freedoms and repressing opposition. The concentration camps became one of the essential instruments of terror used by the Third Reich to annihilate resistance, inculcate by force the Nazi principles, and get rid of individuals deemed harmful or deviant.

The camps thus aim to serve the ideological and security interests of the Nazi regime as it evolves.

The pogrom in November 1938, described as "Crystal Night" by Nazi propaganda, was marked by the mass arrest of German and Austrian Jews, and their internment in the camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. The survivors are released a few months later against the commitment to leave Germany permanently with their families dispossessed of their property.

After the successive annexations and the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the population of the camps expanded and became internationalized.

With the development of "total war" in 1942, the camps also served as a labor reservoir for the war industry. Destined to be murdered, hundreds of thousands of Jews are temporarily left alive to contribute to these economic objectives and integrate the concentration camp universe.

The advance of Allied troops provoked the evacuation of detainees to the heart of the Third Reich during "death marches". Of the 700,000 detainees recorded in January 1945, 250,000 to 300,000 died during these transfers due to their extreme exhaustion or were victims of massacres.

The camp of Buchenwald and its external kommandos thus became one of the main destinations of these columns, which then included more than 30,000 Jewish prisoners out of more than 110,000 registered prisoners. On 11 April 1945, the US army discovered in Buchenwald among the deported survivors a thousand Jewish children and teenagers.

The resistance in the camps

Despite the oppression, living conditions and dangers in the Nazi camps, clandestine resistance was able to establish itself, in many forms and with varying importance. It was at Buchenwald that it developed most successfully, centered around communist activists, notably managing to overthrow the prisoners of conscience in control of the internal administration, to prepare for an insurrection or to take care of the children by regrouping them and organizing solidarity in their favor to allow their survival.

LEON ZYGUEL AND HIS FAMILY

Léon ZYGUEL. Photo Coll. Serge Klarsfeld

Born in 1927 into a non-practicing Jewish family, Léon Zyguel grew up in the 11th^th Arrondissement de Paris. The occupation and the first roundups mark the end of insouciance for Léon and his five brothers and sisters. His father, Aron, was rounded up on August 20, 1941. His mother resolved to move her children to the southern zone. Arrested in the Landes near the demarcation line, the 4 largest including Léon are interned at the camp of Mérignac. One of Léon’s brothers, Marcel, manages to escape. With Maurice, born in 1925, and Hélène born in 1922, Léon is transferred to the camp of Drancy where he finds his father Aron.

Then transferred to the Pithiviers camp, they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp by the convoy of 21 September 1942. Hélène is gassed upon arrival. Aron, Maurice, and Léon are selected for forced labor. Aron, whose fragile health is deteriorating due to the conditions of detention, is murdered. In January 1945, the two brothers were evacuated during the "death marches" to the Buchenwald camp. Placed under the protection of communist detainees, they joined the clandestine organization and took part in the liberation of the camp on 11 April 1945.

Driven by his desire to preserve his dignity, and his pride in passing from the status of racial deportee to that of resistance fighter, Léon returned to Paris in May 1945. At the age of 18, he is reunited with Maurice, his mother and 3 of his brothers and sister. He became a leather worker, married and lived in Montreuil where he continued his militant commitment within the Communist Party. Revulsed by racism and negationism, he actively participates in the transmission of the memory of the Shoah and testifies at the Papon trial in January 1998. He was one of the initiators of the Tlemcen Committee in Paris to bring the memory of deported Jewish children. He died in January 2015.

MINI-QUESTIONNAIRE:

• What is the difference between Auschwitz and Buchenwald?
• What are the main stages of Léon Zyguel’s life?
• At the camp, how was solidarity organized to help the "children of Buchenwald"?
• Among the "children of Buchenwald," mention a few personalities who have become famous.
• Which competition does the teacher want her students to take part in? When was it created?
• What sources does the class rely on to nourish its reflection and work?

• What are the cinematic means used to show that we go from a class made of antagonistic students to a group federated and mobilized to reach the end of its project?

ANNE ANGLÈS VIDEO:

Anne Anglès, teacher of history and geography, looks back on the educational project conducted as part of the National Competition of Resistance and Deportation in 2008-2009, at the origin of the film Les héritiers.