Lucien Bunel - Père Jacques de Jesus

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Father Jacques de Jésus (1900-1945) was a Carmelite friar and headmaster of the Petit Collège Sainte-Thérèse de l' Enfant-Jésus.

Angered at Nazi policies, Father Jacques made the boys' school in Avon, France, a refuge for young men seeking to avoid conscription for forced labor in Germany and for Jews. In January 1943, he enrolled three Jewish boys — Hans-Helmut Michel, Jacques-France Halpern, and Maurice Schlosser — as students under false names. He also hid a fourth Jewish boy, Maurice Bas, as a worker at the school; sheltered Schlosser's father with a local villager; and placed the noted Jewish botanist, Lucien Weil, on the school's faculty.

Informed of the Carmelite friar's activities, the Gestapo seized Father Jacques and the three Jewish students on January 15, 1944. Weil, his mother, and sister were arrested at their home that same day. On February 3, 1944, German authorities deported the boys and the Weil family to Auschwitz, where they perished. Father Jacques was imprisoned in several Nazi camps before being liberated by American troops at Mauthausen in early May 1945. Suffering from tuberculosis and weighing only 75 pounds, he died several weeks later.

In 1985 the Israeli Holocaust remembrance center, Yad Vashem, posthumously honored Father Jacques as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations." Two years later, French filmmaker Louis Malle paid tribute to his former headmaster in the film, Au revoir les enfants.

[edit] External links

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Father Jacques

[edit] Notes

This article incorporates text from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has been released under the GFDL.