“Life Before Me”: The True Story of a Family Hidden During the Occupation

Life Before Me **

by Nils Tavernier

French film, 1h31

Rumors spread of the imminent arrest of all foreign Jews in Paris. When, on the morning of July 16, 1942, the French police arrived in their building, the Zylberstejn family managed to hide in a neighboring apartment and narrowly escape this first phase of the roundup. A couple, Rose and Désiré Dinanceau, lent them a maid's room under the roof: Moshe, Rywka and their daughter Tauba, a cheerful teenager, moved into this 6 m² room.

Not to be seen, not to be heard. Daily life is organized in this heavy inertia, punctuated by new police raids in search of ever more Jews, whether foreign or French, young or old. Then a nagging question returns: what happens to them next?

All day long, Moshe ( Guillaume Gallienne ) sits on a chair, watching through the porthole that lights the room for the comings and goings in the courtyard of the building of the residents, whom he scrupulously counts. Rywka (Adeline d'Hermy) prepares modest meals with the provisions brought by Rose (Sandrine Bonnaire) and obsessively wipes the dishes. Tauba (Violette Guillon) seems the most attached to maintaining a semblance of normal life, as when she softly hums the melodies she plays on a piano keyboard drawn on the floor. Her best friend and her grandmother, who sometimes visit them, bring them echoes of the world.

The Life Before Me is based on the testimony of Tauba Birenbaum , née Zylberstejn, collected by the foundation created in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which became the USC Shoah Foundation. 52,000 autobiographical stories were filmed in 56 countries. Tauba's story served as the framework for the screenplay by Nils Tavernier and Guy Birenbaum, his son. An excerpt opens the film.

The production counts down the days with implacable sobriety and immerses us in the necessarily trying confinement of the Zylberstejn family, whose members are played without pathos. Even if their relationships are marked by affection, their exchanges seem reduced to a minimum, as do the possible occupations (reading, writing, games, raising Tauba, etc.). This oppressive closed-door setting is judiciously interspersed with archive images that shed light on the evolution of the war and the fate of the Jews. They inscribe this singular story in the greater History with pedagogy and fluidity.