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

by Peter Grose

  The two community leaders in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon reacted in very different ways to the declaration of war. As we have seen, Charles Guillon had been clear from Munich onwards that the Plateau would soon find itself playing host to refugees. The minutes of the municipal council of Le Chambon, which met four days after the declaration, on 7 September, record that the population of the Plateau had been considerably augmented ‘because the majority of the tourist population has decided to remain in Le Chambon for the duration of hostilities, some refugees have arrived, and the holiday homes and refuges for children have decided to keep their children from the city and from the department of Haute-Loire’. With the war only four days old, the Plateau was already hard at work offering people shelter, with Guillon and his council playing a part in feeding and housing them.

  The French families who regularly took their summer holidays on the Plateau were due to return home by the end of September. As the minutes of the council meeting record, many of them decided to stay on. After all, it wouldn’t be forever, they thought. The war would be over in a few weeks; while it lasted, they would be safe on the Plateau.

  The Cambessédès were typical, a ‘comfortable’ middle-class Protestant family from Paris who regularly spent their summer months in La Fayolle, where they rented a substantial nine-bedroom house. They would arrive in June and leave at the end of September. The father was a successful doctor, and the mother came from an old Cévenole family. Dr Cambessédès had given money to help set up the New Cévenole School.

  Madame Cambessédès quickly came to a decision: now that war had been declared, she and two sons and two daughters would stay on in the holiday house. The children could go to school in Le Chambon, not Paris. For one of the daughters, Catherine, it was a relief and a revelation. School in Paris had been an unpleasant experience; her teachers used intimidation and public humiliation to get their way. At the New Cévenole School, however, the teachers treated the students as friends. Catherine was a good pupil, but she remembers struggling with an aspect of algebra. Her maths teacher offered to walk two and a half kilometres to her house after school to help her with it. That would never have happened in Paris.

  So, in 1939, teenage Catherine was well content to stay where she was. The house was cold that first winter (she remembers having to crack the ice in the water pitcher to get water to brush her teeth), but she was happily established in a pleasant school, with the war far away. Her parents could congratulate themselves on a wise decision.

  If Dr and Madame Cambessédès had known then that their daughter would soon be asked to run some long and highly illegal errands carrying suitcases full of money and other supplies for the Resistance, they might have had second thoughts.

  • • •

  André Trocmé responded to the declaration of war in typically thoughtful fashion. It happened that 3 September 1939 was a Sunday. Traditionally, Monday was the pastor’s day off so, if they could get away, he and Magda would aim to take a picnic, go for a walk or find some other escape. That Monday, 4 September, they discussed the war. What could they do? What should he do? His first thought was that he should serve as a pastor, yes, but possibly also as an ambulance man or nurse, in a city or village that had suffered bombardment.

  The next day, Trocmé set about clarifying all this by putting his ideas down on paper. Happily, those thoughts were preserved, and can be read today. It is a curious document. It was not intended for eyes other than his own. In it he recalled his childhood and his memories of World War I, and considered his German and Italian connections. What if he abandoned his pacifism and joined the fight? He had six aunts in Germany, all married to pastors, whose religion led them to prefer prison or death to bowing down before Hitler. André’s wife was Italian, the daughter of an Italian engineer and army colonel, and he had a brother-in-law in Italy. If he fought, André might be asked to kill them. He couldn’t face that possibility. However, he could not simply sit tight in Le Chambon, away from danger. The final paragraph reads:

  I have no wish to shelter in security, behind the lines. I ask only that I am given the strength to serve, in the midst of danger, the most tragic victims of war: the women and children of bombed cities. I insist that this service must be as a civilian only. I will be happy to give my life alongside others, but without abandoning faith in my Lord Jesus Christ. May God help me.

  The most immediate threat he faced was military service. He was liable to be called up at any moment. If the call-up came, he would refuse to serve, and that meant prison. And if the call-up did not come, he wanted to work among women, children and old people in a village caught up in the war. Either way, how could he continue as pastor of Le Chambon? That afternoon, Trocmé called the parish council together and offered his resignation. It must have been an odd meeting. Trocmé called in only the church elders, all laymen. The council pondered. They didn’t always agree with him, the councillors told Trocmé, but he had always delivered everything he promised. So, as far as they were concerned, he should stay on in Le Chambon. They refused to accept his resignation.

  Trocmé then wrote to Marc Boegner, the head of the Reformed Church in France and head of the Protestant Federation of France, setting out his position. He told Boegner he was liable to be called up for military service. The papers could be served on him at any time. He would refuse. He had offered his resignation to the parish council, but they had rejected it. He hinted strongly that he would welcome a move to another parish, one that had suffered in the war. He wrote: ‘I devoutly wish to be able to serve as a civilian [Trocmé’s emphasis] the women, the children, the elderly of a city or village which has been bombed, as a civilian stretcher-bearer or nurse.’ He ended the letter: ‘My only wish is to serve my brothers in their suffering, to give my life to them, without ever going against the will of God.’

