A blazing tale of bravery that’s worthy of Hollywood
‘It is as if we were experiencing Victor Hugo’s novel live – the gargoyles spitting molten lead, the flames 50 feet high. You can practically see the hunchback up there in the gallery,” recalled the Paris fire service chief in The Night Notre Dame Burned: Storyville (BBC Four), a superb documentary about the 2019 fire that ravaged France’s most beloved building.
The Naudet Brothers, who famously recorded the collapse of the Twin Towers when making a film about firefighters in New York City, are master storytellers. Over 90 minutes, through a combination of gripping eyewitness testimony and footage from the scene, we followed events from the first wisp of smoke spotted by a bunch of teenagers on a school trip to the situation room, where President Macron was given the stark news that there were only two alternatives now that the end was near: give up the fight and watch the cathedral collapse, or send in a crew in the knowledge that they might not make it out again.
It was all brought vividly to life in words, photographs and illustrations. Embers raining down like confetti; a cascade of lava falling into the nave from 120 feet above; fire so hot that the crews’ helmets changed colour. In the words of one firefighter: “And then we
see the monster arriving, like an animal, its mouth open wide, coming to swallow the roof whole.”
The account of putting out the fire would have been sufficiently riveting, but there were sub-plots and supporting characters worthy of Hollywood. In addition to putting out the fire, the crews also had to save Notre Dame’s treasures. Sent on a mission to retrieve the cathedral’s greatest holy relic, the Crown of Thorns, one firefighter carried it back to the curators only to be told it was a fake and the real one was in a safe. With the building falling down around them, the general manager took him to the safe which had no less than four locks. The manager’s mind went blank at lock number two and he couldn’t remember the code (he eventually texted a colleague who is able to help). “I’m ready to kill someone. I’m furious. I glower,” recalled the fire chief, who can laugh about it now.
How did the fire start? The documentary did not concern itself with that. Instead, it focused on the extraordinary bravery of these men – and one woman, a rookie who had never been called to a real fire before. When they eventually returned to the station, they didn’t clock off but instead polished their kit ready for the morning inspection. All in a night’s work.
Some documentaries make for tough but necessary viewing. The stories told in the concluding part of My Family, the Holocaust and Me (BBC One) were harrowing. The descendants of Holocaust survivors traced the stories that shaped their families, many of them so traumatic that they had never been discussed. But as one of the contributors said: “We must tell the story so it doesn’t happen again.”
The show was presented by Robert Rinder, the barrister who found fame in ITV’S kitsch daytime show Judge Rinder but here proved he is equally able to tackle serious subjects. His own family was at the programme’s heart: his grandfather’s parents and five siblings were murdered at Treblinka. He made the pilgrimage there with his mother, Angela. Rinder wished to confront the horrors. “What do we know of the experience of the gas chambers? How long would it have taken?” he asked. The answer was that the majority of men, women and children were killed within 20 minutes.
Another story involved Noemie Lopian, who wanted to discover what had happened to her mother, Renee, in Vichy France. Renee was still alive, and appeared in the film, but found it too painful to delve into her memory. It was only seven years ago that Noemie realised her mother was a Holocaust survivor.
In 1942, the authorities began rounding up Jews. A neighbour hid Noemie’s mother and her siblings in his garden shed. By 1944, the situation was deemed too dangerous and 10-year-old Renee and her siblings set off without their parents, 300 miles across Nazi-occupied France, for the safety of Switzerland. A 21-year-old resistance fighter, Marianne Cohn, who had saved nearly 200 other children, attempted to lead them across the border in a truck. But they were caught. Marianne was led into the forest and executed, having refused to give up any information.
They were stories of horror, but also of bravery and, as Rinder eloquently put it, of “light, truth and resilience”.
The Night Notre Dame Burned: Storyville ★★★★★
My Family, the Holocaust and Me ★★★★