The Hidden Children Timewatch
BBC2, Friday April 27th, 9pm
'It was a game of hide and seek," explains Peter, "but
the costs were very high if you lost."
Peter was one of the 30,000 Jewish children whose survival of this deadly game meant escape from being deported to death camps during the German occupation of France.
The Hidden Children follows four of the adult survivors as they return to where they had been hidden, and tells their intensely moving stories of not just their survival but also their heart-rending loses.
For the Jewish children in Vichy, France the game of hide and seek was between the Nazis who "systematically hunted them like animals" and the desperate family members and ordinary French people who hid them.
The first-hand stories of Peter, Rachel, Benno and Suzanne's survival also include the stories of people who were neither hiders nor seekers, the policeman who looked the other way to allow 12-year-old Rachel and her sister to escape from where they were herded for deportation, and the German officer who ordered the soldiers who had captured 14-year-old Benno to let him go.
In this, the programme highlights the complexities of the moral response of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
It is, however, the interweaving of the personal memories of the four survivors with the anguished letters from Jewish children who had not escaped which makes this a powerfully moving testimony to the vulnerability of children in their dependency on adults.
Among these was the pleading voice of Anna who, after her parents had been taken away, wrote, "All I have left is to hope that there is a good God, and I will be left with my little brother." She perished in Auschwitz.
Six-year-old Suzanne was saved by a quick thinking non-Jewish neighbour who rushed in and snatched her from the Nazis by pretending she was her child. She ended up in England, with "everything stolen - my family, my language, my education, my childhood".
Now in her 60s, she remains bereft and sits looking out her window hoping to see her stolen family return.
For Benno, "the pain that will not go away" is the loss of his brother Freddie, who was to follow him into hiding. Freddie was arrested two days later and the terrified 12-year-old Benno was left on his own in a remote village.
All of the children lived in constant fear of discovery or betrayal.
A thread of hope throughout the film is the heroism and ingenuity of those who took extraordinary risks to save the children.
For some, the consequences of this, as Peter put it, "respect for their fellow men", were terrible.
It is their courage and kindness we most need to hold on to if we are not to despair at the capacity of our fellow men to do evil.
Review by Olive Travers, clinical psychologist