Lots of emotion last night on the set of “Quelle époque” on France 2, when Jean-Pierre Foucault spoke about his parents. In particular, he recalled his childhood and his very strict Catholic upbringing, but one day he discovered that in fact he was Jewish and that his mother had hidden his family’s dramatic history from him for years.
The star host of TF1 said:
“It was only very late that I learned of my origins and even later, in the early 2000s, that my mother, aged over 80, began to tell her story and that of her family My sisters and I grew up in Marseille in the Catholic religion, and our mother was very insistent that we never miss a mass or a catechism class.
We discovered his Jewishness little by little. Until the day when my own daughter, now an adult herself, said to him: “Tell us about it!” She then agreed to publish her story in a small self-authored book.
My mother’s eight brothers and sisters, as well as her parents, had been exterminated at Auschwitz. She had never talked about it.
My father, Marcel Foucault, throughout the war, took enormous risks to save Jews, providing them with false papers, doing his best to find them housing, constantly putting his life in danger to save theirs.
If we were raised in the Catholic religion, I think that it was above all, for my father, a way of reassuring my mother. They were afraid that evil would return.
It was a kind of protection. My father never talked about what he did during the war either. I think he found this completely normal.
He didn’t consider himself a hero. The Medal of the Righteous, awarded to non-Jews who saved Jews at the risk of their lives, was awarded to him posthumously on October 12, 2009 by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem.
