The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (6 page)

Two ideas now dominated André’s thoughts. His experience in the army left him in no doubt about the rightness and practicality of pacifism. The mounting tension in Europe gave fresh urgency to the cause. At the same time, he grew increasingly conscious of the cruel contrast between his own comfortable, middle-class life and the lives of the poor. His Christian duty, he was convinced, was to help them.

In September 1925 he moved to New York after winning a scholarship to the Union Theological Seminary there. His father disapproved. He thought it was about time André found a parish for himself and launched a career in the Church. However, André knew his mind, and crossed the Atlantic.

If his intention had been to get away from comfortable middle-class life, that ambition fell apart in the most bizarre way. He was wanted on the phone. A strange voice said: ‘I am Mr John D. Rockefeller junior, 10 West 54th Street, and I need a French tutor for my sons.’ Édouard Theis had taken the job earlier, and the Rockefellers had come to trust French theology students. So André became tutor to Winthrop
and David. He collected them from school each day, shared their afternoon tea and evening meal, even travelled with them to Florida for Christmas. Every Friday evening, he went to the Rockefeller country estate at Tarrytown, on the Hudson River, and returned to Manhattan on Saturday evening. On Sunday, he was free to do as he chose. The pay—$175 a month—was generous. He might even be able to save enough money to make a long-standing dream come true: to go to India to meet that great advocate of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi. Less practically, John D. Rockefeller senior gave him a ten-cent coin and made him promise to invest it. ‘It’s the way I started, and I became rich,’ the great man told him. Sadly, the ten cents never quite became the cornerstone of a new Standard Oil Company, but it was a kindly thought.

In 1926 the Rockefellers asked André to stay on for an extra year, or even two, but he now believed the time had come to go to work. That meant returning to France and looking for a parish of his own. He was 25 years old, and he could not remain a student forever. This resolve was strengthened in the Easter of 1926. André was sitting with some friends in the cafeteria of International House. One of the friends left. The empty chair was taken by an aristocratic and strikingly attractive Italian social work student, Magda Elisa Larissa Grilli di Cortona. It would be nice to say it was love at first sight, but the truth is it was more like love at second sight. They met again, and this time the attraction was strong.

Magda came from a radical intellectual Russian family that traced its roots back to and beyond the Decembrist uprising of 1815. The Decembrists had aimed to topple the tsar and bring democracy to Russia. They failed miserably, leading to 289 arrests, five executions and 31 imprisonments. All the other conspirators were exiled to Siberia, including Magda’s great-grandfather, Alexei Poggio. Magda was proud of this radical history. She was determined to lead her own life,
live by her own standards, and break from her stifling middle-class background of minor Florentine nobility and the expectations of Italian married and family life. She was forthright, clever, and a bit of a rebel. She was not religious: in particular, after five years’ residence in the convent school of Le Mantellate she found the Italian Catholic Church repellent. Like André, she had grown up motherless. Her natural mother had died a month after Magda’s birth, and she never got on with her stepmother.

André proposed, Magda accepted, and they married in Saint-Quentin, France, in the autumn of 1926.

André now set to work looking for a suitable parish. He was determined to work among the poor in an industrial town, and his wish was soon fulfilled. At the beginning of 1927 he was sent to the picturesque-sounding Sous-le-Bois (Under the Trees), part of the parish of Maubeuge near the Belgian border. The shady trees turned out to be a distant dream: they had long ago given way to smokestacks, steel mills and industrial grime, while the people of the town were poor, brutalised and downtrodden. Alcohol abuse was a major problem, often leading to domestic and other violence.

As pacifism was contrary to church policy, the young pastor had  given an undertaking not to preach about it from the pulpit. However, he felt free to preach it elsewhere, including at a meeting of  the local Socialist Party. His powerful speech pointing out that pacifism was  the only logical consequence of Christian belief was reported in the local paper. That led to an angry letter of condemnation from the Regional Council of the Evangelical Reformed Church. Trocmé the troublemaker was born. Worse, his name was now on the Regional Council’s watch list.

The following year, after the birth of their first child, Nelly, the Trocmés moved on to another parish, Sin-le-Noble, a suburb of the heavily industrial northern city of Douai and not far from Sous-le-Bois.
Again, there was not much nobility in evidence. Sin-le-Noble existed to dig coal for the steel mills. It was a single-company town, and that company was determinedly Catholic. Miners who skipped mass were warned they could lose their homes. The company subsidised housing, and what the company giveth, so the miners were told, the company also taketh away. It was hardly promising territory for a young Protestant pastor, but André stuck with it for seven long years, from 1928 to 1934. During this period Magda gave birth to three more children, Jean-Pierre, Jacques and Daniel. André honoured his pledge not to preach pacifism from the pulpit. But the storm clouds were now building over Europe, and the need to prevent another tragic war seemed ever more urgent. He would have to take his message elsewhere.

Using his fluent German, Pastor Trocmé even took the argument across the border into Germany itself. He spoke in Heidelberg to a meeting packed with communists and Nazis, each spoiling for a fight with the other but all vaguely agreeing on a single point: pacifism was out. At the end of the meeting, one of the Nazi Brownshirts pulled a gun and threatened Trocmé with it. ‘I suggested to him in German that he should kill me right there in front of everybody,’ Trocmé recalled in his memoirs. ‘My proposal seemed to calm him down, because he disappeared into the crowd.’

At another meeting, this time in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, Trocmé got a hearing from a hostile audience by springing out from behind the curtains and barking: ‘
Deutschland erwache!
’ (‘Germany awake!’) As this was a favourite line of Hitler’s, the Brownshirts lapsed into startled silence, and listened respectfully while André called for equal and fair treatment for both German and French former World War I soldiers. This led to cheering and general applause. Why? As one of the Brownshirts explained afterwards: ‘You have precisely expressed what our Führer tells us every day—justice for all, fairness for all,
and peace for all.’ It was not exactly the kind of endorsement André Trocmé had in mind.

• • •

The Trocmé family now had a pressing personal problem: the children’s health. The foul industrial air of Sin-le-Noble was starting to affect them all, Nelly in particular. So André began to look for a new parish. The first invitation came from Clamart, one of a group of three parishes on the southern edge of Paris. In early 1933 he met the church council of Montrouge–Malakoff–Clamart, who liked what they saw and voted unanimously to accept him. The appointment then had to be approved in Paris by the Regional Council of the Evangelical Reformed Church, the same council that had rebuked André for his pacifist views at Sous-le-Bois. André managed to persuade the Regional Council to allow him to present his case to them in person. But the council asked him only one question: ‘In case of war, would you put on a uniform and defend the Fatherland? Answer yes or no.’ The answer could only be no. That ended his candidacy.

With the help of a friend, André now found a vacancy for a pastor at Thonon-les-Bains, near the Swiss border and not far from Geneva. As with Clamart, André met the church council and they approved of him. But one dissident member of the council tipped off the Regional Council in Paris. This time there was no need for André to go to Paris and speak for himself. The Regional Council had already made up its mind. No, again.

In 1934 Roger Casalis wrote to André asking if he would be interested in taking over from Casalis in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. As we’ve seen, this third church council also liked what they saw, and they voted unanimously to accept him. But this time they were forewarned: stay clear of the Regional Council in Paris. If they called the appointment ‘temporary’ there would be no need to seek approval. So on 22 June
1934, the church council of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, an isolated village high up on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in the Haute-Loire department of France, appointed as their new pastor—temporarily, of course—a restless, charismatic, multilingual, troublemaking, notorious pacifist called André Trocmé.

• • •

Charles Guillon left behind no memoirs. André Trocmé did, as did Magda Trocmé. It is quite striking that neither Trocmé makes much reference to Guillon. There is no evidence that the two men did not get on, but they clearly did not have much to do with each other. However, Guillon and the Trocmés combined to play a key part in one of the most influential developments on the Plateau.

