Denise
Velmont

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Denise Velmont

Denise was born in 1932 in Paris into a family of 4 children. As her mother was suffering from tuberculosis, the public welfare authorities decided to take the three youngest children and send them to foster families in the Pyrénées (southwest of France). This was supposed to be only for a few months, but the declaration of war changed the plan. Denise was then sent to a small village near Orthez. On discovering the tiny house in the middle of nowhere, with its dirt floor and no running water, Denise was shocked, [...+]

My visit to Denise

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Denise

« I came from Paris after all ... and I discovered this small house with dirt floor. »

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Denise

« I got baptized and made my first holy communion immediately. That way, the Germans had no way to claim I was Jewish. »

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Denise

« My mother used to tell me : "Why did they burn my Georges instead of you ?" »

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Denise

« I never wanted to believe that my brother wouldn't come back. »

Livres

Sophie Nahum
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Les Derniers

Enfants Cachés

Of the 70,000 Jewish children living in France in 1939, around 11,000 perished in the camps, while the rest miraculously survived the war, often in hiding, in convents, in the countryside, sometimes in closets. Today, only a few of them can testify to their experience of hiding, their loss of identity, the uprooting from their family environment and the silence that followed the end of the war. History has been slow to make room for them in the hierarchy of victims.

Sophie Nahum went to meet the last surviving hidden children of the Holocaust to hear what they had to say. These men and women speak out here, sometimes for the first time, and it is the children they were that we hear.

Sophie Nahum has been making documentaries for over 20 years. After working for the major channels, most notably Arte, she decided to produce her films independently. Young et moi (2015, awarded at FIGRA) was the first, followed by the multi-media project “Les Derniers”, to which she has devoted herself entirely for the past four years.