http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jan1980/ ... view14.htm This is a story well known to some people but not to others. The following book review from Theology Today tells the story:
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There
By Philip P. Hallie
New York, Harper & Row, 1979. 305 pp. $12.95.
This is the story of a striking instance of successful non-violent resistance in occupied France during the Second World War. Le Chambon sur Lignon, an isolated Huguenot village in southern France, managed to survive two years under Pétain and two more under Nazi occupation and the Gestapo as "the safest place in Europe for refugees." They began to arrive in 1940-41, and by "liberation" in the fall of 1944 some thousands of Jews had come to Le Chambon and disappeared into the underground railway. There were seven boarding houses, over a dozen pensions, and even more scattered peasant farms
which sheltered refugees. No Chambonnais turned away a refugee or betrayed one. There was one successful police raid which caught a number of refugee children, but usually the police found nothing. "Jews? What would Jews be doing here? You, there, have you seen any Jews? They say they have a hooked nose" (p. 161).
The region is physically and psychologically adapted for such a role. This is rough, forested, remote country, the "desert" of Huguenot annals. A Huguenot pastor of Le Chambon had been burned alive in 1529, and the proud tradition of Protestant resistance to government oppression was still lively. But why not just guerrilla resistance? There was in fact considerable Maquis activity in the region, especially late in the war, and many ties linked Chambonnais and guerrillas. But the community maintained its distinctive strategy of non-violence and its commitment to aid Jewish refugees.
The determinative factor in these respects was the pastor, Andre Trocmé. He had come to Le Chambon six years before the war, seeking a remote parish where his pacifism would not be conspicuous. In 1938 he helped to found an international pacifist school in Le Chambon, and the principal, Eduard Theis, also became associate pastor in the Protestant "temple." The two pacifist ministers had won the congregation, so that when war came in 1939 and Trocmé offered his resignation to the parish because of his pacifism, the council refused to accept it. A year or two later when a national leader of the Reformed Church called on Trocmé to ask him to stop aiding Jews because it could damage French Protestantism, Trocmé refused, turned in his resignation again, and again had it declined by the council. He had shown the Chambonnais the most practical and effective way to resist Vichy and the Nazis.
We do not learn as much from this book about Trocmé development as we would like. As a teenager in the First World War he had been deeply impressed by a German
soldier who was a conscientious objector. He himself volunteered for military service in Morocco in 1921, but wished to serve as a pacifist. We would like to know more of his theological studies in Paris and his contacts with the Fellowship of Reconciliation as a student. His American experiences as a student at Union Seminary in 1925 and as tutor for the Rockefellers, as described, are interesting but less significant. His vocation was to preach the gospel to the poor, and he served an industrial parish in northern France for six years before going to the peasants of Le Chambon. We would like to know more of the "Darbystes," who numbered a third of the Protestant community, and who seem to have felt a distinctive respect for Jews.
At the beginning of the war-time struggle, Trocmé believed that the power of love could win over diabolical forces. Vichy officials were sometimes shame-faced in executing German programs, and Le Chambon got away with various symbolic demonstrations of resistance. The staff of the school refused to pledge unconditional obedience to the "Head of State," and the church bell was not rung, as ordered, for
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Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There
Pétain's anniversary. When the minister for youth visited Le Chambon for a sports festival, he was handed a letter by a group of students stating that there were Jews in the community and that they would try to hide them if necessary. A fortnight later the police arrived and stayed three weeks. They took one prisoner.
With the Allied landings in Africa in 1943, the Germans moved to cover south France and took over control from Vichy. At Le Puy were stationed units of the Tartar Legion-Russian and Asiatic prisoners trained as executioners for terror raids on civilian communities. The Nazi command discussed massacre in Le Chambon. Trocmé personally was warned that a price had been put on his head, and he disappeared for months, returning to Le Chambon only after the Normandy invasion of June 1944. Theis, meanwhile, worked for over a year with Cimade as one of the few male passeurs guiding refugees into Switzerland. Magda Trocmé continued to direct refugee traffic in Le Chambon, and liberation arrived before the Tartar Legion.
The story has been reconstructed almost entirely from manuscripts and personal interviews by Hallie. This Jewish ethicist has a high level of self-investment in his book, having found hope in Le Chambon out of the despair and depression into which his Holocaust studies had driven him. He accompanies his narrative with reflections about the nature of the "goodness" manifested here. He identifies an ethical outlook based on recognition of the preciousness of life, which seems to have animated and united representatives of Christianity, communism, Judaism, and atheism more effectively than their separate nominal affiliations. Trocmé himself lost his faith in God's power but retained his pacifist ethic, and after the war he became European secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
James Hastings Nichols
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey
What intrigues me is that these were ordinary people and they were conservative religious people, who knew the burden of oppression.