Jacques Sémelin

His main fields of study are the Holocaust, mass violence, civil resistance and rescue in genocidal situations, and more recently the survival of Jews in France during the Second World War.

Sémelin devoted his PhD studies to the comparative analysis of some 30 examples of civil resistance in Nazi Europe, summarized in his book Unarmed Against Hitler (1994), available now in five languages.

He is co-founder of the Lieu de Mémoire, a museum chronicling the French Resistance, in Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Jewish children and adults were saved during the Nazi occupation.

Taking into account the many debates aroused by his book, especially with American historian Robert Paxton,[6] Sémelin wrote an abridged and revised version, published in 2018 and prefaced by Serge Klarsfeld (reference), under the title The Survival of the Jews in France, 1940–44.

In his autobiographical book J'arrive où je suis étranger (2007) (I Arrive Where I Feel a Stranger), Sémelin speaks openly about his struggle against an inexorable blindness.

In 2016, he also published Je veux croire au soleil, a humorous account of his stay in Montréal as a visually impaired professor, based on anecdotes from everyday life.