Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small Protestant village in the Haute-Loire department of south-central France, in the high country of the Cévennes mountains. It had a pre-war population of around three thousand. Between 1940 and 1944 the village and the surrounding cluster of Protestant hamlets, including Tence, Le Mazet-Saint-Voy, Saint-Agrève, Devesset, and Fay-sur-Lignon, sheltered approximately five thousand Jewish refugees, the majority of them children. The local pastor André Trocmé, his wife Magda, his cousin Daniel Trocmé and the assistant pastor Edouard Theis ran the operation, but the operation was not their work alone. The work was done by hundreds of named local farmers, schoolteachers, postmasters, gendarmes and ordinary Protestant villagers who took refugees into their houses, fed them, hid them in the hayloft when the Vichy police came, walked them across the Swiss border on the long route over the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, and refused, throughout the four years of the operation, to give a single Jewish refugee up.
The local Protestant population, the Huguenots, were the descendants of the French Protestants who had survived the persecution of the seventeenth century, the dragonnades, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The collective memory of having been a hunted minority, three centuries old by 1940, was the village’s working ethical framework. The pastor André Trocmé had been a conscientious objector in the First World War and had spent the 1930s preaching nonviolent resistance to fascism in his sermons at the Reformed Church in Le Chambon. He was the local moral authority. When the Vichy regime began rounding up Jewish refugees in 1940, 1941, the Trocmés told their congregation, and the surrounding Protestant communities, that the village would shelter every Jewish refugee who reached it. The instruction was given in the church and at the village school and at the local Protestant boarding schools, and it was followed.
The refugees came mostly from the south of France, sent by the various Jewish welfare organisations, the OSE, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants; the CIMADE, the French Protestant relief agency; and the American Quaker AFSC. The American businessman and Quaker Burns Chalmers worked from Marseille to direct refugees to the village. The Jewish boarding schools at Le Chambon, including the Maison des Roches and the Maison de l’Espérance, took the older children. The younger children were placed individually in farmhouses across the village and the surrounding hamlets. The local gendarmerie, under the brigade commander Léopold Praly, regularly received warnings from the prefecture of impending Vichy police searches and would call ahead to the village to give the population time to hide the refugees. Praly was, in this respect, an active member of the operation, although he never officially admitted to the role. The village priest, the Roman Catholic Father Louis André, also assisted, despite the village’s overwhelmingly Protestant character, on the same moral grounds.
The Vichy regional prefect Robert Bach made repeated visits to Le Chambon between 1940 and 1944. He demanded the surrender of the refugees. Trocmé told him, in the famous response of August 1942 that has become the standard quotation from the case, that the village did not know any Jews, only human beings, and that even if the village did know any Jews it would not surrender them because it was contrary to the gospel. Trocmé himself was arrested in February 1943 by the Vichy police and held for a month at the Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux internment camp before being released. His cousin Daniel Trocmé, who had run the Maison des Roches, was arrested with several of his Jewish students in June 1943 and deported to Maidanek, where he was murdered in April 1944.
The Vichy raids on the village did not produce a single recovered refugee. The villagers had developed a network of warning whistles, hayloft hiding places and forest paths to the surrounding farms that allowed every refugee to be moved out of any house under search before the police arrived. The operation continued through the German occupation of southern France from November 1942 onwards, when the German army moved into the previously unoccupied zone. The German garrison at Le Puy-en-Velay, the regional capital fifteen miles from Le Chambon, made occasional sweeps but never recovered a refugee from the village.
Yad Vashem named André and Magda Trocmé Righteous Among the Nations in 1971 and Daniel Trocmé in 1976. The institution took the unusual step in 1990 of designating the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the surrounding plateau as a collective Righteous community, the only such designation in Yad Vashem’s history. The village remains a working community today and continues, on the same Protestant tradition, to take refugees from current European wars. The case is the most thoroughly documented community-level rescue of the Holocaust period and is the basis for the most extensive ethical and theological literature, in French, English, German and Italian, of any rescue case.
See also
Sources
- Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There, Harper, 1979
- Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France, Chatto and Windus, 2014
- Patrick Cabanel, Histoire des justes en France, Armand Colin, 2012
- Pierre Sauvage, director, Weapons of the Spirit, 1989
- Yad Vashem, file on Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Righteous Among the Nations, collective designation, 1990
- Lieu de Mémoire au Chambon-sur-Lignon, museum and archive