the awful banality of evil as the architects of the Holocaust were brought to justice. But `The Children of Chabannes' -- a moving documentary about Jewish children in an oasis of calm in unoccupied Vichy France during World War II -- shows that the greatest courage and kindness can come over as simple and matter-of-fact as well.

The film richly deserves to be among the winners of this year's Bermuda Film Festival.

The tiny village of Chabannes and its chateau played host to hundreds of young Jewish refugees, mostly from Germany and Austria, up until 1942 when the Nazi occupiers decided to destroy the fiction of a free France and moved into Vichy in force.

And, from the Pallassou sister schoolteachers who integrated not only Jews but Germans, the country which had just humbled France, into their little village school, to the journalist turned lifesaver Felix Chevrier, who schemed, cheated and bluffed the Vichy authorities to save the lives of nearly 400 youngsters facing death for the `crime' of their ethnic origin, the sheer strength of will shines through -- even now, when the teacher sisters are in their 80s.

The story of Chabannes began in the late 30s, with the exodus of Jews from German-controlled Europe, where the lights were going out all over.

But, in the unlikely setting of an isolated rural community, a little candle flickered for years.

According to Jewish legend, into every generation are born a number of just men -- I think around 30 -- and luckily for the children of Chabannes, a huge proportion of them seemed to be reincarnated there.

The Paillassou sisters, however, even at the end, mourned the six children who were netted by the Nazis, and wished they could have done more.

And, when contrasted with a French government which more than collaborated in the matter of the Jews and sent 76,000 Jews -- 11,000 of them children -- east to Nazi death camps, their humility is astounding.

For -- from 1939 to the end of 1942 -- only those six were caught and transported, with four of them dying in the camps.

The film -- made more poignant by the fact that one of the directors is a daughter of a child of Chabannes, smuggled to Switzerland and resettled in the US -- is truly a hymn to the courage of the human spirit.

That it wasn't final at all -- with the children going on to become scientists, doctors and teachers -- owes everything to the modest heroes of Chabannes.

And, in the week where an English historian who gave a gloss of respectability to Holocaust apologists was humiliated in a libel hearing and exposed as a right-wing racist, the film is a timely reminder never to forget.

RAYMOND HAINEY FILM REVIEW REV MPC