"Not Idly By: Peter Bergson and the Holocaust" (documentary short)

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NOT IDLY BY Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust
a documentary short by Pierre Sauvage (40 min., Varian Fry Institute, 2010)

WORLD PREMIERE: Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival, Jerusalem Cinematheque, Dec. 13, 2009
NEW YORK PREMIERE: Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, March 21, 2010

We said we didn't know.
We said we couldn't have done anything even if we had known.

Peter Bergson, a militant Jew from Palestine,
led a controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust.

This is his testimony.

UPCOMING SCREENINGS

PHILADELPHIA
40th Anniversary Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches
Crisis & Credibility in the Jewish Christian World: Remembering Franklin Littell
Saint Joseph's University, March 6- 8, 2010
Plenary session, Monday, March 8, 9:30-11:00am: Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, and discussion with Pierre Sauvage

NEW YORK
Pierre Sauvage Retrospective, Museum of Jewish Heritage
* Wednesday, March 17, 6:30 pm, Yiddish: The Mother Tongue (1979-2009, revised 30th anniversary edition), 56 min. Order tickets online
* Thursday, March 18, 6:30 pm, Weapons of the Spirit (1989-2010), 90 min. Order tickets online
* Sunday, March 21, 2010, 2pm, excerpts from feature work-in-progress And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille (2011), followed by
Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (2009), 40 min. Order tickets online
Post-screening discussion with Pierre Sauvage interviewed by author and Vanity Fair writer-at-large Marie Brenner
This film presents the challenging testimony of a militant Palestinian Jew who spent the war years in the U.S. leading a group that struggled to make saving the Jews of Europe an American objective. The controversial Peter Bergson is given his posthumous say as he castigates American Jewish leaders at the time for failing to rise to the occasion and pressure the American government to save European Jews.

LOS ANGELES
Monday, April 12, 7pm
Temple Israel of Hollywood Yom Hashoah/Holocaust Commemoration service
address by Pierre Sauvage and Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust

    COMMENTS

During World War II, Peter Bergson led the single most effective public campaign to press the U. S. government to try to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. This excellent film, meticulously assembled by Pierre Sauvage, presents Bergson’s own powerful testimony about the obstruction that he and his group met—and about the very limited commitment to rescue that was finally extracted from the Roosevelt Administration.
    Dr. David S. Wyman, historian, author, The Abandonment of the Jews and co-author, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust

A provocative film about a provocative man who is finally given his full say for history on one of the enduring questions of the Shoah: What could have been done by the U.S. and its allies and by American Jews to save the Jews of Europe—and why wasn’t it done. Bergson presents his views boldly and Pierre Sauvage has empowered him for posterity.
    Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust scholar, served as project director in the creation of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The film—of the utmost importance—shines a bright light on a shamefully neglected aspect of the tormented and at the same time uplifting story of the Jewish people.
Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill's official biographer, and one of Britain's leading historians

This provocative film will open festering wounds that need to be pierced to form a scab of healing. No one who witnesses this cautionary tale will leave unmoved.
Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis

Bergson’s voice resounds, his passion challenges anew, as he warns that massive abuses of human life will rage with impunity as long as people of all kinds are silent, fearful, and busy with other news. By remembering the past, Bergson and Sauvage rightly hold all of us accountable in the present and for the future.
Dr. John K. Roth, Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy; Founding Director, The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College

This brilliant, galvanizing, and profoundly moving documentary celebrates Peter Bergson's vigorous efforts to end the silence and the
slaughter that defined the Holocaust.
Dr. Blanche Wiesen Cook, historian

Pierre Sauvage's new documentary means much to all those who work for remembering the Tragedy.
Elie Wiesel

A fascinating and powerful film about a man whose words and actions were, tragically, ignored.
Bernard Weinraub, author, The Accomplices, a play about Peter Bergson and those times in America

Documents the agonizing efforts by Bergson, a militant Palestinian Jew, to arouse America in the early 1940s to the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews. Based largely on interviews with Bergson decades later, the documentary chronicles his rare triumphs, but mainly his inability to break through the don’t-make-waves mentality of the Jewish establishment, hostility of the U.S. State Department and political caution of President Roosevelt. Director Pierre Sauvage (Weapons of the Spirit), noting current threats facing the Jewish people, observed “How can we meet the challenges of the future, if we don’t examine the failures of the past?”
Tom Tugend, Jewish Journal, Los Angeles, April 15, 2009

An insightful filmmaker’s vision of this legendary man.
All About Jewish Theatre: L. A. Celebrates Peter Bergson

PAST SCREENINGS

Lessons and Legacies Holocaust scholars’ conference, Nov 1, 2009 (paper and excerpts from work-in-progress)
American Jewish University, Los Angeles, March 18, 2009 (full work-in-progress screening), under the auspices of Dr. Michael Berenbaum, with Pierre Sauvage
Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, work-in-progress screening, April 26, 2009, with Pierre Sauvage
Temple Valley Beth Shalom, work-in-progress screening, Encino, CA, May 11, 2009, 7:30pm, followed by panel discussion with Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, and Pierre Sauvage
Association of Holocaust Organizations convention, work-in-progress screening, June 8, 2009, Chapman University, Orange, CA, with Pierre Sauvage

Other documentaries, past and future, by Pierre Sauvage:
Weapons of the Spirit—20^th anniversary edition!
Yiddish: the Mame-Loshn—30th anniversary DVD edition of the Emmy Award-winning documentary, to be released in 2010
And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille—upcoming in 2011
long-in-the-making feature documentary about the most successful private American rescue effort of World War II

Peter Bergson in Not Idly By :

"We cannot resurrect the dead. Eighty-five or ninety percent of those that Hitler wanted to kill were killed. What we can do and what we must do is reexamine ourselves.

