The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (39 page)

Just as the Israelites of the Old Testament suffered, so we have come to our moment of suffering and humiliation.

Therefore let us all be humble, and be ready to carry our own share of responsibility for the general catastrophe. Let us hang our heads in shame for the sins we have committed, and for others’ sins that we failed to prevent; for letting things drift; for our lack of courage; for all of these failings that made it impossible for us to stand firm as storms approached; for our lack of love when faced with others’ suffering; for our lack of faith in God, and our worship of wealth and power; for all the feelings unworthy of Christ which we have tolerated or kept alive in our hearts: in a word, for the sins we all share, which are the real and only cause of all the unimaginable tragedies that befall us.

Let us hang our heads in shame before God, each one of us, as individuals, as leaders or members of a family, as citizens and as Christians, as pastors and church elders, as youth leaders, as members of youth groups, as Church worshippers. We beg God to forgive us for our own sins and for the sins of our people, for the sins of humanity today and of the Church today. In this we are united. It is to God alone that we must look for relief from our suffering. However, we must guard against some forms of humility that would be disobedience of God.

First, let us be on our guard against confusing humility with hopelessness, and from believing and spreading the word that all is lost. It is not true that all is lost. Gospel truth is not lost, and it will be proclaimed loud and clear in our church from this pulpit, and during our pastoral visits. The word of God is not lost, and that is where you will find all the promises and all the possibilities of a recovery
for all of us, for our people, and for the Church. Faith is not lost: real humility doesn’t weaken faith; it leads to a deeper faith in God, a more powerful desire to serve.

Second, we must guard against humbling ourselves not for our own sins but for the sins of others, in a spirit of bitterness and rancour. In recent days, during pastoral visits, we have heard many complaints: from soldiers against their officers, and from officers against their soldiers; from bosses against their workers, and from workers against their bosses; from rich against poor, and from poor against rich; from pacifists against patriots, and from patriots against pacifists; from believers against non-believers, and from non-believers against believers. Each accuses the other, each tries to dodge his or her own responsibilities and pass the blame on to their fellow citizens, or foreign nations, forgetting that only God can judge and measure the guilt of each of us. We do not believe that this kind of humility leads us on the proper road to recovery for our country, and for the Church.

Third, in our shame, let us not lose our faith and our convictions, based on the Gospel. We may not have made proper use of the freedom that was given to us, but let us not give up that freedom, under the cover of humility, and turn ourselves into slaves; let us not give in without a struggle to the new ideologies. Have no illusions: the events of recent days mean that the totalitarian doctrine of violence now enjoys formidable prestige in the eyes of the world because it has, from the human point of view, been impressively successful.

So, yes, let us hang our heads in shame, but let us not bow down to such a doctrine. We are convinced that the power of this totalitarianism is like the authority of the Beast of the Apocalypse, described in chapter 18 of the Book of Revelation. It is nothing other than anti-Christianity. For us it is a matter of conscience to spread that message today, as yesterday. We know well that the sons and daughters of our church gave their lives to fight this totalitarian doctrine. So humbly admit to
your sins, yes, but don’t give in to a new heathenism. It is by giving our lives to Jesus Christ, according to his Gospel, to his universal Church, that we keep our faith and show true humility.

In this call to Christian humility, brothers and sisters, we would like to add a few exhortations addressed to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. First, let us abandon today all divisions among Christians, and all squabbles among the French people. Let us stop labelling ourselves and others, because that is the language of scorn: let us abandon right and left, peasants, workers, intellectuals, proletarians and plutocrats, all the terms we use to accuse each other of some wrongdoing or other. Let us learn to trust each other again, to receive each other, to welcome each other, reminding ourselves that every time we come together, like the early Christians, we are brothers and sisters in Christ.

Then, having abandoned these suspicions and hatreds, and the political passions that go with them, let us gather resolutely around Jesus Christ, the head of the universal Church, and embrace his Gospel, and only his Gospel, as our source of inspiration, obedience and action.

