Lotte H. Eisner  Lotte H. Eisner (5 March 1896, in Berlin – 25 November 1983, in Paris) was a German-French writer, film critic, archivist and curator. Eisner worked initially as a film critic in Berlin, then in Paris where in 1936 she met Henri Langlois with whom she founded the Cinémathèque Française. She was born Lotte Henriette Regina Eisner in Berlin, the daughter of textile manufacturer Hugo Eisner and his wife Margarethe Feodora Aron. Eisner grew up in a prosperous Jewish middle-class milieu and in 1924 obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Rostock. Her dissertation was on the development of Greek vases. In 1924, she began working as a freelance theatre critic until in 1927, Hans Feld, a friend of her brother, suggested she worked for him at "Film Kurier", one of many film trade papers in Berlin. She joined the "Film Kurier" as a staff journalist, writing a mixture of articles and interviews and the occasional film review including the premiere of "Mädchen in Uniform". Most of the premieres and major commercial feature films were reviewed by the men on the staff but occasionally she was allowed to assess them. In 1932, with the rise of National Socialism she became proof editor and reviewer-in-chief as members of staff began to leave Germany. In March 1933, just three months after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, Eisner fled Berlin to Paris where a sister lived. Here she lived precariously taking any job she could find (translating, babysitting etc) and working whenever possible as a freelance film critic for a variety of international journals and newspapers. In 1940, she was rounded up in the first "Rafle du billet vert" and taken to the Vel d'Hiv with hundreds of other single Jewish women. From there they were transported to Gurs internment camp in the Pyrenees, a concentration camp run by the French for the Germans. After a few months, she managed to escape and travelled to Montpellier where she enrolled briefly as a student before finding her way to Rodez and to Pastor Exbrayat who helped her to obtain false papers - she became Louise Escoffier from the Alsace region. She remained in touch with Henri Langlois, who was in Paris, and was secreting cans of film around the country to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis.