What happened to Pere Jean?


I was watching this in class and some kids started talking at the very end when Julien had his closing remarks, so I couldn't hear properly. I know the three boys were killed at Auschwitz, but I wasn't sure what happened to Pere Jean. I think he may have been shot...?

P.S. This movie was amazing! I was nearly in tears at the end when the kiddies are all saying goodbye to Pere Jean. Such a beautiful film.

~SPOON: We ain't no forks!~

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...Pere Jean did not go to Auschwitz but rather a different concentration camp (even the Nazis had some compulsion about people of the cloth one would suppose and after all he wasn't Jewish)....he died, in real life, in May 1945 from tuberculosis just after the liberation of the camp.

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Yes, Père Jean's fate was addressed in the voiceover by the older Julien (which was actually the voice of director Louis Malle). Père Jean died at the Mauthausen concentration camp. No mode of his death was stated.

Tragically, Lucien Bunuel, the real-life priest on whom Louis Malle based the character of Père Jean, actually did die at Mauthausen. I have read that he survived the liberation of the camp, but died of the effects of the malnutrition that he suffered after he gave his rations to other prisoners.

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Just to add a bit in the essays that come with the criterion edition of the dvd, it says Père Jacques (as Lucien Bunuel was known) stayed at Mauthausen for weeks after the camp was liberated, refusing to leave til the other surviors were repatriated. And to respond to an earlier post, the Nazis had no problem whatsoever killing clergymen, some of the first victims of Nazi persecution in Poland were in fact Catholic priest, 1,500 were executed right away.

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bottom line...he died.

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Faulty writes: "to respond to an earlier post, the Nazis had no problem whatsoever killing clergymen, some of the first victims of Nazi persecution in Poland were in fact Catholic priest"

They also had no problem sending non-Jews to Auschwitz.

Lots of non-Jewish Poles and others who were not Jews went there. One of the most famous people to die at Auschwitz was the Polish Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe, who is now Saint Maximilian Kolbe, having been canonized by Pope John Paul II.

But Mauthausen was in many ways as bad a camp than Auschwitz. It was an "extermination by work" camp. They were doing Pere Jean no favors by sending him there. Anybody who wants to know more & has a strong stomach, check out the wiki entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen-Gusen_concentration_camp

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There is a good museum at the Mauthausen concentration camp site. Well worth a visit if you are in Austria.
"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."

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