A Most Persistent Haven: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon
Sauvage, Pierre
A MOST PERSISTENT HAVEN: LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON The story of 5,000 who would not be bystanders—and of 5,000 more PIERRE SAUVAGE I am a 39 year-old European-born Jew, which means that around the...
...Another villager hid the false papers in his mother's grave...
...Father is a French Jew, from Lorraine, in eastern France...
...That we do seems to me to say more about our still traumatized state of mind than it does about them and their significance...
...No one was turned away...
...The notion that he and his wife were in any way heroic, special, is profoundly uncomfortable to both of them...
...But I have no doubt that the most basic answer is that the world did not care enough...
...I cannot expect others to discover and tell that story, for the existence of the righteous Gentiles is a constant rebuke to those others...
...there I was welcomed into this life...
...By neglecting the righteous of the Holocaust, by not being more genuinely and actively interested in searching them out and understanding them, by not integrating them more fully and more prominently into our accounts and memorializa-tions of the Holocaust, we fail not just the urgent universal agenda, but even our own pragmatic interests...
...devoted himself to some children...
...It was not a subject of discussion at the time, and it did not become a subject of discussion after the war ended and the Jews left to begin to reconstruct their lives...
...Monsieur Heritier is the image of the wary French peasant—taciturn, disinclined towards any self-asserting act or word...
...from there, they moved to Nice, on the Riviera...
...Nowhere do we have a parallel to such a story...
...The very next morning, a morning when all France was heaving a sigh of relief, confident that the worst was at last over, Trocme preached a sermon: "The duty of Christians is to respond to the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences with the weapons of the spirit...
...I can do neither, for I was born in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and so I know that in the midst of the carnage, there was decency, in the midst of the evil, good...
...Roger Le Forestier was another, a devout Christian physician who had served with Albert Schweitzer in Africa and then, still a young man, followed his commitment to Le Chambon in the early 1940s...
...It turns out that you cannot know who will be caught up in a conspiracy of goodness once it is launched...
...But the specific world into which I was born is a place called Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in France...
...I owe my life to the good people of Le Chambon...
...These heroes, these mostly quite ordinary people whose heroism was not a play for the spotlight, are inspiring and authentic and significant only because they contrast so dramatically with the apathy and complicity of the rest of the world...
...But the Trocmes had been to Germany in the early years of the Third Reich and had sensed what was coming...
...One book—Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, by Philip Hallie, a professor of philosophy...
...The values of the Chambonnais did not permit them to turn away...
...We remember the Danes and their heroism, and we remember Raoul Wallenberg and now Oskar Schindler, and we, who have taught that "the righteous Gentiles of all nations will have a share in the world to come" have made in Yad Vashem a place of honor for these chussidei umoi ha'olam, these righteous Gentiles...
...And so for nine months Daniel Trocme, in order not to be ashamed of himself, in order itaken olam...
...The tale of that particular slaughter is told in a book—Of Blood and Hope—written by my mother's nephew, my cousin, Samuel Pisar...
...And there is more...
...There was a need, and the 5,000 people of the area became—no one had any idea of it at the time—occupied Europe's most determined, most persistent haven of refuge for the Jews...
...there were always one or two Jewish children sharing skimpy accommodations with their own daughters...
...How, how find in the grisly story a cause for celebration...
...But I cannot accept that we, the Jews, remain so ignorant of and indifferent to the righteous...
...and, quite recently, one award by the Hebrew Union College...
...Among those caught in that Gestapo raid was a young cousin of Andre1 Trocme\ who had come to Le Chambon to run a children's home funded by the Quakers...
...At the start of the war, my parents, Barbara and Leo Sauvage, left Paris for Marseilles, in the then-unoccupied zone of southern France...
...Mitzvah...
...The couple and their daughter survived the war in Le Chambon, as did her sister and brother-in-law...
...a peasant woman caring, among others, for a Viennese doctor and his wife and child...
...This was to prove the only successful raid of the war...
...To the residents of Le Chambon, then as now, there was nothing remarkable in their behavior...
...It was this French government that engaged in a vociferous and energetic anti-Semitic campaign of its own, and it was this government that efficiently cooperated with the Germans when the deportation orders came—the deportations "to the East," to the Final Solution...
...Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was a Protestant enclave outside the mainstream of Catholic—or, for that matter, of secular—France...
...Young Trocm6 was one of the few martyrs of Le Chambon...
...In one of the worst, Gurs, the woman gave birth— it was August 1941—to a daughter, Eva...
...And what of Magda Trocml, widow of the late pastor of Le Chambon, a legend in her own right, a whirlwind of non-stop practical activity, common sense, unflaggingly available, ideally matched to her idealistic and reflective husband...
...I know more: I know that there are people, and always will be, whom even the most ferocious pressures cannot make into bystanders to human suffering...
...There are, it turns out, many answers to that question, all of them disturbing...
...They made their way there under the auspices of the Cimade, a newly-founded organization of young French Protestant women that was ceaselessly active, throughout the war, in helping Jews, going so far even as to place volunteer workers inside the camps...
...A few months later, he wrote— prophetically—that he thought he was going to be able to accomplish great things in Le Chambon...
...Perhaps none saved Jews on the scale of Le Chambon, perhaps nowhere else did such a remarkable consensus emerge...
...Major Julius Schmahling of the Wehrmacht, knew exactly what was going on in Le Chambon—and ordered those convalescing German soldiers, whose curiosity was sometimes aroused, to invest in recovering their own strength, to mind their own business...
...Among the few thousand there honored—so far—are the Chambonnais Andre Trocme, young Daniel Trocme and the assistant pastor Edouard Theis and his Ohio-born wife Mildred...
...Yet in his unpublished memoirs, he confided that his faith was, ultimately, in the possibility of good on earth, "without which," he added, "the theoretical existence of God doesn't interest me...
...And for the next four years, that is exactly what happened in a tiny area of France...
...while others were conducted, the villagers always managed to be alerted in time to send the Jews scurrying into the woods...
...And Madame Brottes, a member of a small fundamentalist sect who sits across the kitchen table from me and holds her head high as she proclaims that for her, as for many of the Christians of Le Chambon, the Jews were the people of God, the Chosen People, to whom she owed a special obligation...
...And Madame Barraud, who is 90, and is almost never at home because she's out all day visiting the old and the sick...
...The humblest peasant house has its Bible and the father reads it every day...
...These were not extermination camps, but the conditions in the worst of these French-run camps were no better than those in many of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Poland...
...On April 2, 1944, Daniel Trocme died in Maidanek...
...And I, the father of David, who want to believe in that possibility, too, who want to extend it and pass both the belief and the evidence for it on to my child and to his, am bound to seek out and to treasure and to learn from the bits and pieces I can find even in the moral rubble of these times—especially in the moral rubble of these times...
...As if moral or spiritual significance is a matter of numbers...
...But the Hentiers were among those who took the greatest risks, for they knew full well that the young Jewish teenager whom they sheltered was spending his nights forging false identity papers for the Jews and the other refugees who flocked to Le Chambon...
...will know that even in those days and places the Jews had friends...
...Madame Heritier happily remembers that it was in their house that I learned to walk...
...Normal for the Heritiers was that from the moment Jewish refugees started arriving in Le Chambon, there was always at least one Jew, usually more, at their kitchen table...
...But there is more...
...The late pastor of Le Chambon lived his life, his eloquent pacifist's life, as a demonstration of Christian faith...
...Le Chambon will be an education for me, and that shouldn't displease you...
...What a thrill it has been for me to meet and correspond with this woman...
...He's not going to tell me that he thinks the question meaningless, almost stupid...
...And yet the rest of us know that it was most remarkable, that the fact that these people behaved as normal, decent human beings was an extraordinary fact...
...And today, 39 years later, I am the father of a three year-old boy, to whom I shall one day have to explain what happened in those days, in those places...
...And perhaps all the Davids...
...Shall we call it an aberration...
...The Trocmes had come to Le Chambon in 1934 after serving among workers in industrial northern France...
...They are not social activists...
...In a world that has known such darkness, in which a new darkness threatens, can we afford not to study and to celebrate goodness...
...A film that records the faces, so many faces...
