The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (4 page)

The YMCA was founded in Britain in 1844 to help young men who had recently moved from the countryside to the city as a consequence of the industrial revolution. The organisation quickly spread to Canada, the United States and Europe. Today it is seen mostly as an international chain of youth hostels, offering cheap and very basic accommodation to backpackers. But in 1900, when Charles started working for the organisation, the YMCA’s Christian, Protestant and puritan roots still ran deep. In the 50 years since its foundation it had grown into a large and genuinely international organisation, and it held camps and conferences, both national and international, where Christian topics were discussed and promoted. It was also hugely influential in the ecumenical movement, which sought to unite the Christian churches. For the young Charles Guillon, though, none of this mattered: the big attraction for him was the UCJG’s gymnasium and, even better, its indoor swimming pool, the only one in Paris at the time. The UCJG was his first port of call on his job hunt, and they offered him a job straight away, as a secretary.

The UCJG had a profound impact on Guillon. Within a year he had given up his agnosticism and converted to Christianity. He also gave up his ambition to become an architect. Instead he chose to study at the Paris Faculty of Theology in Boulevard Arago, in effect the University of Protestantism in France. He kept his strong connection with the UCJG, and attended the odd national and international conference on behalf of the Paris branch. Here he got to know key people in the international organisation, including its founder, Sir George Williams, by then a very old man.

After completing his theology studies, Guillon became a key figure in the running of the Paris UCJG. It was no small task. There was a boarding school to manage, plus endless conferences, meetings and
sporting events to organise, Bible study groups to attend and run, even the launch of the first-ever French Boy Scout troop. By then Guillon had married, and he seemed set for a spectacular rise in the world YMCA organisation, and particularly within the European UCJG, with its headquarters in Geneva.

In 1914, war broke out. Guillon abandoned the Paris UCJG (and his young wife), and for four years served as chaplain to the French 13th Army Corps. When war ended, Guillon returned to his wife, but not to the UCJG. He decided instead to look for a parish that would accept him as pastor. He arrived with his wife at Saint-Agrève, on the Plateau, in the spring of 1919.

It was a tough first assignment—the area was listless, with an ageing population, and with 60 very recent widows, their husbands killed in the war. With furious energy, Guillon set about reviving the parish. He personally visited every family. He restored the church, galvanised the parishioners into action, and within four years had things humming. He still found time to take part in international conferences associated with the UCJG, so he remained in touch with his old contacts. Soon, though, the cold, hard winters on the Plateau got the better of him, and in 1923 he resigned from Saint-Agrève. His next move could hardly have been predicted: the parish council of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a mere eleven kilometres away, invited him to become their pastor, and he accepted, despite the identical climate. He moved to Le Chambon in the autumn of 1923.

If Saint-Agrève was difficult, Le Chambon was a nightmare. In May 1922 the General Assembly (the ruling body of the Protestant Church) had singled it out for harsh criticism. The parish had money problems. It was accused of neglecting the thousands of Protestant holidaymakers who arrived in the summer, and of allowing the local UCJGs to drift and lose support. Again, Guillon turned things round. Within four years the money problems had been addressed, and the
congregation had swollen to something of its former glory. Guillon’s sermons were widely admired, and conferences and fairs organised by the church took place throughout the summer. Charles Guillon had won the confidence of the entire parish.

In 1927, Guillon was 44 years old, married, with two young children. Contemporary photographs show a neatly dressed, rather avuncular figure, almost entirely bald, with strong, dark eyebrows; his round face bears a small, carefully trimmed moustache and a ready smile. He was affectionately known as ‘Uncle Charles’ to one and all. There must have been some vanity lurking somewhere: in addition to the immaculately tended moustache, Guillon famously wore rather lurid purple church robes, which people forgave. He never lost sight of his humble beginnings, and remained determinedly left-wing in a rather old-fashioned, workers-of-the-world-unite way.

