But the other is this.
This story has been told before, and it’s been told wrong. Or at least in a way that distorts important truths. It’s been told as the story of an exceptional French village and the heroic pastor who led his people in hiding Jews. But that’s not how the story went, when it was happening.
It was never the story of one town, and it was never the story of one man.
In south central France there is a high, cold plateau, a hard place to farm, a hard place to keep warm through the long, bitter winters. Hundreds of years ago the Huguenots—French Protestants fiercely persecuted by Catholic kings—fled to that cold plateau and made it their own, built their homes out of the rocks, and learned to till the stony soil. For hundreds of years their descendants kept their traditions: their worship, their independence, their distrust of the government. Their memory of persecution.
And then France fell to the Nazis, and the new French government in Vichy began arresting Jews.
Writers still debate why the people of the Vivarais-Lignon plateau hid so many Jews during World War II, but one thing is clear: they did, and it seemed normal to them. It’s said by people with memory of that time that there was a Jewish refugee in every farmhouse. They saved thousands of lives at the risk of their own, saying afterward that it was only the decent thing to do. And across the plateau, in its eleven villages, a network of pastors worked with each other and with their congregations and their neighbors to welcome refugees, hide them, feed them, provide them with false papers, and eventually (with the aid of allies Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, French and Swiss) smuggle many of them across the border into Switzerland. The real Tanieux was among those villages. The real Pastors Alexandre and Losier were among those pastors.
Here are the parts of Flame in the Night that are real.
The story of the protest letter handed to a Vichy official (the Vichy Secretary of Youth) is real; so is the préfet’s threat in answer. That préfet, Robert Bach, was later considered by his superiors in Vichy to be so lax in applying their raid orders that they replaced him.
There really was a lookout and alert system organized by the pastors and carried out by the Scouts, though many of the details in the novel are invented. It’s also true that after the first raid, the pastors were regularly given warning when a raid was coming by an anonymous phone call to the parsonage.
The story of the rescue of over one hundred Jewish children at the sorting camp of Vénissieux is real down to the last detail. The stolen telegram (it was the Abbé Glasberg who stole it), the all-night scramble in the dark barracks to convince parents to sign away custody of their children in the most wrenching circumstances, the disused convent used as a temporary hiding place, the warning and the flight to the back door, the fear that the cardinal might hand over the addresses when given assurances from Pétain. (He did not hand them over; he gave the operation every possible support.) Some of the children rescued in that operation were indeed hidden on the plateau.
The rescue was carried out by the Amitié Chrétienne (a network of Catholic and Protestant aid groups) and the OSE (a Jewish aid organization). The OSE hid and supported thousands of Jewish children in France during and after the war, including smuggling about a thousand to Switzerland. The “dark-haired woman” behind the table in the convent is Madeleine Dreyfus, a Jewish social worker with the OSE who placed hundreds of children in hiding on the plateau. The Cimade was a Protestant organization doing similar work.
Though the real Pastor Losier did participate in the underground work I described, the leading role was taken by the dynamic Mireille Philip, wife of a Socialist leader who was in London with Charles de Gaulle at the time.
The three-week police raid, with the police trying morning after morning to find someone, really happened. Sadly a few people were arrested in the end, some of them through identity checks on the roads as they fled the area; we don’t know for certain how many. I know the names of three: Kalman Scherzer and Ida Besag, who likely both died in Auschwitz, and a man by the name of Steckler, who was later released.
The story of the policeman falling into a farm cesspit the owners “forgot” to tell him about is also real.
Jeannette and Maurice Berger and their friend Clément are inspired by Georgette and Jean-François Meylan and their brave and lively group of passeur friends on both sides of the French-Swiss border, in the Jura mountains north of the Alps.
The character of Antoine Duval is based on a real person: Léopold Praly, employed by the Vichy police to stay in the real Tanieux and gather all possible information on Jews and Resistance fighters. He was more of an inspector and less of an informer than he appears in the book—he actually made a few arrests himself.
In the real Tanieux, as in the story, there was a quiet (or mostly quiet) tug-of-war between beliefs: the pastors and their adherents, who believed that Jesus taught nonviolence, and the Maquis and their supporters (some of them also church members) who felt it was the duty of the French people to resist the occupiers by force.
The story of the pastors’ arrest is real. The policeman did have tears in his eyes; the real Madame Alexandre had offered him supper when he came to arrest her husband.