  Trocmé had addressed his letter formally and respectfully to ‘Monsieur le Président’. Boegner’s reply opened warmly with ‘my dear colleague’, but his message was cold and terse. After first saying that Trocmé’s letter had moved him deeply, Boegner went straight to the point. He did not agree with Trocmé’s interpretation of the scriptures, and nor did most of Trocmé’s colleagues. Trocmé had done the right thing by offering to resign. He, Boegner, always did his best for ‘those who share your convictions’. The subtext of the letter was clear: Boegner was telling Trocmé there had been enough trouble getting him into a parish and there was no possibility of finding him another one, even one closer to the heat of battle. Trocmé’s pigheadedness would bring suffering on his whole family. Boegner concluded with one of the more formal French signing-off formulae: ‘Please accept, my dear colleague, my cordially devoted sentiments.’ So, goodbye, then.

  • • •

  The so-called Phoney War, when nothing much happened on land (other than a fairly disastrous campaign by Russia to conquer Finland), lasted seven months, until 9 April 1940. Then Hitler struck again. He attacked Norway and Denmark simultaneously. Danish resistance lasted four hours. Norway, with support from Britain, proved slightly tougher. However, by 7 June, Norway, too, had fallen.

  Meanwhile, on 10 May, Hitler launched his major assault to the west, spearing his way into neutral Holland and Belgium. The Dutch lasted five days, surrendering on 15 May. The Belgians lasted a little longer: they surrendered on 28 May. There was still some hope that the Germans could be stopped there. In mid-September 1939, with the war only two weeks old, the British government had prepared for just such an eventuality by stationing a First Expeditionary Force in France, mostly along the northern border with Belgium but also reinforcing the so-called Maginot Line. The Maginot Line was an elaborate French defence installation further east and strung along the French–German border. Its sole purpose was to keep the Germans out of France. To do its job, the Germans would have to attack obligingly from Germany and not from elsewhere. However, they chose to bypass the Maginot Line and attack from Belgium. The combined resources of the British First Expeditionary
Force and the French Army in the north were no match for Hitler’s blitzkrieg, and the two Allied armies fell back to the port of Dunkirk, in northern France.

  Between 26 May and 2 June some 338,000 men—198,000 British and 140,000 French—were evacuated from the Dunkirk beaches to Britain. It is called a miracle to this day, but in reality it was a massive and humiliating defeat for the Allies. The triumphant Germans, having neatly bypassed the Maginot Line, now wheeled south through France. On 10 June, exactly a month after Hitler made his move, the French government abandoned Paris and moved to Bordeaux. That same day, the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy decided that it had better join the winning side quickly, while there were still spoils to be had, and declared war on the retreating Allies. France was squeezed from both sides.

  Trocmé’s dilemma was now acute. Having failed to persuade Boegner to clear a path to a new parish in the war zone, he had decided to volunteer to work with the Red Cross. On 22 May he wrote (in English) to the American Red Cross offices in the Champs-Élysées in Paris, offering his services as a nurse or driver, stressing that he wanted to work with the civilian population in the combat zones, where danger was most pressing, and that he required no salary. He gave as references John D. Rockefeller junior and Marc Boegner.

  He followed up by going with Édouard Theis to the Red Cross offices in Lyon. There they were told that the French government had limited Red Cross recruitment to volunteers from neutral countries, which in practice meant volunteers from Sweden and Switzerland. Trocmé and Theis trudged back to Le Chambon, defeated.

  • • •

  Rapid-fire events now engulfed France, to the point where it was almost impossible to keep track. On 14 June the Germans occupied Paris, and continued southwards. There was still some possibility of slowing their progress: not all British troops had left France at Dunkirk. Instead huge numbers had retreated south, forming what came to be known as the Second Expeditionary Force. But by 18 June the British had evacuated this Force as well, which meant all British troops had abandoned France, leaving the French alone and at Hitler’s mercy. Some 192,000 men returned by sea from eight major ports on the Atlantic coast.

  On 18 June the Germans captured Brest, one of the ports used as an escape route by the Second Expeditionary Force. On 19 June they captured Nantes, close to Saint Nazaire, another of the escape ports. So the British got out in the nick of time. On 20 June the Germans took Lyon in the southeast. They now controlled a huge swathe of France. The French had lost, and everybody could see it. Meanwhile, on 17 June the French premier Paul Reynaud had resigned in favour of his 84-year-old deputy, Marshal Pétain. On 18 June, with the British gone, Pétain asked the Germans for an armistice.

  He was not the only Frenchman making dramatic moves that day. A certain Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle, a cabinet minister in the Reynaud government, had fled to England on 15 June after bitterly opposing the idea of an armistice. On 18 June, speaking on the BBC, he launched what is still widely regarded as the most influential radio broadcast of all time, telling the French people all was not lost. ‘Honour, common sense, and the interests of the country require that all free Frenchmen, wherever they be, should continue the fight as best they can,’ de Gaulle declared. His message was broadcast (in French) on the English language service of the BBC, and very few French people heard it. By all accounts, most of those who did thought de Gaulle was mad. The broadcast was not recorded, and might have been lost for all time and missed its place in history if de Gaulle had not asked to be allowed to repeat it. On 22 June he did so, this time to a larger and more responsive audience. The seeds of a French Resistance had been sown.