Finally, understand that the return to obedience obliges us to make some breaks: breaks with the world, and breaks with ways of living that we have accepted so far. We face powerful heathen pressures on ourselves and on our families, pressures to force us to cave in to this totalitarian ideology. If this ideology cannot immediately subjugate our souls, it will try, at the very least, to make us cave in with our bodies. The duty of Christians is to resist the violence directed at our consciences with the weapons of the spirit. We appeal to all our brothers in Christ to refuse to agree with or cooperate in violence, especially in the coming days when that violence is directed against the English people.

To love, to forgive, to show kindness to our enemies, that is our duty. But we must do our duty without conceding defeat, without
servility, without cowardice. We will resist when our enemies demand that we act in ways that go against the teachings of the Gospel. We will resist without fear, without pride, and without hatred. But this moral resistance is not possible without a clean break from the selfishness that, for a long time, has ruled our lives. We face a period of suffering, perhaps even shortages of food. We have all more or less worshipped Mammon; we have all basked in the selfish comforts of our close family, in easy pleasure, in idle drinking. We will now be made to do without many things. We will be tempted to play our own selfish game, to cling on to what we have, to be better off than our brothers. Let us abandon, brothers and sisters, our pride and our egotism, our love of money and our faith in material possessions, and learn to trust God in Heaven, both today and tomorrow, to bring us our daily bread, and to share that bread with our brothers and sisters.

May God free us from both worry and complacency. May he give us his peace, which nothing and nobody can take away from his children. May he comfort us in our sorrows and in all our trials. May he see fit to make each of us humble and faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ, of the body of Christ, waiting for his kingdom of justice and love, where his will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.

When I began writing this book, I set out to do no more than tell a story. What happened on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, in and around the small French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, between 1940 and 1944 was never less than dramatic. Others have tackled it, and no doubt still more will. But when I came to look at what had been written in the past, all the accounts struck me as incomplete. Jewish writers saw it through the prism of the Holocaust. Protestant historians saw it as a proud moment in the history of Protestantism in France. The champions of pacifism saw it as vindication of their beliefs. A professor of moral philosophy (understandably) saw it as a practical insight into the nature of good and evil.

But somehow, everything I read and every documentary I watched seemed to fall short of telling the full story. You can search through everything written about the Plateau and you will not find the name of Catherine Cambessédès, the 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran suitcases full of money for the Resistance. I had to fly to San Francisco then drive a long way south to talk to her. Oscar Rosowsky, my favourite forger, led to long email exchanges and repeated trips to Paris while he explained the finer points of running up a convincing
carte d’identité
. Charles Guillon, the mayor of Le Chambon, who moved to Geneva after resigning in disgust at the Pétain government’s Armistice terms, and who was the principal source of Catherine’s suitcases, barely rates a mention in most accounts. Nor will you find much from the person of Pierre Piton, the 17-year-old Boy Scout who ran 20 missions smuggling Jews into Switzerland then, when his cover was blown, joined the Resistance. Try a Google search on Le Chambon and look for those four names. You’ll see what I mean.

So yes, the pacifist views of the pastor André Trocmé form a vital part of the narrative. So do the distinctly non-pacifist views of Pierre Fayol, the Jewish leader of the Resistance on the Plateau, who eventually helped to drive out the occupying Nazis at the point of a gun. The peaceful Quakers were important, rescuing hundreds and possibly thousands, particularly children. But so was Virginia Hall, the extraordinary SOE agent who armed and trained the Resistance on the Plateau and was variously known by her
nom de guerre
‘Diane’ and by her nicknames La Madone (The Madonna) and La Sorcière Rousse (The Red-Headed Sorceress). All sorts of remarkable people came together, and they produced a miracle.

