Pierre Sauvage documentaries

SAMUEL PISAR—A LEGACY OF HOPE

The late Samuel Pisar—the family, including me, knew him as Mula—was my first cousin, my mother's nephew, and a major influence in my life. He was a Holocaust survivor of the death camps, a prominent international lawyer, and the author of the best-selling memoir Of Blood and Hope.

In 2023, I was nearing completion on a documentary tribute to this extraordinary man when I was compelled to abandon it—even though his message of hope and reconciliation seemed and still seems especially pressing today.

The videos paying tribute are the following:
—Kaddish: Samuel Pisar—A Legacy of Hope, ten minutes salvaged from my onetime work-in-progress; with Sam's powerful Holocaust testimony underscored by Leonard Bernstein's magnificent Third Kaddish Symphony, for which Sam wrote a new text at the composer's request. Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken—Sam's stepson—is also seen speaking about his stepfather;
—My Cousin—An Interview with Holocaust Survivor Samuel Pisar, a filmed interview I did with Sam in 1981;
—Le Chambon and Postwar Redemption, which draws on excerpts from the video below, Sam’s testimony on the importance to him of the Huguenot area in France where part of his family was sheltered, as well as on my parents’ subsequent role in his “redemption”;
—A Mémorial de la Shoah Interview of Samuel Pisar, a link to the full remarkable 2004 interview with Sam (in French, in both subtitled and English-dubbed versions) conducted in 2004 by the Holocaust museum in Paris. (I am proud that in this interview Sam goes into greater detail about the role our family played in his postwar life.)

Pierre Sauvage