It’s also true that in the camp they were sent to, the pastors were allowed to lead worship services, and that they held many friendly debates about the gospel with the Communists who were the majority of the political prisoners there.
The two pastors really did refuse to sign a loyalty oath to Pétain even though they would have been released immediately if they had. Although they had accepted certain forms of lying, like providing Jews with false identity cards, they felt that taking a false oath to save their own skins was too much. They were released the next day with no explanation.
There was no raid the day of their release. I invented that. But there was one raid—almost the only raid with no anonymous phone call beforehand—while they were gone, in which eight people were arrested by the French police. Unfortunately we do not know their names.
It is true that the people of the plateau never attempted to convert the Jewish refugees, and that the pastor in the real Tanieux offered them the use of church facilities for prayers.
The story of a convalescent German soldier “looking the other way” rather than betraying refugees he happened upon during a raid is not true in itself, but is based on the fact that a hotel full of these men stood next to a boardinghouse full of Jewish children, and no one was ever denounced.
The story of local people coming up to a deportation bus with gifts of food is real, but I’ve altered some facts. (It happened during the first raid, and there was only one person in the bus.)
Julien’s confrontation with Duval is fictional but is based on the fact that when asked why he did what he did, Praly said, “A man has to earn his living in one way or another.”
A small group of men from the Maquis (though not the local Maquis) really did assassinate Praly in front of his hotel in broad daylight. The pastor did hurry to the scene and urge Praly to repent before he died. Praly responded by closing his eyes.
There was an international school in the real Tanieux like the one I described, meeting in a wide variety of facilities for lack of its own school building. Some classes did meet in a hotel—but not the same hotel Praly was shot in.
The story of the raid on La Roche is real. The Gestapo (or possibly the German military police; there’s still some uncertainty) raided a boardinghouse housing young men of university age, both Jewish and non-Jewish. They surrounded the house just before dawn with machine guns as I described, and arrested eighteen young men and the director. It was the only time the Germans themselves raided the town. Of the nineteen, seven came back.1
There really was a political arrest at that same house several weeks before the raid, and some of the men felt the house was targeted and started sleeping in the woods.
It’s true that a young refugee saved a convalescent German soldier from drowning in t
he local river—and that someone went to the Gestapo with this story hoping to get the young person released. It was actually a young man from the real “La Roche,” a Spanish refugee named Luis “Pepito” Gausachs. The pastor’s wife asked two German officers to serve as witnesses and plead Gausachs’s case while the raid was still in progress; the Gestapo released the young man. (He was not Jewish.2)
Although it is fiction, Elisa’s escape from the Gestapo is inspired by the many, many stories of Jewish deportees, both men and women, who saved their lives by leaping from deportation trains.
I based my story of the tip-off that the Germans had taken out a hit on the pastors on a story told in the real Pastor Alexandre’s memoirs. The two pastors did go into hiding in 1943; though the reasons aren’t clear, it does seem they felt it necessary for others’ sake as well as their own. It was the assistant pastor himself, not his son (he had none) who became a passeur on the Swiss border.
Pastor and Madame Cantal are based on Odette and Paul Chapal, who were involved with the Cimade and kept a safe house in Annecy which was a hub for several filières, clandestine networks smuggling Jews and other threatened people to Switzerland.
The priest in Collonges in the last chapter is Abbé Marius Jolivet, a resister and rescuer; the details of the Collonges crossing are real, drawn from a written testimony by Pierre Piton, who worked as a passeur when he was a seventeen-year-old Scout. “The monks and their ladder” is a reference to another real group of rescuers, who under the leadership of Père Louis Favre passed roughly two thousand people into Switzerland over the back wall of a Catholic school built up against the border.
I should also say a word about the Maquis and the Resistance. Pierre’s notion that the Maquis would shoot at Vichy police is just that—Pierre’s notion. The fact is the Resistance as a whole was not concerned with protecting Jews but with liberating France from the Germans. They derailed and sabotaged German supply trains, but not deportation trains. But there’s good evidence that the armed resisters on the Vivarais-Lignon plateau, at least, saw the Jews as an integral part of the community they were sworn to protect; there was in fact a Jewish Maquis unit on the plateau, which helped to liberate the region in 1944 before Allied troops arrived.
As for Julien’s confrontation in the woods with the Gestapo, no such thing ever happened. Resistance to the Nazis on the plateau was a quiet, humble thing, decidedly undramatic. Silence was these people’s friend. But it’s a writer’s job to dramatize things. It’s a writer’s job to take characters and ideas and strike them together till they make sparks. I wanted to take the silent, humble spirit of the nonviolent resistance on the plateau and force it to speak its faith aloud. I knew I needed that to make my story work.
