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FAMILY FIRST: “I had to
take care of my sister, so I didn’t stay a
child very long,” says Langmuir, (bottom).
Courtesy Sally Rubin |
“I remember taking the stars off,” Nelee
Langmuir says softly as she looks at images of Paris on the
screen.
The senior lecturer in French is recalling the yellow fabric
stars that Jews in Nazi-occupied France were required to wear
beginning in June 1942. The 11-year-old Langmuir, born Nelee
Rainès-Lambé, sewed them onto coat lapels that
her mother, father and younger sister wore. By the time she
cut them off two years later, most of her extended family members
had perished in ghettos and camps in Lithuania and Poland.
But her nuclear family had survived, thanks to friends who
housed and protected them.
Langmuir emigrated to the United States in 1949 and has
taught French at Stanford since 1972. She is putting the
final editing touches on a DVD titled Tombées du
Ciel (They Fell from the Sky) that will be a language-teaching
tool and a carefully documented oral history project.
Using still photographs interspersed with recollections
of events, the film tells the story of two of World War II’s
so-called “hidden children”—Langmuir and
her younger sister, Mina. They are spirited into unoccupied
France by a one-eyed veteran, live in his home (a meeting place
for leaders of the Resistance) and, with five new “sisters
and brothers,” attend Catholic school, where they learn
to make the sign of the cross. The young girls’ constant
worry about the safety of their parents, who leave Paris concealed
in a wooden box under the false floor of a meat truck, is palpable. “I
had to take care of my sister, so I didn’t stay a child
very long,” Langmuir says.
Telling the story took a village—or at least a campus.
When Kathryn Strachota, a senior lecturer in German, heard
about Langmuir’s plans to return to France in 1998
for a reunion with the family that had shielded her, Strachota
championed a film project that would document the sisters’ wartime
journeys. Joseph Kautz, head of Meyer Library’s digital
language lab, loaned Langmuir a Sony digital camcorder
and taught her how to use it. Sally Rubin, a 2004 graduate
of the documentary film and video master’s program, watched
the interviews Langmuir taped and created a storyboard
of index cards on the walls of Langmuir’s office. The
division of literatures, cultures and languages, the program
in Jewish studies, the Language Center, and the Humanities
and Sciences dean’s office helped finance the project.
Colleagues and students have previewed the film. Audrey
Calefas, a lecturer in French who enrolled in Occupation
in France: Between History and Memory in winter quarter,
says she was fighting back tears when the lights went
up. “It’s
wonderful to see the family that helped Nelee and her sister,” Calefas
says. “One of the women talks about how, as a Catholic,
she had to protect and teach those little Jewish girls, and
that really touched my heart. Seeing those adults putting themselves
back into the children they were is wonderful, and very authentic—like
a movement of the heart.”
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