Guillon’s spectacular success in turning around two run-down parishes did not go unnoticed, particularly by his old employer, the Y. In 1927 the world secretariat contacted him and offered him the job of assistant secretary of the world committee of the UCJG. Guillon accepted, and resigned as pastor of Le Chambon. The scholarly Roger Casalis replaced him. (Casalis is nearly always referred to in books as a pastor-historian.)

Guillon now moved to Geneva with his wife and children. However, if the UCJG was determined to have him back, the people of Le Chambon were equally determined not to lose him. On 1 December 1929 they elected him to serve on their municipal council, and on 10 May 1931 he was elected mayor of Le Chambon.

One of Guillon’s conditions for accepting the role of mayor was that he be allowed to continue his work with the UCJG. He now divided his time between Geneva and the Plateau. Despite this, he seems to have been a remarkably effective mayor. During his time in office, he presided over the electrification of the village and surrounding
countryside, and the installation of a municipal water supply and sanitation system. He added 80 kilometres of new roads, and set up a clinic for mothers and babies that led to a spectacular fall in the infant mortality rate. Tourist facilities expanded with the creation of walking paths, sports grounds and the district’s first tennis court. He also found time for political activity, becoming vice-president of the Federation of Christian Socialists of the Haute-Loire, and joint organiser in September 1933 of the 6th National Congress of the Federation of Christian Socialists. The conference was dedicated to ‘the world economic recovery, with the double aim of a managed economy and the restructuring of agriculture’.

Wearing his UCJG hat, he also began a manic bout of world travel. In his first year in the new job in Geneva, he visited existing branches of the YMCA in Greece, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and, as a bit of an afterthought, France. Next he travelled to Africa, starting in Senegal and visiting the Gold Coast, Togo, Cameroon and the Congo, setting up new branches in each country as he went. Then it was the turn of Latin America, where he spent four months, and Algeria, where he twice toured the Kabylie region in the north.

By 1933, after six years of globe-trotting on behalf of the UCJG, the mayor was able to write in a newsletter distributed on the Plateau: ‘I have now visited 44 countries and I sense already rising perils and the march towards war.’

• • •

It is not the function of this book to give a detailed account of the origins of World War II. For readers wanting to know more, I would strongly recommend Andrew Roberts’ superb book
The Storm of War
(2009), which is both highly readable and thoroughly researched. Roberts gives a wonderfully detailed and insightful account of the lead-up to war and of the war itself. Here we need only the broadest outline.

Most historians would agree that World War II in Europe was really a continuation of World War I. The Great War, as it is still sometimes called, was the first total war, the first mechanised war, and one of the deadliest tragedies in all human history. The most accurate figures available suggest there were over 37 million casualties, including 8.5 million killed, 21.2 million wounded and 7.7 million missing or taken prisoner. The bitterest fighting took place on French and Belgian soil, around the River Somme in the north of France, and in Flanders in Belgium.

The catastrophic cost of the war itself was compounded by the peace terms, which set out to put an end forever to German militarism. Clause 231 of the Treaty of Versailles declared that Germany and its allies were wholly responsible for ‘loss and damage’ suffered by the victors of World War I, and they would have to pay for the lot. The price was set at 269 billion gold marks, the equivalent of 100,000 tons of gold, which was slightly more than half of all the gold mined in the entire history of the world. (At today’s gold prices the value would be something like US$5.8 trillion) Clearly the Germans couldn’t pay. Germany’s currency collapsed, leading to hyperinflation and great hardship.

This hardship was compounded by the Great Depression, which began with the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929 and spread throughout the developed world. (If what follows has horrible echoes of the world today, then be warned: last time we went through this sequence of events, it led to World War II.) The world now polarised. There were siren voices from the far right of politics offering simplistic solutions guaranteeing a return to prosperity and strength, and similar siren voices from the far left promising a sunny future in a workers’ paradise. What both sides delivered in practice was a string of murderous dictatorships.

