Key Highlights
- It feels like transference.
- Then there’s the art form’s extraordinary role in the history of antifascism.
- You might not thrill to the thing itself, but once you know that the genre-defining mime, Marcel Marceau, used his skills to entertain orphaned Jewish children while helping them to escape occupied France — the noiselessness of his act essential, as Nazi soldiers stalked the corridors of the trains to the Swiss border listening for runaways — then you at least have to respect what Marceau called “the art of silence.” Marcel wasn’t actually Marceau at all — he was born Marcel Mangel, to a Ukrainian mother and a kosher-butcher father from Poland.
- In his twenties, during the Nazi occupation of France, he joined the Resistance, Frenchifying his surname to survive.
- Marcel’s father didn’t make it: He was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.
