VOL. 23, NO. 18	MARCH 27, 1998

veryday family life in Nazi-occupied France will be the focus of a conference Apr. 3–4 that will examine film and writing that shaped opinion as the stage was set for the deportation of French Jews.

  The conference, “Hidden Voices: Childhood, The Family and Anti-Semitism in Occupation France,” will be held at Buell Hall, La Maison Française, and is open to the campus community.

  Conference organizer Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, a professor at Rutgers and a member of the University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Studies at Columbia, said everyday thinking in 1940s France led to “normalized complicity in the deportation of Jewish families and the persistent invisibility of everything surrounding Jewish life in French society.”

  By examining the lives of women and children, Jewish and non-Jewish, Flitterman-Lewis hopes to answer the central question of the time: “How is it that people lived ordinary lives while their neighbors were being wrenched from their homes in the middle of the night and sent to death camps?”

  The conference will address Vichy laws and ideology, memoirs and literary texts, Jewish cultural issues of assimilation and identity, childhood, education and the family and public memory and private memorials.

  “It took me 20 years to even begin to heal,” said Renée Roth-Hano, a conference participant, who, as a Jewish child in Paris in 1942, was sent by her family into hiding in a convent as daily life for Jews became more terrifying.

  “I was in hiding for a long time even after the war,” said Roth-Hano, now an adjunct faculty member at N.Y.U.’s School of Social Work. “I didn’t want anyone to know I was a Jew. This trauma takes a long time to heal.”

  Roth-Hano has written two memoirs, Touch Wood: A Girlhood in Occupation France (Four Winds: 1988) and Safe Harbor (Four Winds: 1993). She will speak on “Surviving, Healing and Moving On: A Lifelong Task” at 2:30 P.M. Sat., Apr. 4.

  Historians, writers and academic experts on cinema, drama and laws of the occupation years 1940 to 1945 are among other participants during the two-day event.

  Sponsored by Columbia University Seminars, there is no admission charge but reservations should be made by calling 854-4482.

  The hours are 1:00–6:00 P.M. Fri., Apr. 3, and 9:00 A.M.–6:00 P.M. Sat., Apr. 4. The 1942 film, Le Voile bleu (The Blue Veil), a popular melodrama directed by Jean Stelli and François Campeaux about a woman who devotes her life to caring for children, will be screened from 8:00 to 10:00 P.M. on Friday.