The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (5 page)

In September 1914, a month after Germany had declared war on France, the city was smashed, overrun and brutally occupied by the rampaging German Army. The River Somme, scene of the most terrible trench warfare of World War I, flows through the middle of Saint-Quentin, so the worst of the carnage took place nearby. The first evacuation of civilians did not take place until March 1916, leaving the citizens of Saint-Quentin to get on as best they could for eighteen months under German occupation. The Trocmé family stayed on even longer: for two and a half years André witnessed at first hand the streams of bodies being brought back through the town from the front line. He could smell the gangrenous flesh, and see for himself the bitter consequences of war.

Then came an extraordinary encounter. A young German corporal called Kindler was billeted in the Trocmé home. André’s brother Robert was a captain in the French Army and something of a war
hero. André was struck by the thought that one day Kindler might be called upon to kill his brother. ‘Not possible,’ Kindler replied. ‘I am a Christian, and Christians don’t kill.’ Kindler was a telegraph operator, and he explained that he had made an arrangement with his captain not to carry a revolver or dagger or any other weapon. If he came under attack, God would decide whether he lived or died. André was impressed, and invited Kindler to join him at a Sunday afternoon UCJG meeting with some young friends. Kindler attended in full German Army uniform. After a nervous start, the other UCJG members quickly accepted the young enemy in their midst. Humanity, and reconciliation, had triumphed. This first encounter with a practising pacifist was an important lesson for young André. He already knew that war was terrible. He now knew that it was possible, even when wearing a military uniform, to have nothing to do with the killing.

Towards the end of 1916, the town of Saint-Quentin came under attack from both sides, German and French. The Germans decided that the last of the civilians should be evacuated, and in February 1917 the Trocmé family joined the exodus. They were packed in cattle cars on trains, with a German sentry standing guard over them, and deposited in Belgium. The trip should have taken no more than three hours, but with the railway lines jammed with military traffic, it took closer to 24 hours, with no food, no water and no toilet facilities.

André and his brother Pierre were billeted with a poor Belgian farming family, the Demulders. Fifteen-year-old André now learned for himself what it was like to be a penniless refugee. The Demulders gave the two young Trocmés another lesson in humility: they simply shared what little they had with the two young strangers, asking for nothing in return. André could hardly avoid the comparison between his own privileged life and the humiliating poverty of the Demulders and their neighbours. Wasn’t this an injustice that cried out to be put right? Pacifism was simply the opposite of making war. But weren’t
the Demulders victims of another kind of war, one in which the poor felt the pain? For a clever and observant teenager, whose overriding sense was one of duty, the experience of being a refugee offered plenty to think about.

André’s suffering was briefer than most. The Trocmé family had relations and influential contacts all over northern France and Belgium, and André’s father quickly found four people who could help—a distant cousin, an old customer of the weaving business, a neighbour from Saint-Quentin and a member of the Belgian Royal Court. The customer lent him money, the cousin and the neighbour found André a good school, and the courtier found the Trocmés a fine house in Brussels, owned by a banker who had fled with his family to Paris. All four introduced them to the well-to-do of Brussels society. Within six months of their ignominious departure from Saint-Quentin, the Trocmé family were again leading a comfortable, middle-class life.

The war ended on 11 November 1918. The Armistice was another huge lesson for André. German soldiers stripped off their medals and military decorations and danced in the streets alongside their former enemies. For the teenage André it was further evidence of the futility of war. What was the point of it all, if men who had been willing to kill each other yesterday were dancing together in the street today? World War I was sometimes referred to as ‘the war to end all wars’. For André, that was the answer. There must be an end to all war.

• • •

After the Armistice, the Trocmés could not simply return to Saint-Quentin and resume their old lives. The family home had been left in ruins, along with 80 per cent of the buildings in their home city. On top of that, the Germans had systematically looted the town, dismantling factory machinery and shipping it off to Germany. The Trocmé weaving business had suffered this fate and would have to be
rebuilt. While that rebuilding was going on, the family also needed to find somewhere to live. So, exactly a month after the war ended, on 11 December, the Trocmés moved from Brussels to Paris.

