A Protestant town's 'conspiracy of good' in Vichy France

"Protestant pastors were the only ones to confront [Pierre] Laval, [the chief Vichy implementer]," says Fabrice d'Almeida, director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Paris, "to tell him to stop deporting children and mothers. But Laval said, 'It is not my business.' " Some 90,000 French Jews died in Nazi camps.

More than a dozen pastors in the Chambon region were part of the "conspiracy of good," Sauvage describes. Of these, Mr. Trocme and his assistant Edouard Theis were the two most prominent.

'Weapons of the spirit'

Trocme gave a dissenting sermon the day after the Vichy government signed an armistice with Germany: "The duty of Christians is to resist the violence brought on their consciences, through the weapons of the spirit. We will resist whenever our adversaries demand obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We will do so without fear, without pride, and without hate," he said from the pulpit.

Trocme was a pacifist from Belgium who saw first hand the horrors of World War I and "never wanted to relive the ghastly brutality and killing," says Ms. Aubin. He saw the incredible ravages, and said we can't allow this again…. He had a deep scriptural piety and a modern progressive outlook. He said don't fight the Germans, but then said don't collaborate with them."

Trocme's sermon turned Nazi theology on its head.

If the Hitler youth handbook argued that "The foundation of the National Socialist outlook on life is the perception of the unlikeness of men," Trocme and Theis rallied Chambon "like a flame to the dry wood of the Huguenot town," says Aubin, to stand up for the equality and dignity of all human beings.

To a degree largely unknown outside France, the war and French anti-Semitism remains a sore point here.

Only when foreign historians, such as Robert Paxton of Columbia University in 1972, began to detail not just the scale, but the enthusiasm with which German policies were carried out, did the nation start facing this history.

Even in 1989 when Sauvage's film on Chambon – "Weapons of the Spirit" – was released, French reaction was mute, as it was when the town entered Yad Vashem: "An entire town is given the rare status of rescuers, a collective honor, virtually unique – but it hardly registers in France," he notes. In 2004 President Chirac visited Chambon and gave a stirring speech. "We are seeing a sea change on the Shoah in France today," he says.

"Maybe more even than the Germans today, we French are still dealing with this," says a high school teacher in Paris. "We still have a wound where our heart is. We all ask the question 'what would I have done? But it isn't fair to compare all France with the way a rural village treated Jews."

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.

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