The world of the 1930s was a perfect breeding ground for demagogues, and demagogues naturally sprang up to take advantage. In
Germany there was a further problem: in the eyes of the German people—and particularly the German Army—they had not lost World War I at all. As far as the German high command was concerned, they had not been defeated in the field, and Germany had not been invaded or occupied. Their country was the victim of a jealous and vindictive international cartel, which had bankrupted them. If they
had
lost the war, it was because the politicians and other treacherous elements—the communists, the socialists and the Jews—had betrayed them. This is known as the
Dolchstosslegende
, the myth of the stab in the back, and without it we might never have heard of an ambitious World War I corporal called Adolf Hitler.

• • •

After seven years, Roger Casalis, pastor of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon since Charles Guillon’s departure in 1927, had grown tired of the isolated life on the Plateau. He felt let down: he needed a car or a motorcycle to get around the huge parish, but the parish council refused to provide him with either. Time to move on. But who would take over? He had a young, firebrand pastor friend whom he knew was looking for a parish, and so he invited him to preach in the Le Chambon church one Sunday in 1934. The parish council looked on: it was very much an audition. As everybody left the church, the parish councillors were stony-faced. That, after all, was the Huguenot way. But the audition was clearly a success. On 22 June 1934 the council unanimously elected as their new pastor a 33-year-old pacifist from northern France. It was done on a ‘temporary’ basis so that the appointment would not have to be approved by the Regional Council in Paris. The new pastor’s name was André Trocmé.

Trocmé was born on 7 April 1901 in Saint-Quentin in northern France, not far from the Belgian border. His background was so vastly different from Charles Guillon’s that it is hard to imagine two such
contrasting characters occupying the same position. Quite simply, the Trocmé family was rich. The patriarch, André’s father, Paul, owned a flourishing cotton-weaving business, and André started life in a large house well staffed with servants. He was the youngest of eleven children from his father’s two marriages: six brothers and three sisters from the first marriage, and an older brother from the second. Paul Trocmé’s first wife had died, as did two girls from the first marriage.

André’s father was austere, strict and a little overbearing. ‘Duty’ was a key theme in the Trocmé household, as was maintaining the long Trocmé tradition of leadership and success. André’s mother, Paula, was German, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor from Petzen, near Hanover. To André she was a distant figure; however, they made a few visits together to Petzen, and with her help, André came to speak fluent German as well as French.

In the way of rich families at the beginning of the twentieth century, André was largely brought up by governesses, maids and servants. His daily schedule offers a fair measure of the rigidity of his life and the distance his parents maintained. Every minute of the day was accounted for, from 7 am rise-and-shine to 9 pm lights out. It included, at 7 pm: ‘Two bells for dinner, followed by 15 minutes visiting with the grownups in the living room.’ That was the only planned contact with his parents in the entire day. It hardly made for a warm and intimate relationship.

Two traumatic events helped to shape the future pacifist. The first took place when André was ten years old: he witnessed the dreadful death of his mother. Because they were wealthy, the family could afford not just a car but a powerful Panhard-Levasseur, famous for its race-winning qualities. Paul was driving, with his wife beside him. André, his older brother Pierre and their cousin Étienne sat behind. Another car overtook them. That couldn’t be allowed, and Paul charged into the clouds of dust thrown up by the other car, intent on regaining
the lead. His car smashed into a pile of stones at the side of the road, throwing the occupants onto the road. André’s mother suffered the worst injuries. She was immediately knocked unconscious, and was taken home by ambulance. She died at home a few days later. André, who occupied the room next to hers, could hear only too clearly her agonised moans as her life drained away.

The family funeral service was held at home. Paul was racked by guilt and remorse, calling out: ‘I  killed her. I  killed her.’ From that point onwards, André Trocmé knew the appalling impact of even a single death. He resolved never to be the knowing cause of one.

The second traumatic event was the arrival of World War I on the Trocmé doorstep. Over the centuries, wars have not been kind to the town of Saint-Quentin. History records no fewer than six Battles of Saint-Quentin, going back to Humfrid’s victory over Louis the German on 15 January 859. All of them tended to leave the town scarred, and sometimes pulverised.