  On the day of de Gaulle’s second broadcast, the Armistice was duly signed by Hitler and Pétain. As we’ve already seen, under the terms of the Armistice, France was divided up. The Northern, or Occupied, Zone—occupied by the German Army, in other words—spread over three-fifths of France down as far as the River Loire, taking in Paris and all the vital northern industrial areas, together with a huge triangle of land along the Atlantic coast as far south as the Spanish border. The Germans wanted to control the major Atlantic ports in the west—Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle—as well as France’s major factories and mills in the north. In what was left—the Southern, or Unoccupied, Zone—a government led by Marshal Pétain held sway from a base in the central town of Vichy. The terms of the Armistice were crippling. Marshal Pétain led a government committed to help the Germans industrially and militarily. Although technically ‘free’, the Vichy government would run its part of France in accordance with German principles. In particular, Jews were to be excluded and hunted down. Those who were caught could then be shipped off to work as slave labourers in German factories. As we shall shortly see, Pétain was personally and directly involved in the persecution of Jews.

  It is important to be clear on two points. First, Pétain enjoyed widespread support in France after the Armistice. He was hailed as the saviour of the nation: although France had been defeated, a nominally French government still controlled a large part of the country. Pétain already enjoyed hero status dating back to his military leadership during World War I and his historic victory at Verdun. Now, in the eyes of most of the French population, he had rescued France again. Second, the Vichy government was a willing rather than a reluctant partner with the Germans in proclaiming a series of repressive laws. Far from championing French independence and traditions of liberty, equality and fraternity, Pétain was full of contrition, almost apologetic. There must be something rotten about the way France had been operating in the recent past, he told his fellow countrymen, otherwise these humiliations could not have been inflicted on their great nation. The Jews, the foreigners, the communists and the politicians had let France down. The only way for France to recover its pride and power was by cleansing itself: in the marshal’s words, by rénovation, along German lines.

  Not everyone was convinced. On 10 July some 80 deputies from the exiled French government in Bordeaux, almost without exception from the political left, refused to support Pétain. They voted against Petain’s proposed rewriting of the French constitution to enshrine the terms of the Armistice. One of the leading mutinous deputies, André Philip from the socialist SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, or French Branch of Workers International), gathered up his feisty wife, Mireille, and their five children, and left town. They chose to move to a remote village in the Haute-Loire, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. André Philip did not stay long. Two weeks later, on 26 July, he joined General de Gaulle in London.

  Although Marshal Pétain remained popular on the Plateau until well into 1941, André Philip later wrote that the people of the Plateau were quick to show where their loyalties lay. For their first month in Le Chambon, his family ate for free: the local farmers thought it was an honour to give them food because he had voted non. The same farmers refused to sell anything to the Pétainists.

  • • •

  With the fighting now spread across most of Western Europe, André Trocmé’s worst fears had been realised. The war he had argued so hard to prevent had now arrived on his doorstep. So how should he respond? And, in particular, how should a Christian pacifist respond?

  The answer was little short of electrifying. The Armistice was signed on 22 June, a Saturday. The following day, André Trocmé and Édouard Theis issued a joint declaration. Trocmé read it as a sermon in the regular Sunday service in the church of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, while Theis sat below the pulpit in full pastor’s robes. At the end of the service, the two men walked side by side out of the church. No one who was present would ever forget their declaration.11 In it, the pastors addressed themselves to their congregation, to the people of the Plateau, and to the wide world. It was an intellectual tour de force and it set the tone for the Plateau for the next four years.

  Trocmé and Theis began by quoting a radio broadcast made the previous day by Marc Boegner, who had called on the French Protestant
Church to humble itself for the mistakes it had made in helping to bring the French people to their present unhappy state.12 Trocmé’s rhetoric soared above Boegner’s. What everybody now faced, said Trocmé, was a test comparable with the biblical sufferings of the Israelites.

  First, he told the congregation, everyone should keep hope alive. All was not lost. Second, people should be honest about their own failings, and not blame others for their problems. But, third, people should remain true to their own beliefs. Totalitarian violence seemed to have won the day, but that was no reason to accept it. The power of the totalitarians was comparable to the power of the Beast of the Apocalypse. And like that diabolical power, it should be furiously resisted. The task of Christians was to stay united, whatever their politics and whatever their place in society. They should trust each other, stay close to each other, welcome each other, and remind themselves that, like the earliest persecuted Christians, they were brothers and sisters together. Then came the most striking phrase in the entire declaration:

  The duty of Christians is to resist the violence directed at our consciences with the weapons of the spirit [emphasis added]. 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.