No one asked who was Jewish and who wasn’t. No one asked where you’d come from. No one asked who your parents were. No one asked if you could pay your way. They just welcomed each one of us with warmth, as children separated from their parents, children who woke up at night in tears, haunted by nightmares.
Elisabeth Koenig-Kauffmann, one of 5000 refugees successfully hidden in Le Chambon
IF A French railway station has a plaque commemorating the Second World War which doesn’t name employees of the state-owned railway network, SNCF, who were killed, then the odds are that it marks an episode in the Vichy régime’s part in the Holocaust.
After the capitulation of France on 22 June 1940, a puppet state, the État Français, was set up, with its capital at Vichy, and Marshal Philippe Pétain, the former victor at Verdun in the First World War, at its head.
When the Nazis’ “final solution of the Jewish question” was implemented after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, Pétain’s henchmen, and in particular Pierre Laval, his Prime Minister from April 1942, exceeded Nazi expectations. They even put unaccompanied children into the cattle-wagons destined for Auschwitz.
At least 75,000 French Jews were murdered. Laval, a committed Nazi apologist, was executed for treason after the liberation of France in 1945. Pétain, 89 years old, confused and silent at the time of his sentencing, died in a prison hospital in 1951. His death sentence had been commuted by de Gaulle.
Uniquely in wartime France, however, the station at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, near Saint-Étienne in the Auvergne, marked not certain death but salvation for those who passed through it. It is now a museum whose modesty belies the triumph of the determined citizens of this otherwise insignificant town.
This strong-minded Protestant community, with contempt for Nazi barbarity and Vichy cowardice, contrived to save between 3700 and 5000 Jewish lives. Since 1998, the town has been honoured by Israel with the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Gabrielle Barraud, a personal recipient of the Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations for her work in producing hundreds of forged identity papers for Jews who were smuggled through the town, exhibits total insouciance at the risks she undertook, and is dismissive about the work she did. “C’était normal,” she says.
PERHAPS it was — for the people in this area, at least. This part of the Auvergne is the only area of France where a clear majority was, and is, Protestant. Isolated and undisturbed, it escaped the constraints imposed by Louis XIV’s annulment in 1685 of Henri IV’s 1598 Edict of Nantes, which gave some legal rights and freedoms to Protestants.
The result, in Le Chambon at least, was a tradition of dogged resistance to outside authority, shaped and fed by John Calvin’s strict insistence on individual freedom and autonomy before God.
The Maison des Roches is the site of the only Gestapo “success” in Le Chambon. (After the Nazis occupied the southern half of France, from November 1942, all pretence of an independent French state was abandoned, and the Gestapo had free rein everywhere.)
The Maison des Roches is the site of the arrest of Daniel Trocmé, on 29 June 1943. He was gassed in Majdanek Concentration Camp in April 1944, as well as 18 of the 90 Jewish students he had hidden in the school he ran in the building. Others of these students were killed in various ways in Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Majdanek.
The guide and animator of his astonishing story was his cousin, Pasteur André Trocmé. Cultured, sophisticated, and half-German himself, he found his way to parish appointments barred in the 1930s, owing to his avowed pacifism.
Le Chambon accepted him as its pastor in 1934. Soon after this, a colleague arrived, Pasteur Édouard Theis, charged with setting up the École Nouvelle Cévenole in the town — which still exists, and retains its Protestant and pacifist identity as the Collège Cévenol.
AFTER the fall of France in 1940, Le Chambon initially offered cautious acceptance of the Vichy régime. This was short-lived: Pasteur Trocmé was never deceived, and Le Chambon became known in the département for the constant anti-Vichy graffiti daubed on its pavements: the Croix de Lorraine, “V” for victory, “1918”, and “Vive de Gaulle”.
After the national disgrace of the Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv, on 16-17 July 1942, the Vichy régime’s initial round-up of 12,884 “foreign” Jews in Paris for deportation, Trocmé and the entire town decided calmly, practically, and firmly that they were having none of it.
Jews had begun seeking shelter in Le Chambon as early as 1940, but after the collaboration of the Vichy régime with the Final Solution became clear, an extensive and elaborate system of refuges in outlying farmsteads was set up, and much of the town was involved.