This book has only one purpose: to tell that whole dramatic story in all its facets and covering all its key personalities, as best I can. I hope the reader has been drawn in, as I was, by a group of ordinary human beings who found it within themselves to do extraordinary things. It has been a long, five-year journey for me. I crossed the United States from coast to coast, talking to survivors, as well as making repeated trips to Le Chambon and the surrounding villages. I spent hours and days in French departmental archives, combing through arrest warrants, police reports, bureaucratic waffle and heart-breaking pleas for some injustice or other to be put right. I met people of extraordinary courage who wondered why I was talking to them.

I had to learn about forgery, about Boy Scouts who put their scouting skills to better use than I ever managed, about the YMCA, which certainly has a history which goes beyond backpacker hostels and a song by the Village People, about Huguenots, about pacifists, and about the labyrinthine politics of France during the Occupation. I learned about codes, and secret messages, and the particular affection of Resistance fighters for the Sten gun. I can only hope that the reader has enjoyed the journey as much as I did.

Writing is supposed to be a lonely business, but the writing of a book like this is impossible without the continual, massive and totally unrewarded support of a multitude of experts and participants, and others who simply take an interest and want to help.

My first thanks must go to those eyewitnesses who gave generously of their time. When I was starting out on my research, I conducted long interviews with Oscar Rosowsky, Max and Hanne Liebmann, Rudy Appel, Nelly Trocmé Hewett, Catherine Cambessédès and Pierre Sauvage. Their contribution did not end with the interviews: afterwards I bombarded them with emails and phone calls demanding impossible acts of recall. What was the
exact
date when this or that happened?
How much
money was in the suitcase? Perhaps as an act of self-defence, some of them read the manuscript when it was still a work in progress, and made myriad helpful suggestions and corrections. I am deeply grateful to them all.

Nelly Trocmé Hewett needs special mention. She more than any other suffered from my endless emails and queries. She generously and unhesitatingly introduced me to her extraordinary network of friends from the Plateau. She is a retired schoolteacher, and her habit of correcting pupils’ homework has happily survived into her retirement. If the accents on French words like Cévenole and Saint-Agrève now face the right way in the preceding text, readers can thank Nelly and her eagle eye. As well as saving my stumbling French from many a spelling or grammatical howler, Nelly was also a remarkable fact checker. Any mistakes in this book are mine and mine alone, and there would have been more of them without Nelly’s help.
Merci
, Nelly.

Catherine Cambessédès, another retired French teacher, also did her bit correcting my homework. At one point she sent me 27 pages of handwritten notes, many of them adding revealing little details to the story she first related to me when I interviewed her back in May 2012.
Merci,
Catherine.

My thanks to Dr Wendy Chmielewski for permission to quote from the André Trocmé and Magda Trocmé papers, part of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Roger Darcissac was a keen photographer (he took the stunning photograph of his son Marco that appears on the cover of this book) and his family donated his photographs and albums to the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. My thanks to Aziza Gril-Mariotte, the
chef de projet
of the Lieu de Mémoire’s collection of photographs and papers, for permission to use them in this book. Others who contributed have been acknowledged in the text.

As will be clear from the bibliography, the historian Gérard Bollon is a prolific writer on Plateau topics. He was one of my first interviewees, and he took me on a conducted tour of the Plateau while I photographed the House of Rocks, The Wasps’ Nest, The Flowery Hill, Tante-Soly’s, the New Cévenole School and other landmarks. He patiently answered endless email queries written in my beginner’s French, and for more than two years generously steered me in right directions.

Nelly Trocmé Hewett’s friend Joann Cierniak, who writes about music, theatre and the performing arts, came to my rescue when I was getting bogged down in the research. She read parts of the book as a work in progress, and her encouraging response reassured me and kept me going.

Nobody can tackle a subject like this without taking advantage of the research already done by other authors and historians. My first need when I began my research was an accurate chronology: step forward François Boulet, author of the excellent
Histoire de la Montagne-refuge
; step forward also Léon Chave, who prepared a very full chronology as his contribution to the 1990 symposium
Le Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Accueil et Résistance 1939–1944
(The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Welcome and Resistance 1939–1944).