I am the last one on earth to condone the passivity of the political leadership of the United States—with President Roosevelt at the head—and of Great Britain, and of the Soviet Union, itself in a state of occupation by a tyrant.

But the people who should have dramatized, shook up, awakened the... otherwise busy, like Ben Hecht's ballad [see above and below]—'the world is busy with other news'—the otherwise 'unrealizing' world leadership to what's going on should have been the Jewish leaders. They knew the Jews were being killed. But the grasp wasn't there.

You couldn’t have stopped the massacre. You could have slowed the massacre. You could have made it an inefficient massacre. The people who made it efficient were the Allies who didn’t interfere. And the people who didn’t urge them to interfere were the Jews.

Jews should begin not by screaming, 'While they're murdering six million Jews, the Gentiles stood idly by.' They should say, 'We stood idly by.'"

Most Americans—even many American Jews—believe that we didn’t know. Many assume that we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known. Meet Peter Bergson!

Until 1941 Nazi Germany had persecuted and sought to expel the Jews. But the doors of the West had remained closed to them. It was only then that the free nations of the world had faced a new Nazi policy: mass murder of the Jews of Europe.

A Palestinian Jew who had served with the nationalist Irgun organization in pre-Israel Palestine, Peter Bergson (born Hillel Kook, 1915-2001), had come to the U.S. in 1940. In America, this firebrand led what came to be known as the Bergson Group, whose strenuous efforts from 1942 to 1945 underscore just how much was known—and how much was attempted during those difficult years.

Vilified at the time—American Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise reportedly characterized him as “equally as great an enemy of the Jews as Hitler,” while others castigated the group as fascist or terrorist—Bergson remains a controversial yet relatively obscure figure in the history of America and the Holocaust.

Not Idly By—currently nearing release and available for film festival screenings—provides the riveting first-hand testimony of the charismatic and eloquent Bergson, who comments on the response to the crisis by non-European Jews and describes his determined efforts to fight the Holocaust: the innovative and provocative full-page political ads in major newspapers, the poignant, assertive 1943 Ben Hecht/Kurt Weill pageant We Will Never Die, the rabbis’ march in Washington before Yom Kippur 1943, the creation of various activist committees and the energetic and productive lobbying of American government officials that ultimately helped lead to the establishment at last of a U.S. rescue agency. This is a one-sided view of those times: Peter Bergson’s.

Coincidentally, Bergson is also the posthumous star of the 2009 Simon Wiesenthal Center feature documentary, Against the Tide. Has Peter Bergson's time come at last? With his help, can we break through the taboos that shroud the American experience—and the American Jewish experience—of that challenging time in history? Do Americans--Jewish and non-Jewish--not need to consider and probe further our share of responsibility in the massacre of the Jews of Europe? How can we expect to meet tomorrow’s challenges effectively if we don’t probe our related failures in the past?

Both Bergson documentaries (Sauvage’s has been in the works since 2007) draw on the unused interview shot by Claude Lanzmann in 1978 for his epic 1985 Shoah. In addition, Not Idly By exclusively benefits from the passionate and detailed interview Bergson granted to filmmaker Laurence Jarvik for the latter’s ground-breaking 1982 documentary Who Shall Live and Who shall Die? Also featured in Not Idly By are extensive audio excerpts from the Hollywood Bowl production of the historic 1943 "pageant" We Will Never Die, heard extensively for the first time since 1943.

An Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker (Yiddish: the Mame-Loshn—"the mother tongue"—to be released in a 30th anniversary DVD edition in summer 2009), Pierre Sauvage, himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, is the president of the Chambon Foundation (www.chambon.org), which includes the Varian Fry Institute. Upcoming in 2010 is Sauvage’s long-in-the-making feature documentary about American rescuers during the refugee crisis of 1940-41, And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille.

Sauvage is best known for his acclaimed feature documentary Weapons of the Spirit, which will be rereleased in 2009 in a special 20^th anniversary edition. The film tells the story of a unique “conspiracy of goodness” during the Holocaust: in and around the Christian village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, 5,000 Jews found shelter, including Pierre, who was born there. At the Holocaust commemoration at the U.S. Capitol on April 23, 2009, President Barack Obama invoked the example of Le Chambon to encourage Americans to "strive each day, both individually and as a nation, to be among the righteous (see www.chambon.org.)

Believing that it would help to know more about the Righteous, for over twenty-five years the Chambon Foundation's mission has been "to communicate and explore the necessary lessons of hope intertwined with the Holocaust's unavoidable lessons of despair." Pierre Sauvage seeks to do this both through his documentary work and through his popular video-accompanied presentations, The Challenge To Us of Holocaust Rescuers and Did Americans Fight the Holocaust?

a Varian Fry Institute production

On Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust

a few of the advertisements taken out in major newspapers by the "Bergson Group":

The upcoming DVD of Not Idly By will contain bonus materials.

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