The Plateau by Maggie Paxson (review)

Paxson's book studies the Vivarais-Lignon plateau where thousands of Jews were hidden during the Shoah. It focuses on one of the rescuers, Daniel Trocmé, who was related to the author. It follows him to the village where he took charge of two homes, for children (Les Grillons) and young adults (La Maison des Roches), and after his arrest, to Majdanek, the extermination camp where he died in 1944. As the book follows Trocmé, it also studies the rescue work being done on the plateau today, where refugees fleeing war and persecution from Yemen, Kosovo, Chechnya, Syria, and several African countries are welcomed just as the people living on the plateau during the Nazi plague welcomed the Jews who came looking for a safe place to hide. Paxson is interested in collective memory and she follows these two time periods in some depth. She also explains that people living on this plateau hid victims of the religious wars during the sixteenth century and once again Catholic priests during the Revolution. How did this happen? The inhabitants were able to see other human beings as human beings, not as Jews or African refugees. They were individual human beings first. Nothing external to their fundamental humanity made them more or less worthy of welcome and rescue. This came through when Pastor André Trocmé, Daniel's cousin, was asked by Vichy officials to turn over the list of Jews hiding in the area. He replied: "We don't know Jews. We only know men" (311). Paxson's book is beautifully written, often poetic. Even though it contains many imagined scenes, it never violates the history it portrays. She follows Daniel to the place where he died, and we find her, late in the book, looking for a stone to leave in his memory and a place to leave it. Many readers will have to hold back their tears at the end of the book when Maggie places a clay-colored stone where two branches meet in the carob tree planted in Daniel's honor in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. When Daniel wrote to his parents to explain to them why he had decided to go to the plateau to do this rescue work rather than complete his doctorate as they would have preferred, he said that the work he was going to do would be "part of the reconstruction of the world" (318). Paxson shows subtly but clearly that, both then and now, reconstruction of the world is made possible and begins with children. Perhaps this is why Saint-Exupéry (whose plane disappeared three months after Daniel died) seems so omnipresent in this study where he is mentioned only on a couple of occasions. Trocmé, the people on the plateau, and Paxson herself epitomize two truths that are central to Le petit prince: "On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur" and "L'essentiel est invisible aux yeux."