Together they had clambered through a forest on a treasure trail, together they had read Jules Verne and the Arabian Nights and together, they had just thumped out a noisy boogie-woogie on the piano. Now, as the two boys step out of the music room and into the deserted playground of their boarding school, the camera holds an ominously still grey morning. The fronds of trees are thick with snow in the foreground and thin sleet slices the hushed air.
“Scared?” asks Julien Quentin, the Catholic.
“All the time,” says Jean Bonnet, the Jew, whose real name is Jean Kippelstein.
Hidden names and hidden lives have been part of more Holocaust films than Louis Malle’s heart-stopping Goodbye, Children, (1987). Among venerable others is the documentary Secret Lives, (2002), in which director Aviva Slesin (herself smuggled out of a Lithuanian ghetto) movingly brings together an ensemble of Jewish parents who had to hide their children, Catholic families who took the children in as gentiles, and the children themselves, all of whom held each other very close in those urgent, risk-ridden times, waiting for estranged families to reunite. The effort that went into saving thousands of European Jewish children is also depicted in Mark Jonathan Harris’ documentary Into the Arms of Strangers (2000).
Based on the memories of its director, Goodbye, Children pushes us into an all-boys Jesuit boarding school in Nazi-occupied France. The year is 1944 and France is mired in the quicksand of the Vichy government. Head of the state Phillipe Petain announced there would be no more defeat for France – instead, there would be Franco-German collaborations with the Nazis in all their undertakings.
“At least Petain knows how to get along with the Krauts,'” says one of the senior boys.
“Better Krauts than Jews or Reds,” his friend replies.
Unknown to the students, the priests who run the school have sheltered three Jewish boys. One joins the class where Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) rides an academic high horse. The new boy is introduced as Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto), and everyone is told to treat him kindly. Not that Jean needs any favours. He appears an astonishingly self-sufficient child with high academic proficiency, quietly confident in class but somewhat tentative otherwise. Julien, quite the sleuth, finds evidence of Jean’s true identity and does all the adding up. However, he does not declare his findings – not even to Jean. It doesn’t matter anyway. After their initial wariness of each other, the boys are now friends. Jean even defends those who tease Julien for bedwetting.
The performances of the cast shine against the near-Dickensian drudgery of the school and the life in it. The building is cold, dark and damp. Vitamin crackers do little for nourishment. Though masters wear gloves, students must warm their hands on dying cinders. Other suggestions and uncomfortable moments find their way organically into the film. Sirens announcing air raids and bombing drive the boys into the sooty bowels of the school building; a notice on the door of public showers forbids Jews to enter; a Gestapo soldier wanders in to meet Pere Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud) for confession. In a riveting moment reflective of confused loyalties, drunken German soldiers bawl out their French comrades in a restaurant for attempting an arrest. All items on the menu are not available and coupons are used to buy food.
But the boys manage to pursue their interests, ogling at the lovely piano teacher, Davenne (Irene Jacob in her debut role), watching a Charlie Chaplin film and trading home goodies for cigarettes and stamps through blackmailing the cook’s helper, Joseph (Francois Negret). It is when Joseph is caught stealing lard from the kitchen and fired from his job that the danger that had been furlongs away now comes stomping up to the school in Gestapo boots.
The first goodbye in the film is when Julien’s mother puts her petulant, tearful son onto the train to take him to school. But the other goodbyes in the film come tearlessly and with a quiet sense of inevitability.