Paul Trocmé had previously been a major lay figure in the Evangelical Reformed Church, and his seventeen-year-old son was now beginning to develop strong religious feelings. In Paris, André embarked on a prodigious two-year course of study that included university-level Hebrew, Greek and church history at the Sorbonne, university-level philosophy at the Faculty of Theology on Boulevard Arago (Charles Guillon’s alma mater), and high school German, English, geography and literature at home. He completed it all with distinction. He was now determined to become a Protestant minister.

André paints a picture of himself at the time as stiff-necked and afraid of girls. He was living in the gloriously vibrant city of Paris in the 1920s, which appeared to his puritan Protestant soul to be Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon and the Garden of Earthly Delights all rolled into one. ‘I was,’ he wrote, ‘unable to see the difference between sin and innocent amusement. Life was white in church, at the Christian Union meetings, [and] when we strolled through the Meudon Forest … and black at the movie theatre, the circus and the brothels.’ He was certainly prudish. In 1919, aged eighteen, he went off to a Boy Scout camp at Domino on the Île d’Oléron, an island off the Atlantic coast of France near the port of La Rochelle. He recalled afterwards: ‘The conical
marabout
-style tents were pitched in a little pine forest, and we walked around half naked (so it seemed to me) … here I was, wearing only a bathing suit and exposing my body to the burning sun for the first time.’
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So prudish, yes. Tempted, yes. But give in to temptation? Never!

This puritanism stayed with him throughout his life. He never drank or smoked; sex outside marriage was beyond contemplation; and he vowed to tell the truth at all times, whatever the inconvenience.

André’s life now took an unexpected turn. His next decision can be seen as wilful, or eccentric, or another example of his clear-headed originality. At theology college the young student had come into contact with a strong circle of pacifists, and he became increasingly impressed by their ideas. There were, in the world of the 1920s, two strong threads running through the pacifist ideal. On the one hand there were those, like André and his friends, who saw pacifism as a moral issue. Christians should obey the sixth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There was no ambiguity. The words meant exactly what they said. And that meant pacifism was the only choice for a believing Christian. (This was not, to put it mildly, a view shared by the established churches, Catholic and Protestant.)

The second thread was political. Essentially, the socialist left believed that wars were part of a capitalist conspiracy: the rich and powerful tricked the poor and gullible into dying on their behalf. Instead, the poor of all nations should stick together and refuse to fight in support of their kings and bosses. This was quite a different line of thought, since it allowed men to kill for what they saw as a just cause. After all, bumping off the odd tsar and tsarina never seemed to trouble the Russian revolutionaries. Although his experience as a penniless refugee had given him some inkling of the meaning of the phrase ‘class warfare’, this left-wing form of pacifism was never André’s line. His position was always based on Christian morality.

However, we know from his (unpublished) memoirs that young André increasingly felt that his wealthy upbringing and now his cloistered life at theology college were somehow keeping him away from the real world, which included girls and other temptations. To know himself properly, he would have to enter that real world and try to make his way in it. How? All young Frenchmen were liable for military service. As a theology student, André’s had been deferred. Against the universal advice of family, friends, fellow students, teachers
and professors, André Trocmé knew what he must do next. The young pacifist put his theology course on hold, and joined the army.

• • •

André was remarkably tall, particularly for a French man of the time, at six feet two inches (188 centimetres). In all photographs, he towers over those around him. His confident style, middle-class accent and obvious intelligence gave him an air of real authority. Although his round spectacles lent him a slightly bookish appearance, the rest of him proclaimed a natural leader. Contemporary photographs show a young man with film-star good looks. Here, the army decided, was officer material. He was quickly promoted to corporal, and assigned to a disciplinary platoon.

He was an odd soldier: he didn’t swear, and in his free time he read books while his fellow soldiers headed for the brothels and bars. (If André ever went into a bar, he drank coffee.) Above all, he made it very clear that he would not fight and kill. On arrival at the unit, he had been issued with a rifle and 250 rounds of ammunition. He never made them ready for use.

A sympathetic friend arranged his transfer to a geodesic brigade (an army map-making group), which sounded like a good refuge for a pacifist soldier. So Corporal Trocmé, his rifle and his ammunition joined the cartographic unit of the 54th Field Regiment and headed for the Bled,
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in Morocco.

