Marcel Marceau was the French mime who, before he became the most famous practitioner of his art in the twentieth century, worked in the French Resistance smuggling Jewish children out of occupied France into Switzerland. His real name was Marcel Mangel. His father, Charles, a kosher butcher in Strasbourg, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and murdered there. Marcel survived because he and his brother Alain joined the Resistance and used Marcel’s gift for impersonation and his elementary school skill at drawing to forge identity papers and to lead groups of Jewish children, sometimes posing as a scout leader, sometimes as a teacher, across the Alps to safety.
The family had moved from Strasbourg to Limoges after the German occupation of Alsace in 1940. By 1942 Marcel and Alain were working with the Maquis under the assumed surname Marceau, taken from a Revolutionary general the brothers admired. Marcel forged the identity cards. The figure of three Alpine crossings is the one most often given. The figure for the children is harder to fix; estimates run from seventy to several hundred. The work was done with the Eclaireurs Israelites de France, the Jewish scout movement, and with the OSE, the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants. After the liberation of Paris he served as a liaison officer with General Patton’s Third Army.
The mime came after the war. Marceau studied with Étienne Decroux at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris and developed the white-faced silent character of Bip the Clown, in striped jersey and battered top hat with a flower, who became his trademark from 1947. He toured almost continuously for the next sixty years and gave his last performance in March 2007, six months before his death.
Marceau spoke in public about the wartime work only sparingly. He explained, when he did, that he had stayed silent on stage in part because he had used silence and gesture to lead frightened children through forests and mountain passes when speaking would have given them away. The connection between the two careers is real. He told the New York Times in 2005 that the children who walked behind him into Switzerland had to be quiet, and that he had learned then that silence and movement could carry meaning that words could not.
He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour for his Resistance work. The 2020 film Resistance, with Jesse Eisenberg in the lead, dramatised the wartime period. The film took liberties; the real story is in the recorded interviews and in the OSE archives.
Marcel Marceau died on 22 September 2007 at the age of eighty four. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. His art is on this site because it grew, in part, from work done to save Jewish children in 1942 and 1943.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards