How legendary mime Marcel Marceau saved Jewish children from the Nazis
Marcel Marceau is remembered as a legendary mime artist who delighted audiences for decades as the character Bip the Clown and inspired Michael Jackson’s moonwalk.
But he is also a Holocaust survivor who risked his life to help hundreds of Jewish children and adults escape Nazi-occupied France.
Marceau’s story is told in Resistance, a new film starring Jesse Eisenberg and directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz.
In an interview with Mirror, Jakubowicz said he was not aware of Marceau’s feat until he began researching the mime’s life for the scriptwriting.
“I had no idea that he was Jewish or that he saved children in the war, that he found his art through the very act of saving children,” Jakubowicz said.
“I felt like if that is the story behind him it needed to be told.”
Jakubowicz tracked down Marceau’s cousin Georges Loinger, who recruited the performer into the Jewish Boy Scouts of France and French Resistance to entertain and soothe the children orphaned from the 1938 riots.
“The Jewish Boy Scouts … suddenly had to take care of 123 orphans. They’re crying, they’re desperate and they are traumatised,” Jakubowicz said.
“They only had Yiddish as the common language because the kids were German and Austrian and these guys were French.”
Marceau – who had been miming in theatres at the time – agreed to help the orphans, finding ways to make them laugh with routines such as walking against the wind and passing a hand over his face to switch from ‘happy’ to ‘sad’.
Marceau led Jewish children across the Alps to the Swiss border on three trips to prevent them from being sent away to labour camps. He also helped them survive with his mime.
“The kids had to appear like they were simply going on vacation to a home near the Swiss border, and Marcel really put them at ease,” Loinger told the Jewish Telegraph Agency in 2007.
Marceau mimed to keep the children calm when their papers were checked by the Nazi soldiers and to encourage them to stay quiet as they were escaping.
In a 2001 lecture Marceau spoke about his father, who died in Auschwitz.
“If I cry for my father, I have to cry for the millions of people who died,” he said. “Destiny permitted me to live. This is why I have to bring hope to people who struggle in the world.”
Marceau passed away aged 84 on September 22, 2007.
Jakubowicz spoke of his film: “It is important for moviegoers to see how much worse the world was not so long ago but also how much better it can get.”