RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-plateau-review-a-culture-of-selflessness-11565736945?mod=ig_booksaugust17

It was in the spring of 1942, as the Germans occupying France began rounding up Jews for deportation, that the inhabitants of the remote Vivarais-Lignon plateau opened their doors to refugees fleeing capture. Situated in the Massif Central region of southern France, high in the mountains and cut off from the rest of the country by thick snow during the winter months, the Vivarais-Lignon had a long tradition of resistance. In the 16th century, it was a stronghold for the Huguenots during France’s wars of religion. Now, as the Nazis and the Vichy government intensified their own persecutions, Catholics, Protestants and Darbyists—followers of John Darby, a 19th-century English preacher—offered sanctuary to Jews. Some hid them in barns and attics; others pretended that they were family members. Many of these saviors were dour, silent people, accustomed to hard lives, who shared a belief that sheltering strangers was not only important but fundamental to who they were.

Much has been written about the plateau and its people, whose selflessness helped save thousands of lives, including many Jewish children. Historians have pored over the area, tracing both the individual acts of courage and the rivalrous interpretations of the past to be found there. In “The Plateau,” Maggie Paxson recounts the story of one brave young teacher who arrived in the region late in the summer of 1942. She also discovers, during the course of her research, something that has been happening on the plateau since 2000, when it became an outpost for the Centres d’Accueil pour Demandeurs d’Asile, a nongovernmental organization that provides assistance to asylum seekers fleeing war and persecution. Kindness to strangers, the author suggests, is imbued in the very soil of this area. “The sacred here” she writes, “feels quiet, steadfast.”

Ms. Paxson is an anthropologist who has spent many years studying the people of the countryside, often in Russia. Intrigued by “how memory works in groups” and wanting to explore ideas about peace and dignity and whether there are communities that are more resistant to violence than others, she trawled databases, bibliographies and peace-studies programs in search of a potential subject. Eventually, during a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, she came across photographs of Jewish children playing on the Vivarais-Lignon plateau during the war years. She was reminded of her grandmother’s stepmother, to whom her mother had been devoted and whose younger brother, Daniel Trocmé, had taught those same children in 1942 and 1943. “The Plateau” is both a personal quest to understand her family’s connection with Trocmé and a reflection on Ms. Paxson’s own field of study. Part history and part reporting, it contains reimagined scenes and speculations, along with digressions on such topics as demography and cave painting.

Trocmé was one of nine children born to the founder of an elite boarding school in northern France. At the age of 30, after several itinerant years, he was offered a job as a teacher and director at a school on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. With the war driving increasing numbers of Jewish children up to the plateau in search of sanctuary, the school offered them a home. Letters quoted by Ms. Paxson show Trocmé to be a thoughtful, self-doubting man who became much attached to his pupils. When, in June 1943, the Germans raided the school and took away a number of his students, Trocmé insisted on going with them. Ms. Paxson traces the stages of Trocmé’s captivity, from French internment camps to his death in Poland’s Majdanek concentration camp, at the age of 32, in April 1944. After the war, he was commemorated as one of the plateau’s Justes—righteous among the nations—by Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem.

Rather more of Ms. Paxson’s book, however, is devoted to the region’s newest arrivals over the past two decades. Many of them had endured terrifying journeys through an increasingly xenophobic Europe and arrived on the plateau traumatized. During her many months there, the author grew close to the refugees and learned their stories. Akhmad, from Chechnya, had escaped Russian hit squads and fled with his wife and three small children. Lalik and Arat lost their daughter to Armenian killers. The 63 residents Ms. Paxson found living on the plateau also came from, among other places, Albania, Angola, Azerbaijan, Guinea and Rwanda. As during the war, the stranger and outsider has been welcomed and accepted, the remoteness of the plateau and the generosity of its inhabitants making it possible to avoid the many tensions that have come to plague migration in Europe.

Nevertheless, the plateau’s history is not an entirely peaceful one, and its inhabitants view their own past very differently, with rivalries and contested versions of past events souring the memories of some older inhabitants. Given this, the plateau was perhaps an odd choice of subject for the study of peace. Pacifism was certainly one motivation for saving Jewish refugees, but it wasn’t the only one. The Darbyists did so out of religious conviction; the armed resistance out of their opposition to the Vichy government. And peace, like happiness or love, Ms. Paxson recognizes, is not measurable but rather a “dynamic” force “not located in the beginning or the end, but in the unfolding.” The plateau, she concludes, is a place “made holy by the aggregate acts of love within.” In this context, the word “peace” may be something of a misnomer.

What is unquestionably true, however, is that between 1942 and 1944 more Jews and other people hunted by the Nazis and the Vichy government were saved on the plateau than in almost any other region of occupied Europe. The shelter offered by the plateau’s inhabitants was a perfect example of what could have been done—and was largely not done—to protect the victims of persecution. And it could be an example again of what can be done for the refugees of today. One of the great tragedies of World War II was that there weren’t more such plateaus. It’s a tragedy, as Ms. Paxson’s book demonstrates, that continues to this day.

Ms. Moorehead is the author of “Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France.” The last book in her Resistance Quartet, “A House in the Mountains,” will be out this winter.