To a full crowd in the Granoff Family Hillel Center last night, Tufts Hillel screened a documentary about a French chateau in which 400 Jewish children were saved from the ravages of World War II.
Titled "The Children of Chabannes," the film, directed by Lisa Gossels and Dean Weatherill, was presented as part of Holocaust Commemoration Week. Just over an hour and a half long, it opened with interviews of surviving "children" from the chateau.
Situated in the central French region of Creuse, in what was then-unoccupied France, Chabannes was a small town of roughly 300 residents. (Today, its cow population outnumbers its human one.) The chateau was one of four in the region that housed foreign Jewish children.
Along with his younger brother Warner, Gossels' father, Peter - a doctor in Newton, Mass. who attended the screening - was one of the children at Chabannes. Gossels was inspired by her father's story (and the 1996 reunion of the children, now elderly, in Chabannes) to make the film.
The chateau's goal was to offer a refuge to the children in which they could live and be educated, and to offer them an atmosphere in which they could have a childhood as close to "normal" as possible.
Felix Chevrier, the man who ran the chateau, was portrayed in the documentary as someone who had a genuine passion for the children. He showed them kindness and served as their father figure.
"He saved them because they were Jewish and because they were children," one of the now-elderly children from Chabannes said in the film.
The film presented various still photographs taken from Chevrier's journals, as well as journal entries and drawings made by the children.
One man described Chabannes as a place where children could play, learn and grow both intellectually and physically. Indeed, the children were integrated into the local school system and were taught French.
But life at Chabannes was not easy. In the film, one woman recalled her arrival at the chateau, telling the camera that she cried for 23 straight nights because of the separation from her mother.
"It was a dismal place," said another woman of the chateau. The children would horde their food and bread in their beds, attracting rats. The same woman complained of the chateau's dilapidated structure and said that the paint was peeling off its walls.
Another man said that while things were certainly not as bad as they could have been, he and his chateau-dwelling peers were still fairly hungry. Living mainly on a diet of turnips, chickpeas, bread and whatever could be gathered in the area, he said the children were "hungry but not starved."
One educator at Chabannes, Gorges Loinger, believed that the children should have the highest level of physical and mental strength so that if they were "sent to the East to work," they would survive.
He didn't just train his students in physical education; he taught them how to resist and how to run, jump and climb in order to escape if need be.
As the film progressed, so did the march of history. In 1942, Vichy - the capital of unoccupied France - decreed that Jewish children could not be integrated into the village's school.
Things got worse for the children of Chabannes later that year, when every region of France was required to round up a quota of foreign Jews and turn them over to the police.
In the documentary, one then-child from Chabannes said that he "did not feel fear [at Chabannes] until a big bus came from Vichy." The bus was sent to take the chateau's older children to labor camps in other parts of France, and then Germany.
In total, 12 boys were taken away from the chateau on that bus. Six were released thanks to the efforts of the OSE, a humanitarian organization, but of the remaining six, only two survived.
One of these two survivors was interviewed for the film.
"We were living skeletons," he said against a backdrop of black-and-white photographs of starving children in Nazi camps. He described his constant moving from one labor camp to another.
"In the end, we were sent to more and more camps until we couldn't work any more, and then we were sent to Auschwitz," said one of the two surviving men from Chabannes' bus round-up. He described how he survived 13 rounds of selections at Auschwitz by burying his head in human excrement in the bathroom until the selection processes were over.
Back at Chabannes, the round ups continued. Chevrier helped to hide the children in nearby forests when the police came with lists of names. Slowly, one by one, the OSE helped the children escape to Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United States.
The extensive underground network that was run by the OSE finally left the chateau at Chabannes empty - meaning that the police were coming to round up children who had already escaped.
The documentary concluded by updating the status of the survivors who were interviewed. The film was inspired by a 1996 reunion of the surviving children in Chabannes.
In a short question session directly following the screening, Gossels and her father Peter fielded inquiries from the mainly student audience ranging from filming techniques and the experience of living in Chabannes as a child during WWII.
Gossels' father Peter spoke briefly about his experience at Chabannes.
"There was not a lot of Judaism," he said to the crowd. "It wasn't a religious community, but we did have some events. We all knew we were Jewish and we felt Jewish."
He also talked about the way the rest of his life panned out: After leaving the chateau, he and his brother were housed with families in Wayland, Mass.
"I consider myself very, very lucky because I had an American education," he said. "I came here when I was 11, and I was able to compete the same way you all are competing."
Gossels' also spoke about the filming techniques she used in making her documentary. She also discussed the cooperation of the people of Chabannes back when she was filming in 1996.
"The whole town joined in making the film, and we all worked very hard," she said. "As a result of the film, the village school was honored with Felix Chevrier's name."
