The Village That Hid Children

The knock came after dark, as it often did.

On the doorstep of the presbytery in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon stood a woman, shivering in the snow. She was a stranger, a Jewish refugee from Germany, and she was frightened. She asked if she could come in.

Magda Trocmé, the pastor's wife, opened the door wide and told her to come in out of the cold.

Years later, Magda would say she had not thought of it as a big decision. Someone was cold and in danger. So you let them in.

A village on a high plateau

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a village high on a plateau in south-central France, surrounded by pine forests and farms. In the 1940s it was poor, cold for much of the year, and far from the big cities.

Most of the people there were Protestants, descended from the Huguenots, who had been persecuted in France for their faith centuries before. Their families had passed down stories of hiding in the woods, holding secret services and being hunted by soldiers. They knew, in their bones, what it meant to be a hunted minority.

In 1940, France was defeated by Nazi Germany. The north was occupied by German troops. The south was ruled by a French government based in the town of Vichy, which cooperated with the Nazis and soon began passing laws against Jews.

Weapons of the spirit

The village's pastor was André Trocmé, a tall, energetic man who believed deeply in non-violence. His friend and fellow pastor, Édouard Theis, worked alongside him.

The day after France surrendered in June 1940, the two pastors preached a sermon. They told their congregation that Christians must resist the violence that would be pressed on their consciences, and that they would do so not with guns but with what they called the weapons of the spirit.

Nobody in Le Chambon could have guessed then exactly what that would mean.

Every door

The refugees came by train, by bus and on foot. Some arrived alone. Some came with false papers. Many were Jewish children whose parents had been arrested or deported. Some were sent there by aid organisations that knew the plateau would take them in.

They were taken in by farmers, by shopkeepers, by families in the village and in the surrounding hamlets. They were hidden in attics, in barns and in boarding houses. Children were placed in children's homes and enrolled in the local schools under new names. A school called the Collège Cévenol took in many teenagers.

Villagers made false identity cards and ration cards. When police were on their way, a warning would pass from house to house, and refugees would slip out into the forest until it was safe. Guides led some of them on dangerous journeys across the mountains into neutral Switzerland.

Nobody kept a list. That was the point.

Saying no

In the summer of 1942, a government minister visited Le Chambon. A group of students handed him a letter. In it, they told him that they knew about the arrests of Jewish families in Paris, and that there were Jews living among them in the village. If anyone came to take them, the students wrote, they would hide them as best they could.

Soon afterwards, the police came to Le Chambon and demanded that Pastor Trocmé give them the names of the Jews in the village. He refused. He told them, according to later accounts, that he did not know their names, and that even if he did, he would not hand over his brothers and sisters.

The police searched for days. They found almost no one.

The cost

The village did not escape danger. In February 1943, André Trocmé, Édouard Theis and the head of the public school, Roger Darcissac, were arrested and held in an internment camp for several weeks. They were released, but later had to go into hiding.

Pastor Trocmé's cousin, Daniel Trocmé, ran a home for young refugees in the village. In 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo along with the young people in his care. He died in the Majdanek concentration camp in 1944.

Yet the rescue went on until the end of the war.

Afterwards

Nobody knows exactly how many people were sheltered on the plateau. Historians' estimates usually run into the thousands, many of them Jewish children. Very few of those hidden there were ever caught.

When people asked the villagers afterwards why they had done it, many seemed puzzled by the question. They had simply helped people who needed help. What else was there to do?

In 1990, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance centre, honoured the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the surrounding villages together as Righteous Among the Nations. It was one of only a very few times the honour has been given to a whole community.

Want to read more?

Philip Hallie's Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed is a moving classic account, and Patrick Henry's We Only Know Men explores the wider rescue. Pierre Sauvage, who was born and sheltered on the plateau as a baby, made the documentary Weapons of the Spirit.