Moorehead, Caroline. Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France.
Clements, Keith
Moorehead, Caroline. Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy
France London: Chatto and Windus, 2014.
The Jewish holocaust remains the dark cloud hanging over the
history of 20th century Europe, and the complicity of Christians and
churches in the story--which was but the culmination of centuries of
anti-Semitism in "Christian" Europe--lies in the heart of that
darkness. But within that grand narrative of Christian complicity lie
notable exceptions, stories of resistance to the Nazi policies and of
aid to the victims. Notable among these is the story of Le
Chambon-sur-Lignon and other villages high on the Plateau
Vivarais-Lignon in France, where hundreds of Jewish people, mostly
children, were hidden and protected during the German occupation of
1940-1944 and in many cases were enabled to travel to safety' in
Switzerland and elsewhere. So outstanding is this epic that Le Chambon
is one of only two places in the world to be honoured by inclusion among
the "Righteous among the Nations" at the Yad Vashem holocaust
memorial in Jerusalem.
The story of Le Chambon and of Andre Trocme, the Protestant
pacifist pastor who was the leader and pillar of its resistance, has
already been told many times, but this particular account has unusual
significance. Perhaps inevitably, many previous narratives have invited
criticisms of partiality and tendencies to hagiography, for example by
emphasizing Trocme's role to the detriment or exclusion of other
pastors or, particularly, of lay people who were also outstanding for
their courage and resourcefulness, or by exaggerating the numbers of
children who were saved (Something like 800, impressive enough by any
standards, is now judged to be more realistic than the thousands that
have sometimes been claimed.).
Moorehead by contrast writes as a secular historian with no
particular bias toward (or against) any confessional or denominational
grouping, and casts a dispassionate yet humane eye upon the strengths
and weaknesses of the actors as human beings. This means that they stand
out in much greater relief than they would if treated as one-dimensional
heroes or heroines. She also has no inhibitions about warning of the
dangers of a kind of cult developing from afar, due especially to the
tendency of projecting onto the story one's own values and their
need for justification. Pacifists have turned to the Le Chambon story as
an illustration of the triumph of non-violence under oppression. But the
actual history was a lot more complicated than that. For example towards
the end of the increasingly brutal German occupation a number of the
younger villagers turned to the Maquisards, the armed wing of the French
resistance, as offering the only hope of survival.
Disputes continued long after the war among the surviving villagers
themselves as to what really went on during 1940-1944. When Alain Arnoux
arrived as pastor at le Chambon in 1983, he hoped to open up the
unanswered questions for discussion in a truthful way: "He was sick
to death of the bickering, the animosities, the films, books, speeches,
each one more inaccurate than the last, the ever-inflated numbers of
those rescued--5,000! 8,000! --and of the parade of American evangelical
visitors who had taken this tale of religious non-violence to their
hearts and came to worship at the shrine of Trocme's house"
(334). In fact the war of words and conflicting narratives broke out all
over again. If that is depressing, perhaps it is not surprising either.
As with so many cases of resistance to oppression, the story is shot
through with ambiguities and open questions. How much of the success of
Le Chambon was due to some Vichy French police turning a blind eye, or
at best dragging their feet to obey search-and-arrest orders from above?
Or perhaps even some of the occupying troops (not all of whom were from
Germany itself) stationed nearby suspected what was going on but were
simply not interested enough to cause trouble. Or, at the end of the
day, how big a factor in the success was the sheer physical isolation of
the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon --high and almost totally isolated during
the long, bitter winters?
Nothing however should detract from the main features of the story
and its principal actors, especially those who were courageous and
faithful even unto death. It was a truly cooperative exercise, in which
Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were all involved and put themselves
under a common risk. Trocme himself remained steadfast under arrest and
interrogation, but nothing could have been done without the willing help
offered by those who came to teach in the remarkable school set up for
the Jewish children, "hidden" among the children of the
villages, right under the noses of the occupying military. No less
impressive were the villagers themselves, not only of Trocme's
mainstream Protestantism but members of the fundamentalist Darbyist wing
of the Brethren movement. Unsophisticated in the niceties of ethics and
political responsibility, they could nevertheless tell basic right from
plain wrong. Mentally soaked in the Old Testament, they were inoculated
against the latent anti-Semitic culture of many of their more
sophisticated and urbane fellow-citizens who stayed silent when the
transports of Jews to the death camps started. They simply knew they
must act when the children of Abraham, God's chosen, were in
danger. The simplicity of such responses combined with the complexities
of the whole context of the resistance make for an important case study
in "What does resistance entail?
But it is good, too, that Moorehead as a secular historian does
justice to the actors and movements familiar to those who know their
ecumenical history: the meeting at Pomeyrol in September 1941 when W.A.
Visser't Hooft met with French Protestant activists who drew up
their theses against anti-Jewish measures; the outstanding work of such
as Madeleine Barot and CIMADE on behalf of evacuees and refugees; her
Jewish counterpart Madeleine Dreyfus, secretary of the OSE organization
for rescuing Jewish children; Marc Boegner, President of the French
Protestant Federation, who during the German occupation after a slightly
cautious start spoke out with great courage and urged the churches to
resist the anti-Jewish policies; and Charles Guillion, sometime mayor of
Le Chambon and officer of the YMCA who liaised closely both with the
infant WCC in Geneva and with the Swiss refugee and aid organizations.
Mention of the last-named (who, incidentally, on one of his visits to
Geneva met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer) is the cue to say that Moorehead
also acknowledges the role that the infant WCC played in enabling many
of the children from Le Chambon to be spirited across the border and
received in Switzerland in the face of the general obstructiveness of
the Swiss authorities. It is a part of the ecumenical story, and of the
early WCC in particular, that should never be forgotten.
No doubt yet more will be written about Le Chambon and its
significance. More also remains to be researched on the whole landscape
of interlacing refugee aid networks--Christian, Jewish and nonreligious
humanitarian--before and during the Second World War, stretching from
Europe to America and other parts of the world too. That will be a
fascinating and truly ecumenical study. The "village of
secrets" will continue to have an honoured and thought-provoking
place within it, thanks to this excellent book.
DOI: 10.1111/erev.12209
Keith Clements, retired general secretary of the Conference of
European Churches, is the author of Dietrich Bonhoejfers'
Ecumenical Quest.
