Weapons of the Spirit will be available again soon!
Please see Weapons of the Spirit.

Upcoming public appearance

Pierre Sauvage: A Year That Mattered
Varian Fry, Mary Jayne Gold,
and Other Americans Who Cared,
Marseille, 1940-1941

Temple Israel of Hollywood
Yom Hashoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day
Monday, April 17, 2023, 6:30pm

The real story behind the fictionalized Netflix series Transatlantic.

In 1940-41, after France fell to the Nazis—and while Nazi Jewish policies transitioned from expulsion to murder—a New York intellectual named Varian Fry led a private Marseille-based American rescue effort that defied American anti-refugee policies and helped save some 2,000 people—many of them among the creative giants of Europe.

The Fry mission is the subject of Sauvage’s upcoming documentary, A Year That Mattered: Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis, Marseille 1940-41, which he began filming when many of the principals were still around to provide testimony. The rescue effort and a controversial recent novel are also said to have inspired the fanciful new Netflix limited series, Transatlantic.                                                                   

Sauvage is himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, having been born and sheltered in the Christian oasis of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, as he recounted in his highly acclaimed documentary Weapons of the Spirit, which will soon be available again in a remastered 2023 edition.

Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust

upcoming hour-long documentary by Pierre Sauvage

Another largely unrecognized hero of that time is a man named Hillel Kook, a Jew from pre-Israel Palestine, who called himself Peter Bergson upon arriving in the U.S. in 1940. The challenging hour-long documentary Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust—which notably addresses the issue of how American Jews and their leaders responded to the crisis—is freely available for viewing through September at Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust.

“The U.S. and the Holocaust is sad, whereas Not Idly By is angry.
Bergson rages with a Hebrew prophet’s fury.”
Dara Horn's review of The U.S. and the Holocaust in The Atlantic

Marie Brenner and Pierre Sauvage on: trouble-makers; President Roosevelt; Rabbi Stephen Wise (2010, Museum of Jewish Heritage, 3 min.)

And soon, Weapons of the Spirit—remastered 2023 edition

DuPont Columbia Documentary Award—shared with Ken Burns’ epic The Civil War series

While “the U.S. slammed its doors,” as Weapons of the Spirit first recalled in 1989,
one small community in Nazi-occupied France engaged in a conspiracy of goodness.
The filmmaker returns to the area Le Chambon-sur-Lignon where he was born and sheltered.