Holocaust survivor and documentary filmmaker speaks November 5

Event Calendar Listing
Wednesday, Nov. 5
7 p.m.
Dana Auditorium in Sunderland Language Center, located on College Street (Route 125)
Free and open to the public

Pierre Sauvage, a child survivor of the Holocaust, will speak in Dana Auditorium at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 5. Sauvage won an Emmy Award for his 1989 documentary “Weapons of the Spirit,” which explored the rescue of 5,000 Jews by 5,000 Christians in his French hometown of Le Chambon during the Nazi occupation.

In 1982, Sauvage founded the Chambon Foundation, the first nonprofit educational foundation committed to communicating the necessary and challenging lessons of hope intertwined with the Holocaust’s unavoidable lessons of despair.

Sauvage is currently working on a documentary about Varian Fry, an American teacher and journalist who traveled to France in August 1940 on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee with the assignment of bringing some 200 well-known intellectuals in imminent danger of arrest (including Marc Chagall and Max Ernst) to safety in the United States. Fry, who left only when deported by French authorities, was posthumously awarded the first annual Middlebury College Rohatyn Global Citizenship Award this past May.
 
The lecture is sponsored by the Middlebury College Charles P. Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, with assistance from several other Middlebury College organizations including the Holocaust Remembrance Film Fund of the Film and Media Culture Department, Rohatyn Center for International Affairs, Hillel, the Religious Life Council, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and the Department of Religion.

For more information contact Ellen McKay, Scott Center coordinator, at 802-443-5626 or emckay@middlebury.edu.