Read the Telegraph’s 4/5 review of My Family, The Holocaust and Me, episode 2 – where Holocaust Matter’s Noemie Lopian traces her mother’s journey through WWII.
Through her journey, Noemie visits a former prison in Annemasse, France. It was here her mother, a child at the time, was arrested by the Gestapo during an attempted flee to Switzerland.
The Telegraph’s Review
Noemie Lopian, who wanted to discover what had happened to her mother, Renee, in Vichy France. Renee was still alive, and appeared in the film, but found it too painful to delve into her memory. It was only seven years ago that Noemie realised her mother was a Holocaust survivor.
In 1942, the authorities began rounding up Jews. A neighbour hid Noemie’s mother and her siblings in his garden shed. Noemie revisited the scene and tried to imagine it: “Children hiding for hours knowing people were coming to catch them, to kill them… how damaging that must have been.”
By 1944, the situation was deemed too dangerous and 10-year-old Renee and her siblings set off without their parents, 300 miles across Nazi-occupied France, for the safety of Switzerland. A 21-year-old resistance fighter, Marianne Cohn, who had saved nearly 200 other children, attempted to lead them across the border in a truck. But they were caught. A local historian described the terrifying scene: German police with dogs, machine guns and spotlights trained on a group of children. Despite their age, they were interrogated for days with guns to their heads. Marianne was led into the forest and executed, having refused to give up any information.
They were stories of horror, but also of bravery and, as Rinder eloquently put it, of “light, truth and resilience”.
Read the review: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2020/11/16/family-holocaust-episode-2-reviewa-difficult-vital-watch/