...To the peasants and villagers of Le Chambon, Le Mazet, Ray and all the hamlets and isolated farms of the area, the biblical admonition to love one another was the bedrock Christian message, a message they could not ignore, no matter the risk, no matter the consequences...
...No conversion was imposed...
...Who, when one of "her" Jews was caught and sent to an internment camp, mailed him precious food packages every single week...
...The beautiful French landscape, it should be remembered—as the French do not like to—was then scarred by dreadful internment camps...
...There were so few of them...
...They came because they chanced upon word of it—as in the case of my parents—or with the help of one of several admirable organizations, such as the American Quakers, who made use of Le Chambon's willingness—even eagerness—to take in both individuals and groups of Jews...
...The future will tell me whether I was equal to the task or not, and it will tell only me because it is not a matter of success in the eyes of the world...
...And might our own increased understanding of the sources of righteousness not be useful to us, today, as we seek dependable allies...
...Lest that message be obscured by the events of the day, the parish paper, at the very top of the first page, recalled that Jesus had said, "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar...
...We will resist," Trocm6 went on, "whenever our adversaries will demand of us compliance contrary to the orders of the Gospel...
...Les armes de I'esprit" is, thus, the French title of my documentary...
...They do not stress their Christian upbringing or belief...
...And so it was that my parents, a year after the large-scale deportations began, had to determine where to hide, where to go to have a child, a Jewish child...
...Might such models not serve as a prod to current behavior...
...And then came the war, and they were separated, sent to different internment camps...
...He who saves one life...
...And the young forger, who engaged in one of the most highly punishable of anti-Nazi offenses, survived the war...
...Madame Brottes, who took care of half a dozen Jews...
...Readers with personal knowledge of righteous conduct during the Nazi era are asked to contact Friends of Le Chambon at 8033 Sunset Boulevard #784, Los Angeles, CA 90046...
...and Heritier, and Brottes, the name Le Chambon...
...David is entitled to know such things...
...In September 1942, he wrote a letter to his parents explaining why he was not going on for his doctorate, as his parents wanted, but was instead acceding to the pastor's request that he come take charge of this new home—at least half of whose wards were Jewish...
...When I press, noting the risks they were taking, Madame Heritier looks up just long enough to say simply that one gets used to the risk...
...My husband and I didn't have that many Jews," she says—she whose pension was open to the hunted at any time of day or night...
...if the world is askew, that is the world's problem, not theirs...
...For there is here, plainly, the opportunity to present especially dramatic and inspiring positive role models to the Gentile—especially the Christian—world...
...So I am grateful to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon not only for my life, but also for my knowledge, which will one day be David's, too...
...A filmmaker currently in post-production on his forthcoming feature documentary, "Le Chambon: The Village That Defied the Nazis," Sauvage won an Emmy for his "Yiddish: The Mame-Loshn...
...The Hentiers are embarrassed that anyone would want to interview them about anything, but they don't really feel that I am interviewing them, for they remember me and my parents well...
...No one was betrayed...
...They think what they did was "normal...
...We who care that the memory of the Holocaust be sustained, as a tribute to the slaughtered, as a warning to the generations, must know that people are more likely to approach its horror, to confront the fact that we live in a world that permitted an uncountable number of children to be bumed because they were Jews, in a world that has known utter moral bankruptcy, if there is, at the edges of that world, the solace of the righteous, the knowledge that there were those who stood aside from that world and rejected it...
...As if we didn't believe, we Jews especially, that even tiny minorities may own important, perhaps even divine, truths...
...Or perhaps I should avoid the matter altogether, let it be understood as an aberration that has no continuing relevance to our secular, assimilated lives...
...As, of course, are we all...
...There is a picture of me as a baby in their daughter Eva's arms, for she helped take care of me...
...The effort was never coordinated...
...No agonizing, no intellectualizing, no rationalizing, no minimizing, no debating: Action...
...Perhaps that memory would lead them to help protect the Sauvages from harm...
...No person or group mobilized the villagers, the farmers, the peasants and the spiritual leaders of the area of Le Chambon into a coherent network...
...Tikun olam, we call it...
...This article is adapted from speeches he gave at Temple Valley Beth Shalom in Encino and at the Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust Committee of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles...
