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Le
Chambon sur Lignon |
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Le
Chambon-sur-Lignon is a commune in the Haute-Loire department in
south-central France with a past !. Primarily a Huguenot town, it
became a haven for Jews fleeing from the Nazis during World War II. During the Holocaust in
France, in a tiny mountain Huguenot village 350 miles from Paris called Le
Chambon-sur-lignon, 5,000 Jews, mostly children, found shelter with 5,000
Christians, almost the entire population of the village. Defying the French government
which was collaborating with the Nazis, the villagers of Le Chambon hid Jews
in their homes for years. They provided the refugees with forged
identification, provided education for the children, ration cards, and sent
them to safety in Switzerland. The Chambonnaises were
descendants of the Huguenots, the first Protestants in Catholic France.
Having endured persecution in France they were able to understand the plight
of the Jews. Under the leadership of a
young French pastor, Andre Trocmé, the people of Le
Chambon felt it their duty to help people in need, never considering their
actions heroic or dangerous. Born in 1901, Trocmé came from a long line of German Huguenots. As a
teenager in World War I he had been profoundly influenced by a German soldier
who was a conscientious objector. Andre Trocmé
and his assistant pastor Edouard Theis were pacifists. In1938 they
founded Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, an
international pacifist school that educated Jewish children. Attendance
grew from 18 in 1938 to 350 in 1944. Trocmé and
Edouard Theis inspired the non-violent rescue activity in Le Chambon between
1940 and 1944, enlisting the involvement of 13 Protestant ministers. Residents of the town were
unaware of the rescue efforts of their neighbors. They neither talked about
it during the war, nor after, when the refugees had already left. No records
were kept. By the middle of the
Occupation, there were seven houses in Le Chambon, financed by Quakers,
Catholic clergy, the Red Cross and Sweden, for children whose parents had
been deported. The Vichy police frequently searched houses and farms in the
village. The head of one of these
schools was Daniel Trocmé, Andre's, cousin, head of
one of France's finest elementary schools, Les Roches, who had a heart
condition which made it difficult for him to do strenuous work. When the Nazis discovered the
school, they arrested Daniel, and questioned him all the way to the prison
camp, Maidenek in Eastern Poland, where he was gassed and incinerated, in
1944. The village was known to the
Germans as "that nest of Jews in Protestant country," where no
villager denounced a refugee or a person concealing refugees. When a national
leader of the Reformed church asked Trocmé to stop
aiding Jews, because it would damage French Protestantism, he refused. As Jews in Paris were
deported in 1942, he delivered this sermon, "The Christian Church should
drop to its knees and beg pardon of God for its cowardice." While the
Vichy government allowed 75,000 Jews to go to their deaths and made informing
on Jews patriotic, the French police cooperated with the Nazis. The abandonment of the Jews
prompted Elie Wiesel to write "What hurts the victim is not the cruelty
of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander. Villagers in Chambon,
armed with their beliefs, in view of storm troopers, saved the lives of 5,000
refugees." In Le Chambon women played a
key role in the rescue. They were faced with the decision to whether or not
take a stranger into their homes whose presence could imperil the lives of
their families. The women of Le Chambon were the backbone of much of what
occurred there. Pastor Trocmé
always responded to calls for help to hide Jews, even if it jeopardized his
life, his wife or children, because Huguenots believe in the dignity of all
humans, without using their influence to convert Jewish refugees. Once Chambon became "a
city of refuge," they felt compelled to diminish suffering and put into
action the principles in which they believed that faith without works is
dead. No violence, not even the violence needed to defeat Hitler, was
permissible to them as Christian pacifists. Trocmé
told a Vichy official who had threatened him about the sheltering of the
Jews: "We do not know what a Jew is," he told him, "we only
know men." Andre Trocmé
was eventually arrested, and released, without having been persuaded to sign
a commitment to follow government orders regarding Jews. Many Jews resided in
relative calm until the end of the war, with the aid of local residents. While Andre was in hiding his
wife, Magda, continued taking trips with Jews to neutral Switzerland. Many
involved in the rescue efforts received a medal from Yad Vashem that contains
a Talmudic saying, "Whoever saves a single life is as one who saved an
entire world." "The responsibility of
Christians" they said, in Church after an armistice with Nazi Germany
was signed, "is to resist violence through the weapons of the
spirit." In 1990 Le Chambon, became
the first community to be honored as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem. Two
thousand French Righteous Among the Nations have been recognized for their
help of Jews during the Holocaust, 40 of them in Le Chambon And it is a deliberate choice, in tune with our Internationalism that we
chose this place with such a historic appeal. |
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President
Barack Obama speaks about Le Chambon “We also remember the number 5,000 -- the number of Jews rescued by the
villagers of Le Chambon, France -- one life saved for each of its 5,000
residents. Not a single Jew who came there was turned away, or
turned in. But it was not until decades later that the villagers spoke of
what they had done -- and even then, only reluctantly. The author of a book on the rescue found that those he interviewed were
baffled by his interest. "How could you call us 'good'?" they said.
"We were doing what had to be done."“…”Their legacy is our
inheritance. And the question is how do we honor and preserve it? How do we
ensure that "never again" isn't an empty slogan, or merely an
aspiration, but also a call to action?” |
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