Pierre Sauvage

Pierre Sauvage (born March 25, 1944) is a French/American documentary filmmaker and lecturer, who was a child survivor of the Holocaust and a child of Holocaust survivors. Described by Tablet Magazine in 2012 as "a filmmaker of rare moral perception", Sauvage is the President of the Chambon Foundation, which he founded in 1982. The Chambon Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit public charity, was the first educational foundation committed to "exploring and communicating the necessary and challenging lessons of hope intertwined with the Holocaust's unavoidable lessons of despair." In 2005, the Varian Fry Institute was established as a division of the Chambon Foundation; its specific focus is on America and the Holocaust.

Sauvage is best known for his 1989 feature documentary, Weapons of the Spirit, which tells the story of the "conspiracy of goodness" of a mountain community in France that defied the Nazis and took in and saved five thousand Jews, including Sauvage and his parents. Sauvage himself was born in this unique Christian oasis—the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon—at a time when much of his family was being tortured and murdered in the Nazi death camps. But it was only at the age of 18 that he learned that he and his family were Jewish and survivors of the Holocaust. Weapons of the Spirit won numerous awards, including the prestigious DuPont-Columbia Award in Broadcast Journalism (sharing the documentary award with Ken Burns' The Civil War series). The film had a 50-city theatrical release, received two national prime-time broadcasts on PBS—accompanied by Bill Moyers' probing interview of the filmmaker—and remains one of the most widely used documentary teaching tools on the Holocaust. An updated 25th-anniversary edition of the film will be released in 2017.

Sauvage's 2014 documentary Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, won the Best Documentary Award at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. The film provides the challenging and eloquent testimony of Peter Bergson, a militant Jew from Palestine who led a determined and controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust. Sauvage's 1979 documentary Yiddish: the Mother Tongue was the Emmy Award-winning portrait of the unique and tenacious Yiddish language and culture. Also awaiting release is Sauvage's new documentary We Were There: Christians and the Holocaust, a compilation film consisting of three shorts: Three Righteous Christians (Madeleine Barot, pastor André Dumas, Jean-Marie Soutou); We Were There: Rev. Franklin Littell Confronts the Holocaust; and An Interview With Magda Trocmé.

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