Jewish refugees, most of them children, began to be welcomed silently in large numbers. Some were spirited across the Swiss border. Others lived in hiding in Le Chambon and its outlying villages, until the arrival of the Free French army there on 3 September 1944. At least 19 boarding-houses, as well as the scattered farms, were used.
It was an audacious plan. “Tante Soly”, a hostel never containing fewer than 20 Jewish children, was set up next door to the Hôtel du Lignon, requisitioned for German soldiers convalescing after injury on the Eastern front. No one ever said anything, and the conspiracy of silence was maintained.
The mutual dislike of the ordinary soldiers of the Wehrmacht, and the Nazi zealots of the Waffen-SS and the Gestapo, has recently been aired in the 2008 Hollywood film Valkyrie, and here there seems to be evidence for it: it is hard to believe that these German soldiers did not know what was happening under their noses, and yet they said nothing.
THE story of Le Chambon went largely untold until the publication in English of a biography of André Trocmé, Lest Innocent Blood be Shed, by Philip Hallie in 1979. Then it became widely known after the success of the film La colline aux mille enfants in 1994. The story is all the more powerful because of its rarity in 1940s France. Why here?
THE story of Le Chambon went largely untold until the publication in English of a biography of André Trocmé, Lest Innocent Blood be Shed, by Philip Hallie in 1979. Then it became widely known after the success of the film La colline aux mille enfants in 1994. The story is all the more powerful because of its rarity in 1940s France. Why here?
Perhaps it was because, in Le Chambon, the Huguenot population was aware of its own history of being persecuted, and was able to respond in a communal and committed way to the plight of others similarly reviled.
Le Chambon today gives almost no outward sign of its courage during the war, when Pasteur Trocmé ensured that church bells were never rung for the Marshal, and that festive bunting was never put out for Vichy dignatories’ visits.
These acts of subversion followed a catastrophically glacial reception for the Vichy Minister for Youth, Georges Lamirand, on 15 August 1942, when Trocmé’s blunt reply to Préfet Robert Bach’s request to acquiesce in a census of Jews in the town was: “Here we do not recognise Jews, only people.” The Vichy police searched Le Chambon for three weeks after this visit, managing in all that time to find only one refugee.
The cloak of quiet indifference to display and to fame which wrapped the town continues. There is no Trocmé cult. The Protestant temple remains bare, dignified, and calm.
THE SS discussed conducting a random massacre in Le Chambon, in the style of its enormity at Oradour-sur-Glane, in Limousin, next to the Auvergne, on 10 June 1944.
Then, 642 civilians were murdered in scenes of bestial savagery: the men were machine-gunned, and 350 women and children were burnt alive in the parish church; those who tried to jump from its windows were machine-gunned, and selected women were gang-raped and shot that night; their unburnt bodies, naked below the waist, were placed the next day on top of the piles of burnt bodies.
It was this Nazi sadism that Le Chambon openly defied. Small preliminary massacres were carried out by the Germans with the aid of the milice, the Vichy paramilitary police, on 22 April 1944 in neighbouring Araules and Yssingeaux. Nine people were murdered, and the genitals of two of the murdered men were mutilated; one woman had been raped beforehand.
One of the milice involved in this massacre, Marcel Blachon, was shot by the Resistance on 8 August 1944, having been made to dig his own grave; but Le Chambon did not travel far down the path of vengeance after the Liberation.
Roger le Forestier, the Le Chambon town doctor, always close to Trocmé, was randomly executed by the Germans on 20 August 1944 in what by then was a pointless act of brutality by a defeated power. Pasteurs Trocmé and Theis had been arrested on 13 February 1943, but were released without explanation. Somehow, Le Chambon was spared.
TODAY, French Protestants are few, and their numbers decline decade by decade. Even in France, where he is appreciated generally as a writer, jurist, and humanist, Calvin’s reputation hampers Protestant Christians’ mission — even though one fifth of them are not Calvinists, but Alsatian Lutherans.
French Protestants do not talk about sex as much as the Anglican Communion, but they have their share of heated debates about doctrine, liturgy, mission, and churchmanship.
During the Nazi occupation, however, in simple, determined, and faithful ways, they and they almost alone in France conspired to save thousands of innocent lives in the teeth of the most implacable and demented opposition.
The Revd Dr Jack McDonald is an Anglican priest working as Pastor of the Temple Neuf, Metz, after the Reuilly Accord of 2001.