Father Jacques (born Lucien Bunel) was a Carmelite
friar and headmaster of the Petit Collège Sainte-Thérèse de l '
Enfant-Jésus. Angered at Nazi policies, Father Jacques made the
boys' school in Avon, France, a refuge for young men seeking to avoid
conscription for forced labor in Germany and for Jews. In January
1943, he enrolled three Jewish boys -- Hans-Helmut Michel,
Jacques-France Halpern, and Maurice Schlosser -- as students under
false names. He also hid a fourth Jewish boy, Maurice Bas, as a
worker at the school; sheltered Schlosser's father with a local
villager; and placed the noted Jewish botanist, Lucien Weil, on the
school's faculty.
Informed of the Carmelite friar's activities, the
Gestapo seized Father Jacques and the three Jewish students on
January 15, 1944. Weil, his mother, and sister were arrested at their
home that same day. On February 3, 1944, German authorities deported
the boys and the Weil family to Auschwitz,
where they perished. Father Jacques was imprisoned in several Nazi
camps before being liberated
by American troops at Mauthausen in early May 1945. Suffering from tuberculosis and weighing only 75
pounds, he died several weeks later.
In 1985 the Israeli Holocaust remembrance center, Yad
Vashem, posthumously honored Father Jacques as one of the "Righteous
Among the Nations." Two years later, French filmmaker Louis
Malle paid tribute to his former headmaster in the film, Au revoir
les enfants.