‘PicturinghowIwas

IF THE Nazis had had their way, the FrancoAustralian film-maker/ painter Philippe Mora, like so many Jews, would never have been born. His mother, Mirka, her two siblings and his grandmother were arrested in Paris during the Roundup ( Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv), in 1942, and sent to a transit camp in Pithiviers, from where they’d expected to be transported to Auschwitz. However, 24 hours before being taken, they were freed.

Discussing his new documentary, Three Days in Auschwitz, from his home in LA, Mora tells me: “Only something like a hundred Jewish people were released, and four were my family. So the probability of me even being here on the phone, talking to you…” He breaks off, as if still trying to process the grim odds. “It’s unbelievable.”

Why they were saved became clear last year, when police records held in Paris revealed that his grandfather had used a letter forged by the Resistance to claim that the four were needed as labour in a Parisian garment factory producing uniforms for the Germans.

“It was obviously BS,” says Mora. “My aunt was eight and the other was 10, so they could hardly be making uniforms. But that’s how they got out.”

As Mirka survived in hiding, the man who would become Mora’s father, Georges (a German Jew born as Gunther Morawski), fought alongside Philippe’s future godfather, the legendary mime artist Marcel Marceau, in the French Resistance. “It turns out that a lot of my family were what you’d call ‘fighting Jews’,” says the director, proudly. “There’s an antisemitic myth that the Jews went quietly into the gas chambers. It’s nonsense. There was a lot of fighting and a lot of protest.”

Eight of his father’s family did die in Auschwitz, however. And when Mora attended a 2010 retrospective of his films in Wroclaw, Poland, where his paternal grandparents had been married, he was able to learn more about them in archived documents that the Nazis hadn’t had time to destroy before the Russians swept through.

“I couldn’t believe the names of all my family members. I knew they’d died, but here it was in black and white.

“One name that struck me was Charlotte Morawski, who did a thesis on Nietzsche, in 1915, in Breslau [the German name for Wroclaw] University. There was a notation in her file that said: ‘Charlotte Morawski has asked for the photo of her father to be given to the local synagogue when she is evacuated.’ Evacuated was the term the Nazis used for Auschwitz/ murder.”

To his horror, he discovered that the Nazis had gone through the house of a “comparatively very wealthy” great uncle, and valued every item “down to each cup, each plate, each chair. . . The value of Mora’s personal response. taps. The value of toilets. It wasn’t just murder. It was a huge looting, a robbery, and then kill the victims and no one will know.”

As Auschwitz wasn’t far from Wroclaw, Mora decided to go to the camp to pay tribute to his dead relatives. Three Days in Auschwitz emerged from this and subsequent visits, over a period of five years,