Guillon wanted to build a UCJG camp at Le Chambon, along the lines of American summer camps. It would be primarily set up as a holiday camp, but it could be used as a school during term time. The two Trocmés had a much more ambitious idea. Le Chambon had long needed a secondary school, and the Trocmés would be delighted to set it up. So began the École Nouvelle Cévenole, the New Cévenole School.
⁵
It would be unique in that it would be privately owned, coeducational, Protestant, and international in character, with a strong thread of pacifism. The school would be open to boarding students from all over Europe—indeed from all over the world—as well as from the Plateau. The teachers, too, would be drawn from around the world. Guillon had a suggestion. The school would need a headmaster (in French, a 
directeur
). How about Édouard Theis? Theis could also act as Trocmé’s assistant at the church. André jumped at the idea.

So both projects went ahead. Charles Guillon built his UCJG camp, known as Camp de Joubert, and André and Magda set up the New Cévenole School. The school opened its doors to its first eighteen pupils in October 1938. Three languages were included in the curriculum:
Édouard Theis’s American-born wife, Mildred, taught English, Magda Trocmé taught Italian, and Hilde Hoefert taught German. Hilde was an Austrian Jewish schoolteacher who had fled Vienna in the wake of the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938). In Vienna she had taught Latin. When she arrived on the Plateau, sometime in the summer of 1938, there was no work for Latin teachers. So she took a job as an au pair at the Salvation Army refuge
Les Genets
. She continued to work there even after accepting the German teaching job at Cévenole, because the first teachers at the school were unpaid.

Hilde Hoefert has some claim to being Le Chambon’s first specifically Jewish refugee. She would not be alone for long.

By 1936 the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was almost perfectly poised for its future role as a refuge. It had two things going for it: people and position. The Plateau itself spread across two French departments, the Haute-Loire and the Ardèche, in the French region known as the Auvergne. There were seventeen
communes
,
⁶
thirteen in the Haute-Loire and four in the Ardèche, with a total population across both departments of about 24,000. It was largely a rural community, with the population scattered widely in isolated farmhouses and small villages rather than concentrated in large towns. In the Haute-Loire the key communes were Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, population 2721, of whom 2600 were Protestant; Le Mazet-Saint-Voy, population 2221, with 2087 Protestants; and Tence, population 3662, of whom only 300 were Protestant. The figures for the key communes of the Ardèche are less precise: suffice to say that more than half the Ardèche’s Plateau dwellers lived in the commune of Saint-Agrève, around 3000 in all, of whom about 1500 were Protestant. The total Protestant population of the Plateau came to around 9000, heavily concentrated in the communes of Le Chambon, Le Mazet and Saint-Agrève. The Protestants were mostly Huguenots, fundamentalist followers of John Calvin, the austere French priest who carried forward the teachings
of Martin Luther. Some were Darbyists, a splinter Protestant group, who believed, among other things, that Jews were indeed God’s chosen people. Thus the Plateau came well stocked with determined people, hardened by centuries of religious persecution, and all of them armed with a profound tradition of frugality, silence and sticking together.
⁷
The persecuted Huguenots had also developed a tradition of sheltering other victims, whatever their background. After the French Revolution of 1789 and the establishment of a determinedly secular society in France, Catholic priests came to be seen as part of the Old Order, to be hunted down where possible. The Protestants of the Plateau took them in.

Geographically, too, the Plateau was an ideal sanctuary. It was totally isolated. It straddled no strategic route from anywhere to anywhere. It housed rural communities with no heavy industry worth grabbing, and no natural resources like coal or precious metals to interest an invader. Anyone who set about conquering the Plateau would not have much to show for his efforts when the job was done. So, in general, people left the Plateau alone.

Last but not least, it had a strong tradition of hospitality. Since the late nineteenth century, the Plateau had played host to huge numbers of tourists and visitors, particularly children. Farmers took in poor children from the cities and offered them a healthy summer in the clean mountain air. The farmers received a nominal subsidy from an organisation called
Les enfants à la Montagne
(The Children on the Mountain), while the children did small chores around the farm to earn their keep. Special holiday homes catered for unaccompanied children. In 1935 some 3500 children spent their summer holidays in and around Le Chambon. The whole Plateau was littered with houses and apartments to let, guesthouses, B&Bs and even a few hotels.