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PortugueseAfter the war, he returned to competitive swimming and represented France at the 1948 London Olympics, becoming one of only three known Jewish Holocaust survivors to compete in the Games.
By Shula Rosen
French filmmaker Florence Miailhe has earned an Oscar nomination for her 15-minute animated short Papillon (Butterfly), a film that recounts the life of Jewish Olympic swimmer Alfred Nakache and his survival of Nazi persecution, using hand-painted animation to trace memory, trauma and resilience.
The film, nominated in the Best Animated Short Film category, draws on the real-life story of Nakache, a celebrated French swimmer in the 1930s whose career and family were shattered during the Holocaust.
Papillon depicts an elderly man swimming through shifting memories that gradually reveal a childhood in North Africa, athletic success, and the rise of antisemitism, including scenes tied to the 1936 Berlin Olympics marked by Nazi symbolism and taunts directed at Jewish competitors.
Nakache was born in 1915 in French Algiers to a family that had immigrated from Iraq. Specializing in the butterfly stroke, he became one of France’s leading swimmers and competed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where his relay team finished ahead of the German team despite failing to medal.
Under the Vichy regime, he was stripped of French citizenship and forced to leave Paris, while also joining the Resistance underground.
On November 20, 1943, Nakache, his wife and their daughter were arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz, where his family was killed. Nakache survived imprisonment and a subsequent death march to Buchenwald before liberation.
After the war, he returned to competitive swimming and represented France at the 1948 London Olympics, becoming one of only three known Jewish Holocaust survivors to compete in the Games.
Nakache continued swimming throughout his life and died in 1983 of a heart attack after a swim near the Spanish-French border.
Miailhe, 70, said she has a personal connection to Nakache’s legacy, having taken swim lessons as a child with his younger brother Bernard and later learning that her father met Nakache while both were active in the Resistance. “I hope people will be moved by Alfred Nakache’s story and rediscover it, because it’s not well-known in France,” she told Deadline.
The film was produced by Ron Dyens and Luc Camilli for Sacrebleu Productions and XBO Films. Dyens told Deadline that Nakache’s life reflected moral contrasts during the war. “The whole tragedy of human duality is ultimately reflected in Nakache’s story,” he said.
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