Arts and humanities
> Monday, March 16, 2026 - 4:00 p.m. - UFR ARSH Library
Interview with Frédéric SALLÉE, associate professor of history, specialist in the history of Nazism and the Holocaust, who will present his book "Les enfants du pays: histoire intime d'une rafle" (Children of the Country: An Intimate History of a Roundup)
"Sir, why not study a photograph where we know who the people are and what became of them?"
A harmless question asked in history class, and suddenly all the teacher's certainties are shattered! What does he himself know about his past, about this photograph of his cousin Georges, whose existence is kept secret within his family? Rounded up in a pharmacy run by a Jewish couple, the young man was reportedly deported to Auschwitz.
Stung by the student's question, Frédéric Sallée sets out to investigate what he suspects is a dark secret. Thanks to the archives, the author discovers a very different reality. Cousin Georges was never deported to Poland. And the ten other people rounded up that day—notables, priests, resistance fighters, and Jews—were scattered throughout Europe. Traveling from the Ardèche to the borders of Germany, from the lands of the Holocaust to the Siberian Gulag, Frédéric Sallée pieces together this story without realizing that it will forever change the way he teaches.
In a moving and sincere text, Les Enfants du pays questions the place of intimacy in history lessons and the transmission of memory between generations.
