For eight years, documentary director Sophie Nahum has been meeting the last survivors of the Shoah, in order to collect their precious testimony on video. In short sequences broadcast on social networks, these former deportees retrace their history, revisit the mechanisms that allowed this genocide to exist, and tell their vision of current society. After October 7 and the impressive rise in anti-Semitic acts in France, the director continued to give them a voice, like “a cry of warning” sent to the entire society. Interview.
L’Express: Since October 7, you have continued to collect the testimony of Holocaust survivors and their families. Why do you think this work is more necessary than ever?
Sophie Nahum: For a long time, I have noticed that we generally talk about the Shoah on television or in history classes as an event belonging purely to the past, recounting the facts, the places, the figures… And by refusing to talk about what remains in our societies today. I realized when meeting the survivors that they were healthy examples for young people, not only because they had survived the camps, but because they had moved forward in life after that, starting from less than nothing. , and with absolute courage, elegance, and dignity. But there is often a misunderstanding about why they are testifying. It’s not so that we cry with them, or have empathy towards the Jewish community. It’s a cry of warning. Now more than ever, because they felt that the issue of anti-Semitism was not resolved.
What did these witnesses tell you about the rise of anti-Semitism in France?
This terrifies them, and it doesn’t even date from October 7. For example, there is Lucette, an Auschwitz survivor who tells me that in 2014, there was a demonstration under her windows in the middle of Paris, in which people shouted “death to the Jews”. What shocks her is not that people are shouting this slogan, because she knows it exists, but rather that no one around reacts. What made the Shoah possible was active and passive collaboration: the fact that we could hate and harass Jews without causing anyone to react. Anti-Semitism in France has risen slowly, with triggering events: when you see that Mohammed Merah kills children at point blank range in a Jewish school in 2012 and that no one takes to the streets to be offended anymore, that announces a certain collapse.
The current political situation also worries the survivors a lot: when they see that Marine Le Pen is reaching the second round of the presidential elections, it frightens them. Especially since they are aware that the threat no longer comes only from the extreme right: there have been accommodations on the left which were not acceptable, and we must be vigilant in the face of all provocations, hence let them come.
What was the reaction of the Holocaust survivors you met after the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel?
It’s a shock. And what shocked them the most was that there was not five minutes of unanimous condemnation of these acts. From the start, the victims had for some become the culprits. Since then, many witnesses have spoken to me very clearly about the fright, the return of nightmares, but above all the loneliness. The feeling of having preached, told, and still being so alone.
“There is a total liberation of anti-Semitic speech”
What came out a lot in the messages I received, particularly from descendants, was also the relief that their grandparents or parents were no longer there to witness this. We must remember that some survivors never spoke about the camps, sometimes hid their Judaism from their children, and converted because they were afraid, long after the war. The descendants thought they were missing the point, traumatized by what they had experienced. Today many understand that they were right, in a way, to hide their religion from their neighbors or to change the name on their mailbox.
Do you think October 7 had an impact on the way the subject of the Shoah is treated in France, and if so what impact?
All taboos have been overcome, there are no longer any limits. Let’s say that before October 7, we could not directly take on Holocaust survivors, or even people who work on the subject. This is now the case. On social networks, I saw people directly threatening witnesses – without even telling you about me and my commitment. There is a total liberation of anti-Semitic speech, all the barriers have been broken. There is almost a satisfaction among some in saying that ultimately it was “deserved”, that “Hitler did not finish the job”, that “too many survivors returned from the camps”, with a new obsession with treating the Jews or the survivors of “Nazis”…
Before, we had a few negationists, a few nazillons that I blocked or reported. But this is something else, it has become more frequent, stronger. We also feel a certain uneasiness about broaching the subject of the Shoah. There is self-censorship, people who avoid inviting us, asking us for conferences, for example.
In your opinion, are there any positions or events in the past year that have undermined this status of the Holocaust?
I think that the bias of some people not to show solidarity on what happened on October 7 opened the door to everything. The immediate putting into perspective of what happened was terrible, and the collapse for us is precisely here. Current anti-Semitism is, in my opinion, not a matter of religion, of kippahs, of mezuzahs in front of doors, but rather a matter of clan, as if one had to choose a side, and risk catching a wave of hatred as soon as that we condemn what happened on October 7. In this context, even talking about the Shoah has become problematic, even fascist, as if it placed us directly in the camp of the extremists… While my approach is universalist, the Shoah is a paradigm for all of humanity.
I work on the genocidal phenomenon and the mechanisms that make it possible, and suddenly what I do is associated with something ghettoized. I, who have heard so many testimonies about small compromises, small passive collaborations, have the impression of experiencing all this since October 7 – the ease with which people turn a blind eye to certain declarations and certain biases makes me scandalizes and frightens me.