Comètes et Perdrix is the incredible story of two Jewish children, Robert and Gérald Finaly, whose parents were deported and exterminated by the Nazis. At the Liberation, the aunt of the two orphans, who had settled in Israel, claimed her nephews from Antoinette Brun, to whom they had been entrusted. But she refused to return them, pleading that she had saved, raised and baptized them. The case was then brought to court. For eight years, from 1945 to 1953, the Finaly affair would divide opinion and the entire international press, divide the intellectual and judicial world, provoke a veritable diplomatic crisis that would set Jews and Catholics, clerics and lay people against each other, implicate Franco, the Spanish dictator, and compromise the Church of France and the Vatican. It is a news item that has become a matter of State, which reveals another kind of anti-Semitism that which would like to protect Jewish children from their own religion, and which raises the timeless question of welcome. What do we do when we host? What do we protect when we hide two Jewish children in 1953? Marie Cosnay’s undertaking, both historical and literary, is not to recount in a linear and chronological manner the facts that led to the kidnapping and then the return of the Finaly children, but rather to explore the personal, historical and political mechanisms that led to this situation.
