TOBIAS GREY: A REVIEW OF CAROLINE MOOREHEAD’S BOOK “VILLAGE OF SECRETS-DEFYING THE NAZIS IN VICHY FRANCE”
http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-village-of-secrets-by-caroline-moorehead-1416441748
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 Trocmé’s new parishioners seemed to him “as grey as their granite farmhouses,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir.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.
Ms. Moorehead is critical of both these earlier works for providing an overly simplistic picture of what happened. In particular, she resents the way that Hallie depicted Trocmé, a committed pacifist, as the “soul of Le Chambon” and showed him “acting more or less single-handedly.” What emerges in Ms. Moorehead’s book is a broader canvas in which Trocmé is one of many people that played a crucial role in the rescue effort. Likewise, Le Chambon isn’t the only heroic village: The people of the nearby towns of Fay, Tence and Mazet also opened their doors.
Before the war, tourists had been attracted to the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon for its dry summers. By 1939, Le Chambon alone had nine hotels, 38 boardinghouses and nine children’s homes, all served by a small train. The region’s crisp mountain air also attracted tuberculosis sufferers such as Albert Camus, who stayed on the plateau for several months after arriving in the late summer of 1942 from Algeria, during which time he worked on his allegorical novel “The Plague.”
ENLARGE Village of Secrets
By Caroline Moorehead
Harper, 374 pages, $27.99
Among the plateau’s inhabitants were a high percentage of Protestants whose Huguenot forefathers fled there following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, as well as a number of Darbyists, dressed in their distinctive white-lace caps, who paid sober allegiance to a 19th-century English preacher named John Darby. “We are morally conscious people,” said one present-day Darbyist whom Ms. Moorehead interviewed for her book. “Our families didn’t think of themselves as doing good. They did what they had always done, given sanctuary to the persecuted.”
The rush to save Jewish lives on the plateau began in earnest in the winter of 1942, thanks to the efforts of two incredibly brave and industrious women: the Protestant Madeleine Barot, who was general secretary of the Christian organization Cimade, and the Jewish Madeleine Dreyfus, who worked for the children’s aid society Organisation de Secours aux Enfants. Under the cover of sending up people to the plateau who had been released from internment camps in the south and had been OK’d by the French police, Barot and Dreyfus also began to smuggle Jewish children “wanted” by the Gestapo. In addition to providing refuge for Jews in their own homes, the parishioners provided them with forged IDs and helped many over the border into a largely unsympathetic Switzerland.
Much of the research for Ms. Moorehead’s book was done in private archives belonging to families who lived on the plateau at the time. As with her previous history “A Train in Winter” (2011), another unblinking exposé of resistance during the war, for “Village of Secrets” she conducted numerous interviews with surviving family members. For two years Ms. Moorehead traveled around France, the United States and Israel gathering the memories of elderly Jewish men and women who were hidden in the village as children. One of the commonly repeated stories Ms. Moorehead heard was of a desperate woman appearing at a remote farmhouse asking for help. When she explained she was Jewish, the Protestant farmer called out: “Family! Father! Mother! Come quickly: We have amongst us a representative of the chosen people.”
The author is noticeably less reliant than Hallie was on the unpublished memoir that Trocmé, who died in 1971, wrote after the war. Indeed, the one sour note that this book strikes is the way Ms. Moorehead fails to properly evaluate Trocmé’s side of the story. The defiantly anti-Nazi communal leader deserves a more generous treatment.
Ms. Moorehead points out that during the four years Germany occupied France, 234 people were deported from the Haute-Loire to the extermination camps in Poland. “For France, this was an exceptionally low figure,” she writes. “Even lower was the number of those taken from the plateau—barely a few dozen.” This was only possible thanks to the bravery of men and women like Marianne Cohn, who spent her war years as a “passeur”—smuggling people out of France into Switzerland. After she was tortured by the Gestapo and before she was beaten to death with a spade, she wrote what Ms. Moorehead rightly describes as one of the defining poems of the Vichy years. These are its opening lines: “I shall betray tomorrow, not today, / Today pull out my fingernails, / I shall not betray.”
Mr. Grey is a writer and critic living in Paris.
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