There are numerous Holocaust documentaries, novels, memoirs, and movies depicting the endangered lives of Jewish children
during World War II. As viewers and readers, flipping the pages or watching the images onscreen forces us to consider our place
in relation to those individuals who have seen the unthinkable. We consume their stories, their testimonies – their vivid
remembrances which transcend the place and space of fading-memories to become re-imagined, and lived-again through the
painful acts of telling. We become witnesses to the stories told by these witnesses of true horrors (Felman & Laub, 1992). Louis
Malle’s (1987) film Au Revoir Les Enfants forces us, as viewers, to undertake this difficult task through the eyes of a nearlysilent
protagonist – a Jewish boy named Jean Kippelstein, hidden in a private Catholic school in Vichy France by the school’s
headmaster, Father Jean, in 1944. The relations between Father Jean and his pupils are all complex and unravel over the course
of the narrative, culminating in a final tragic scene with fatal consequences.