...Shall I then teach him that there is no purpose to be served in working and living with others, that anti-SemPierre Sauvage is the founder and president of Friends of Le Chambon, a non-profit foundation devoted to the study and memorialization of righteous conduct in Le Chambon and elsewhere during the Holocaust...
...It was with the cooperation of this government, of its police and its bureaucracy, that some 80,000 men, women and children were handed over to the mass murderers...
...And when the children were escorted to safety in Switzerland, as happened, they asked for more children...
...he was very concerned about the serious problem pregnancy of one of the Jewish women under his care...
...Copyright ©1983 by Friends ofLe Chambon...
...And the answer dangles...
...There I was born...
...There was a couple from Germany who had met and fallen in love as refugees in Paris...
...But here and there throughout Europe there are other heart-warming stories of Jews being provided shelter...
...It was the French government of the time, headed by the immensely popular Marshal P6tain, that quietly dumped Jewish refugees into these camps...
...So my parents rented a room in a farmhouse in Le Chambon, and it was there, in March of 1944, that I was born, at a time when much of my mother's family was being slaughtered...
...They became heroes because there were villains...
...itism is our irreversible destiny...
...I was born ip Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, and I have come to believe that the story of the righteous Gentiles is not merely interesting, that because of the extent of the atrocity and its continuing psychological costs it is an indispensable story...
...So it was that in the midst of Christendom's most horrendous failure, these Christians of Le Chambon gave evidence of religion's capacity for good...
...The Hentiers, a couple now in their 80s who lived up the road from where my parents and their baby were staying...
...What shall we make of it, as a memory, as a legacy...
...theirs was a commitment anchored by and in their Christian faith...
...And the Jews came to Le Chambon...
...So these people who do not read the papers but the scriptures do not stand on the moving soil of opinion but on the rock of the word of God...
...It so happened that a Jewish friend of my parents knew of a mountain village in south-central France, not too far from Lyon, that he thought would be as good a gamble as any...
...They had been lucky so far, especially since my mother is a Polish Jew, born in Bialystok, and was thus particularly vulnerable to being caught in a roundup of the kind the Vichy collaborationsists conducted frequently, or even by the Nazis themselves...
...Is that what I should tell David, my son...
...And I mean to tell him also, lest he miss the point, that there were people as good and as righteous in every single country of occupied Europe...
...The French armistice with Germany was signed on a Saturday evening...
...But he remained passionately eager to demonstrate that there is nothing even remotely passive about pacifism...
...I have chosen Le Chambon not because it is an adventure but because 1 will thus be able not to be ashamed of myself...
...A compelling ratio—one life preserved per local inhabitant...
...As if we even knew the numbers in this largely uncharted chapter of our past...
...Until, in June of 1943, the Gestapo came and arrested him...
...they are remembered because there was a Holocaust...
...What shall I tell him of the world, and of the ways of the world with the Jews...
...And just a few months later...
...Shall we fixate on the horror, and ignore the goodness...
...As the world watched...
...The people of the area are still amazed at how widespread the perilous hospitality was, are still surprised to learn that such and such a neighbor had also sheltered Jews...
...That is why, as I tell David of these things, as he learns that there is in all of us a capacity for evil and an even greater and more insidious capacity for apathy, I want him to learn that the stories of the righteous are not footnotes to the past but cornerstones to the future...
...At one point, this Christian pacifist had seriously considered whether he had an inescapable moral obligation to take advantage of his fluency in German to penetrate Hitler's entourage and assassinate him...
...He merely shrugs his shoulders and says, "When people came, if we could be of help...
...And then she looks down again, hoping I will not insist on answers she believes—erroneously— she does not have...
...even in Bialystok, even in Lithuania, even in the Ukraine, there were people who helped, individuals who risked and sometimes lost their lives, often defying not only the Nazis but their own neighbors, people whose actions—because so solitary—are in some respects even more remarkable than those of the Chambonnais...
...There were so many others, so very many...
...They were a cosmopolitan couple, she half-Italian, half-Russian, he half-German, half-French...
...I cannot name them all, but there is one more I cannot not name...
...But yes...
...The people of the rural area of which Le Chambon was the centerpiece had not forgotten the persecution of their own Huguenot ancestors by the kings of France...
