Villagers from the Cévennes cooperated to save thousands of innocents wanted by the Nazis and their French collaborators.
In 1934, when André Trocmé took up his new post as the Protestant pastor of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, an isolated, wind-swept village in the highlands of the Haute-Loire in the French Cévennes, he and his family could have been forgiven for ruing their luck. Enclosed by mountains and prey to heavy snows during the long winters, the village could be cut off from the outside world for weeks at a time. Trocmé’s new parishioners seemed to him “as grey as their granite farmhouses,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “They talked incessantly about death.” Not the most engaging qualities on the surface, but as the charismatic pastor eventually discovered, it would take a special kind of bullheadedness to defy the Nazis and their French collaborators in 1940-44.
The inhabitants of Le Chambon and its surrounding parishes in the non-Occupied Zone of south-central France would save thousands of lives during World War II: Communists, resisters, Freemasons and a large number of Jews, including hundreds of orphaned children and babies whose parents had been deported to the death camps, were all given vital refuge from the Gestapo and French Milice, the paramilitary force created in 1943 by the Vichy regime to combat the Resistance. Nearly everyone in the town cooperated to save these innocent strangers, Trocmé among them.
After the war, about 40 people from Le Chambon, including Trocmé and his wife, Magda, were awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Center for Holocaust Research. A best-selling book, “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed” (1979) by Philip Hallie, and an award-winning documentary film by Pierre Sauvage, “Weapons of the Spirit” (1987), were made about the extraordinary efforts of the people of Le Chambon. Now, in “Village of Secrets,” Caroline Moorehead delivers the definitive account of how and why they did what they did.