Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems

The Roots of Resistance

The Roots of Resistance Le Chambon What is missing at Le Chambon are the Jews. One sees the place well enough, the steep streets of a village and the police who have come to arrest Pastor Trocme seated at the dinner table because the pastor’s wife insisted that the evening meal be taken. One sees the townspeople coming to bring gifts to him, in defiance of the Vichy regime, unveiling once again the human, insisting on it. One sees the large wooden door through which the strangers arrived, the seal to the left of the door, and the small inner opening to the presbytery. But one never sees them, their faces. The presence of these shadows accumulates in the pages of Philip Halle’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed— the sounds of their whispers, their Babel of languages. In Le Chambon during the Second World War, the Jews were joined to each family like a second soul. They passed through the houses of strangers. If some survived the Nazis, it was due to a pastor, to a town of people. In each house a Jew stopped on his way to somewhere else, on his way from somewhere . He did not stand still and declare: This is my home. For 1 5 6 if he did, he risked his own survival. And in those times there was no homeland, no place for him to go. When the decision was made in Le Chambon, a small town in southern France, to place the town and its inhabitants in grave jeopardy and eventually to save some twenty-five hundred Jewish men, women, and children, the Chambonnais had been rehearsing the decision for centuries. The townspeople of Le Chambon were an anomaly in France as descendants of the Huguenots who had been persecuted since the sixteenth century. Each person had fought his own battle against those who would crush him. Their rebellion was whole. It was not a a matter of a leader establishing the position of resistance for the rest, but a position that rested squarely within each inhabitant of the town. One example of just how reliable was this individual consciousness may be seen in the transformation of Bible study leaders. There were thirteen groups led by youngsters for the purpose of study. When the Germans conquered France, these groups became the communications network and their leaders, the moving spirits of the rescue operation. During the occupation, Trocme gave most of his instruction (Bible and resistance!) to these leaders. Pastor Trocme saw to it that he was the only person in Le Chambon who knew of the entire operation, that the groups operated independently of one another, so that if one leader was caught and tortured, he would not reveal enough to destroy the whole rescue machine. Each leader had to make swift, intelligent decisions on his own when Trocme was not available. There are two important lessons to be learned from the Chambonnais . The first, that one must be prepared to be human. The second, that in the act of resistance, timing is the crucial factor. I have heard it said by concentration camp survivors that one must be wary of the first, smallest injustice. Through the entryway of the first injustice does the next come. And the next. The decision to act in the face of injustice does not come when a man is being shoved into a ravine with a bullet in his neck. To act against injustice—to express one’s humanity —must begin early. And it must be learned. It has been said that it is the work of a whole lifetime to become human. Pastor Trocme tells a story: In 1921, he was in the French army on a mapping mission in Morocco. He was surprised to be issued a gun and cartridges, and in the name of nonviolence left his equipment at the depository. In the desert, when asked where his weapons were, he A PLACE CALLED GEHINOM 1 5 7 announced that as a Christian he could not kill. He was told by his lieutenant that he had endangered the lives of the entire group by his action. He was already committed to this military campaign. He should have made such a decision earlier. This conversation in the desert was a turning point in Trocme’s thinking. It taught him that the ethical commandment against killing had to be...