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  • 2018-01-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Marcel Marceau Save Hundreds of Jewish Children From Nazis? (en)
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  • International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed annually on 27 January (the date the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated in 1945), is an occasion not only for commemorating the millions who died during the Holocaust (1933-1945), but also for acknowledging the heroic efforts of those who helped European Jews escape the clutches of the Third Reich. One of those acknowledged heroes was the internationally acclaimed pantomime artist Marcel Marceau (1923-2007), whose work as a young man with the French underground was celebrated in a Facebook video posted on 26 January 2018: Much of the above was confirmed by Marceau himself in his acceptance speech when he was awarded the Raoul Wallenberg Medal for humanitarianism in 2001. I don't like to speak about myself, he said, because what I did humbly during the war was only a small part of what happened to heroes who died through their deeds in times of danger. He continued: As the speech went on, Marceau also paid homage to his father Charles, a kosher butcher in Strasbourg who was deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz (never to return), and his cousin Georges Loinger, a Resistance fighter who would later confirm some of Marceau's wartime exploits. When Marceau died in 2007, Loinger's remembrances were quoted in an obituary published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: The anecdote about Marceau persuading a unit of German soldiers to surrender by miming the imminent arrival of French forces appears to have been mythologized a bit in the telling. For instance, Loinger didn't mention Marceau's using pantomime to subdue the Germans in his 2007 account of the incident: Marceau's own version of the story (as related to American historian Timothy Ryback in 1997) confirms that role-playing was integral to the event, but it does not imply that Marceau played a non-speaking part in that instance: Marceau confirmed that his first public performance as a mime was on a stage in front of 3,000 U.S. troops in Frankfurt, Germany after the war's end. I played for the G.I.s and two days later I had my first review in the Stars and Stripes, he said in his Wallenberg Medal acceptance speech. Observers sometimes remarked that part of the great mime's allure was a deep sadness that lurked at the heart of his performances. You see the pain and the sadness in his mime skits, Georges Loinger said after his cousin's passing. The origin of that pain was his father’s deportation. Fittingly, Marceau is honored as both a victim and a hero of the Holocaust, the event that more than any other shaped the course of his life. (en)
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