At dawn on 11 September 1942, nearly 600 foreign Jews living in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais departments, an area under the authority of the German occupation forces in Belgium, were arrested at home. They were taken to the Fives goods station, on the outskirts of Lille, from where the train that would carry them to Malines, a Belgian transit camp on the way to Auschwitz, would depart.

25 railway workers from the station and the depot spontaneously mobilised throughout the day alongside local residents and managed, despite the presence of German soldiers, to get at least 40 people, most of them children, out of the station and then shelter them for the rest of the war. This was one of the largest rescues in Europe of Jews bound for Auschwitz.

The film, written by Catherine Bernstein and Grégory Célerse, produced by KUIV/Marie-Hélène Ranc and directed by Catherine Bernstein, draws on G. Célerse’s book, Sauvons les enfants, Une histoire du comité lillois de secours aux juifs (Lille, Les Lumières de Lille, 2nd ed., 2018). It follows the historian’s journey through the archives, a scale-model reconstruction of Fives-Lille station, which was destroyed shortly afterwards by bombing, and the testimonies of several children who were saved at the time.

Supported in particular by France Télévisions, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and SNCF, the film received, among other awards in France and abroad, the 2022 Historia prize for historical documentary.