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A Protestant town's 'conspiracy of good' in Vichy France
As the French education ministry revisits Holocaust curricula this month, advocates say Chambon-sur-Lignon's story would be 'revolutionary' for schoolchildren.
posted May 14, 2008 at 8:05 am EDT
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More than 'celebrating diversity'
To be sure, Chambon had natural advantages not found in cities. The area is hilly, rough, spread out. Jews hid in barns and fields, and saw the approach of danger. Some Huguenot hiding places were hundreds of years old. Aubin points out the crucial role dogs played – barking at strangers and allowing escape.
Huguenot locals created a spirit that allowed Catholics, Quakers, Darbyites, and the Red Cross, to join the "conspiracy."
Sauvage hypothesizes that some Germans officials posted there may have been "caught up" in that spirit. Trocme and Theis were arrested at one point, but quickly released; Nazis mostly left the town alone, though records later show they knew it was a center for the false papers Jews needed to move anywhere.
The Chambon example represents both a transcendence and a concreteness that Henry and others say is often lost in many current ideas of good. The rescuers stated plainly, in interviews before they died, that the Biblical injunction to love one another implies that something is owed to one's fellow man, regardless of race or creed.
"The Huguenots were not risking their lives to hide Jews in their barns in order to celebrate diversity," says Henry. "They felt deeply the humanity of the other."
Refugee returns as filmmaker
For Sauvage, making the film about Chambon was a transformative experience. After the war, he moved to Paris with his family, then New York. He wasn't told he was Jewish until age 17. He returned to do a documentary in the 1980s, thinking he would shoot for a few weeks, and quickly put the film out.
Instead, it took five years and much soul searching to complete. Sauvage was simply not prepared, he says, for the character of the Chambon people. It changed his life.
"Every cliché I had imagined about [the people of Chambon] was wrong," Sauvage says. "They were incredibly smart. There was no escaping the fact they were heavily Protestant. They made me ask questions about myself and my own faith, or lack of it. At some point I realized that their selflessness was not depleting but was what gave them strength. This was something new for me.
"They had such a bedrock sense of values that it shook me to the core. I had to ask who I was. My film clearly had to be a Jewish testimony … and I finally realized I had to become Jewish in order to make a film to praise Christians."
Today Chambon is a town of cafes, pizza parlors, stone houses. Tourists come for dappled hills and distant vistas. The air is fresh – a reason Albert Camus came here from Algeria during the war. He wrote "The Plague" in Chambon in 1942 while recuperating from illness.
Even now, Pascal Blanc, a real estate agent here says few locals think their acts heroic.
"It was normal for us to help. We have helped all the time in our past," he says. "This is who we are. We don't think of those we helped raise in the war as outsiders; they are part of our families. Many still visit.
As for the Jewish community in France, leading figures advocate the inclusion of the story of the "righteous" in education curriculum.
"Putting forward these 'pages of light' written by individuals who risked their lives to save the lives of Jewish children
is, from our standpoint, very educational," writes Anne-Marie Recolevschi, director general of the Paris-based Foundation
for the Memory of the Shoah, in a statement to the Monitor. "The actions of the Righteous constitute a source of hope and
enable the transmission of a spirit of responsibility and respect of one another. [Editor's note: The original translation of the quote included a grammatical error.]
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