...Those papers were essential for survival...
...It is also something of a contribution to the reconstruction of our world...
...Why, then, call particular attention to Le Chambon...
...For them Le Chambon was a sleepy, backwater place—except for one thing, which Andrl Trocmd wrote about to an American friend a few months after his arrival: "The old Huguenot spirit is still alive...
...A place, a sequence of events largely ignored by historians, unstudied by sociologists, uncelebrated by the religious communities, Jewish or Christian, unchronicled by the media...
...And now, a film, for that is how I have decided to inform the Davids of what happened, of what people can be...
...Knowing the extent of the loss, hence the depth of the mourning, how find time or room for thanksgiving...
...And there, in the newly-founded secondary school, the citizens of Le Chambon set aside a room for Jewish religious services, at which one of the Jewish teachers officiated...
...I owe even more than that to my son...
...Especially to the survivors, the issue of righteous behavior has been difficult, even painful...
...A MOST PERSISTENT HAVEN: LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON The story of 5,000 who would not be bystanders—and of 5,000 more PIERRE SAUVAGE I am a 39 year-old European-born Jew, which means that around the time of my birth, much of my family was humiliated, tortured and murdered in the Nazi death camps...
...I am a filmmaker from southern California, in the United States, descendant of the murdered, heir to endless gloom and memory most bitter...
...Le Forestier fell into Nazi hands and was murdered by the henchmen of Klaus' Barbie, the SS thug who was later to • become a United States intelligence operative and who is now at last, so late, being brought to justice...
...So my son David, who will know thai his great-grandmother Feigl Suchowolski and his granduncle Memel Suchowolski and his grand-aunt and granduncle Helaina and David Pisar, and his then-nine-year-old cousin Frieda Pisar, that all these and more were incinerated, will know as well the names Trocme\ and Le Forestier...
...But this was no time for dawdling in the sun...
...And it appears that a German officer...
...there the others did not watch, but reached out their hands...
...We will do so without fear, as well as without pride and without hate...
...In 1944...
...it is a reminder of their complicity, a rebuttal of the alibi that it was not possible to care, to do anything...
...The man—the husband, the father—arrived in Le Chambon some time after his wife and daughter...
...The knowledge is indispensable not just because this cynical world desperately needs to be reminded that moral behavior is possible even under the most unlikely circumstances, that it is both gratifying and appreciated...
...They had met in New York, where he was studying at Union Theological Seminary while tutoring David and Win-throp Rockefeller, in 1921...
...towards the end, Monsieur Heritier hid the paraphernalia for producing them in his beehives...
...Trocme, a brilliant, inspiring man, had had difficulty finding a parish because he was a proclaimed conscientious objector, not—to put it mildly—an acceptable belief at the time...
...We know very little about the extent of such conduct, and we know very, very little about who the good people were and less still about why they acted as they did...
...for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen...
...By and large, we have perceived them as misplaced footnotes to a macabre text...
...And all this under Vichy's\nose, within striking distance of the SS, with convalescing German soldiers walking the streets of Le Chambon during the last year...
...today, they live just a few miles from my home in Los Angeles...
...But there is more, much more, that we do not yet know...
...he is now a pediatrician in the outskirts of Paris...
...Then, avoiding calamity by way of the nearly routine miracle that marks the stories of so many of the survivors, mother and daughter were directed to Le Chambon...
...His professional expertise and his personal devotion pulled mother and son through: I cannot believe that my mother—for 1 was that son—would have been more effectively cared for, attended with greater dedication, in even that most modern facility where my own son was born...
...I think it may be time for me to assume responsibilities with regard to other people...
...And Monsieur Heritier stares resolutely at the ground when I ask the expected question: "Why did you shelter Jews...
...He came late one afternoon, and that very night, there was a Gestapo raid on the house where they had almost stayed the night...
...Ultimately, he decided that even this murder could not be sanctioned...
...Because during the course of the war the people ofLe Chambon and the surrounding area took in some 5,000 Jews...
...Once, while preparing to make a documentary—I am a filmmaker—I did quite a bit of research on the reasons why Auschwitz wasn't bombed...
Vol. 8 • October 1983 • No. 9
