Claude Askolovitch interviews his mother Evelyne about her childhood deportation to Bergen-Belsen

Journalist Claude Askolovitch converses with his 86-year-old mother Evelyne in their Paris home, exploring her traumatic childhood as a four-year-old deportee. Evelyne was interned at Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen from 1942 to 1946, recalling a weekly bread ration of seven centimeters meticulously divided by her mother for survival. She describes a chilling silence in the camps, with no memory of dialogue with her mother and a haunting image of a German soldier's terrifying gaze. Fake Honduran papers obtained via Switzerland spared the family from Auschwitz gas chambers by granting neutral citizenship status. Evelyne's father, broken by sending his own mother to Sobibor extermination camp, was anxiously watched by her during naps. Despite German language associations with terror, it remained a vehicle for Heinrich Heine's poetry and Don Giovanni arias sung by her father. Music emerges as a family thread, with Evelyne lamenting her lost singing ability in old age. Their unfiltered, sometimes quarrelsome discussion in the podcast 'Esprit de famille' underscores the delayed transmission of Holocaust memory across generations.