It wasn’t till it spoke that I realized how desperately I had wanted to hear what it had to say.
The more I’ve read about the story of the plateau, and the more I’ve read about World War II, the more I have realized how utterly shocking it is that two such idealists as the pastors I’ve portrayed even survived the war. It was not a time for ideals. It was a demonic time, a time when the power to kill was worshipped as a god, when the Hitler Youth trained up young boys to the ideals of steel-hard pride and ruthlessness. A time when the powerless died by the millions, when the young learned the terrible lesson of the world: kill or die.
And yet these men who in following Christ refused all violence and power, refused not only to kill but even to lie to the Nazis to save their own lives—these men who protested a Nazi roundup in writing—not only survived but aided their people in saving thousands. It is almost unbelievable.
And it happened.
That is the story I wanted to tell. That is the story I needed to hear. The shocking story that hints that at the end of all things there is something more, that there is another Power beyond power, that the gun does not decide all.
Maybe these people were simply very, very lucky. Or maybe it’s true. Maybe the meek shall inherit the earth.
1. I offer their names here, in their memory: Jean-Marie Schoen, André Guyonnaud, Jules Villasant-Dur, Félix Martin-Lopez, Sérafin Martin-Cayre, Pedro Moral-Lopez, and Antonio Perez survived. Georges Marx, Jacques Balter, Léonidas Goldberg, Herbert Wollstein, and Charles Stern died in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Daniel Trocmé, the house director, died in the gas chamber at Maidanek. Robert Kimmen, Frantz Weiss, Hermann Lowenstein, Camille Wouters, Alexandre De Haan, and Klaus Simon are unaccounted for.
2. But a Jewish refugee did once save a German convalescent from drowning: Joseph Atlas, a sixteen-year-old from Poland, did it in August 1943. In an interview in 2002 he said he didn’t realize till afterward that the man was German, but would still have done it if he’d known. When he saw the man’s friends coming over, he fled immediately just like Elisa did.
Acknowledgments
THE PERSON THIS book owes the most to never had the chance to read it. I don’t know, any more than Elisa, whether the dead see us. But I want to thank Rich Foss. Thank you, Rich. For your friendship, for your listening, for not only using your precious energy to talk writing with me but actually wanting to. You found the heart of every single fragment I ever told you of my story; to see you seeing it kept me going. I wish I could remember every word you said. I miss you.
The other person this book owes the most to is of course my mother, Lydia Munn, who birthed not only me but also Julien and all his family. Thank you, Mom. For your patience, for the foundation you laid, for giving me the privilege of carrying it onward. Our partnership fed my roots, both in writing and in life. Thank you also to my dad, Jim Munn: you’ve been the best encourager either of us could wish for.
Thank you to all my editors at Kregel, present and former: Miranda Gardner, who started me on the journey and taught me that cutting is not violence but sculpture; Janyre Tromp, who believed in this series from the beginning; Dawn Anderson, who helped me see my words with different eyes; Joel Armstrong, who pushed till I came up with the last few vivid details, like late fruit on the tree as the frost comes; and Steve Barclift, who has been very kind.
Great thanks to Rachel Langer for answering so very many questions about Judaism, for your kindness and encouragement, and for taking the time to read over the manuscript at such a busy moment. I could not have written Elisa without you.
Warm thanks to J. J. Neulist and Małgorzata Madej: for all your encouragement which was like water in a dry place, for all our writing discussions, for knowing what it’s like. For your excellent feedback and for being patient through so many versions of that scene where Marek almost falls out of the tree!
Deep thanks to Tim Otto for being the one I knew I could send the book to when it was far from perfect; for a phone conversation that brought me back to who I was, what I was doing and why; for another that gave me the space I needed for a new decision. You were there at exactly the right time.
Many thanks to Heather Clark for your listening ear as I flailed around trying to chart a true course through the treacherous waters of history. Thank you also to her husband, Greg, for that story about what it means to speak names. I’m glad I spoke the names I did.
All my thanks also to my husband, Paul: for seeing with me what I see in this one, for bearing with me long as I’ve paid what it was worth.
And to my son, Ian: thank you for being patient, thank you for being interested. Sorry for the spoilers, not to mention the bedtime stories about Nazis at four years old. Please don’t be mad when you find out I didn’t tell you everything. I love you.
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