Part VI of ‘A Life in the Shadows’: The Hidden Children of the Shoah
In the small farming village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the mountains of southern France, 5,000 Protestant Huguenots saved 5,000 Jewish people. Defying the Germans and the French collaborationist government, they “provided a safe haven throughout the war for whoever knocked on their door,” Pierre Sauvage explains. In the award-winning feature documentary “Weapons of the Spirit,” written, produced and directed by Sauvage, a French-American documentary filmmaker who was born in Le Chambon in 1944, he said that “most of the villagers were proud descendants of the Huguenots, the first Protestants in Catholic France. They remembered their own history of persecution, and it mattered to them. They also read the Bible and tried to heed the admonition to love your neighbor as yourself.”
Sauvage quotes their pastor, André Pascal Trocmé, who said, “The responsibility of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences through the weapons of the spirit.” He was “The Soul of Le Chambon” and leader of the nonviolent resistance in his area of France, philosopher Philip Hallie reports.
For Trocmé, Hallie said, every individual—”Jew and non-Jew, German and non-German—had a spiritual diamond in the center of his vitality, a hard, clear, pricelessly valuable source that God cherishes.”
Pastor Édouard Theis, the co-pastor in Le Chambon who worked with Trocmé in promoting peaceful, nonviolent resistance, explained to Hallie what led to the rescue of thousands of Jews. Theis said he and Trocmé were attempting to thwart the Germans and Vichy from violating the biblical injunction against murder. They wanted to protect the victims and stop those determined to become perpetrators. If they failed those in Le Chambon, they, as ministers, would share in the guilt of the evil-doers.
Hallie adds that his wife, Magda, who played a key role in this rescue mission, believed that “something is evil because it hurts people. Hers is an ethic of benevolence: she needed only to look into the eyes of a refugee in order to find her duty…. She recognized no imperatives from above; she saw only another’s need, and felt only a need to satisfy that need the best she could.”
‘The Nest of Jews in a Protestant Country’
Resistance groups throughout France sent Jews to Le Chambon, particularly children, historians Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork said. Those who were not shipped over the border to Switzerland remained throughout the war. They were housed either with individual families or in group homes maintained by a number of charitable organizations and governments.
Hallie describes the process of the rescue. After the 1 o’clock train arrived in Le Chambon, or some other transport, many refugees would come to the presbytery, the Trocmé’s residence, Hallie said. If they were not assigned to stay at the presbytery, they would be taken to a temporary shelter. There, they would be provided with false identification and ration cards. After a few days, they would transfer to a more permanent accommodation. When Le Chambon became inundated with refugees, they would be taken, along with other Jews, across a dangerous mountain trek to Switzerland.
Rescuing was a community effort. Thirteen local leaders, known as the responsables, became the “backbone” of the parish and the “nervous system” of Le Chambon, Hallie said. Though these men provided the ideas and “some of the energy” that created a refuge for Jews, it was the “houses,” the homes of the village, that enabled the rescue to succeed.
Another type of house was one like that of Daniel Trocmé’s, the Crickets, a rundown old boardinghouse for children approximately two miles from the village, supported by the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers). Altogether, there were seven houses financed by American Congregationalists, the Quakers, and the governments of Sweden and Switzerland.
When citizens of Le Chambon were lauded for their moral courage, they scoffed at the praise, Hallie said. In practically every interview he had with them, “there came a moment when he or she pulled back from me and said, ‘How can you call us ‘good’? We were doing what had to be done. Who else could help them? And what has all this to do with goodness? Things had to be done, that’s all, and we happened to be there to do them. You must understand that it is the most natural thing in the world to help these people.’”
One way to judge the Chambonnais, Hallie suggests, is the way they judge themselves—“with a shrug of the shoulders
and the question: ‘Well, where else could they go? I had to take them in.”
At one point the authorities asked Trocmé to provide them with a list of the Jews who were living in the town under false names, Professor of history Mordecai Paldiel notes. Trocmé responded, “Even if I had such a list, I would not pass it on to you. These people have come here seeking aid and protection. I am their pastor, their shepherd. The shepherd does not betray the sheep in his keeping.” At another encounter with the authorities, he replied, “I don’t know what a Jew is. I only know human beings.”
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.