The rifle now became a problem. In France, there was no chance he would be called on to use it. But the Bled was a different proposition. The Berber tribesmen there were not too fond of the French occupying army, and the unit might be called on to shoot back, if not to shoot first. For a pacifist corporal, there was only one way forward. French Army regulations allowed soldiers to deposit unused weapons with the armoury. So Corporal Trocmé’s rifle, suitably greased and wrapped,
found a new home in the arms store at Rabat, Morocco, and the reluctant corporal headed off into the wild Bled armed only with a paper receipt for his weapon, signed by the armourer.

Inevitably, trouble threatened. The platoon’s officer, Lieutenant Tardy, ordered an inspection of the group’s arms. Corporal Trocmé explained that his rifle was back in the armoury at Rabat, adding that, as a pacifist, he would refuse to use it anyway. In his memoirs, Trocmé recorded the following dialogue.

LT TARDY: If we are attacked tomorrow, the absence of a single rifle could make a big difference in the end result of the battle.

CORP TROCMÉ: I understand, Lieutenant.

TARDY: A refusal of obedience in front of the enemy means an instantaneous court martial and an immediate execution by firing squad … do you understand that, too?

TROCMÉ: Yes, sir, I do.

TARDY: I  should condemn you to a long prison sentence and send you back to Rabat in handcuffs. I can’t do that because I need all of my men.
The lieutenant paused for a moment, and then went on.

TARDY: I’ll tell you what. I’ll ignore your case for the time being. I don’t give a damn whether you have a rifle or not as long as we are not attacked. But, if we are ambushed and if I order my men to fire their weapons in self-defence, and you don’t carry out my order for any reason, then you will be court-martialled and only God knows what will happen to you after that. Is this understood?

TROCMÉ: Yes, sir.

Happily, none of this eventuated. The Berbers fired a few shots one night, but the platoon sheltered behind a stone wall and waited for
the attackers to lose interest, which they eventually did. No one was ordered to fire his weapon in self-defence, so there was no court martial and no God-knew-what to follow.

Shortly afterwards, the unit returned to Paris, to find that the whole 54th Regiment had been dissolved. Corporal Trocmé’s rather unpromising military career could now end, as long as he could come up with the appropriate discharge papers. Perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out that all his military papers had been lost, and he could not find his old commanding officer or anyone else to release him. As far as the army was concerned, he didn’t exist. A unit of air force balloonists had taken over his old barracks, and the phantom corporal managed to persuade an air force sergeant there to issue him with a stamped paper that declared for all the world to see that TROCMÉ, André Pascal, had been lawfully discharged from the air force, not the army, and was now a civilian. He never heard from the army again, nor they from him, undoubtedly to the relief of both.

• • •

By then it was 1923, the year Adolf Hitler made his first bid for power in Munich with the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. The attempted revolution may have failed (and led to Hitler’s trial for treason) but the civil unrest that drove it seemed ever more ominous. Throughout Europe people sensed that the Great War, the war to end all wars, was far from over.

André Trocmé returned to his studies at the Faculty of Theology in Paris, this time in slightly reduced circumstances. The family home in Saint-Quentin had finally been restored, so his father and family gave up their apartment in Rue Jacob in the Latin Quarter and moved back home, while André shifted into student accommodation at the college. This was another turning point: he was now much more exposed to persuasive individuals at the college who were already taking public stands in the cause of pacifism. Jacques Martin went to prison three
times for refusing conscription. Henri Roser was thrown out of the Missionary Society after returning his military papers, and had to end his studies at the college. Édouard Theis, another pacifist, became an important ally and lifelong friend and colleague of Trocmé’s. Arnold Brémond mingled anti-war militancy with support for workers’ causes. Surrounded by these powerful voices, André Trocmé now made up his mind: in 1924 he joined the MIR (Mouvement International de la Réconciliation), an international pacifist organisation, and became a member of its European Council. He was now a publicly declared pacifist, at a time when refusal to serve in the military was a criminal offence. The public saw pacifists as cowards and traitors, and this view was supported by the established churches, Catholic and Protestant, and by just about every government in the world. Pacifism could be a lonely business.