Free The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide by Peter Grose

had done the right thing by offering to resign. He, Boegner, always did his best for ‘those who share your convictions’. The subtext of the letter was clear: Boegner was telling Trocmé there had been enough trouble getting him into a parish and there was no possibility of finding him another one, even one closer to the heat of battle. Trocmé’s pigheadedness would bring suffering on his whole family. Boegner concluded with one of the more formal French signing-off formulae: ‘Please accept, my dear colleague, my cordially devoted sentiments.’ So, goodbye, then.
    • • •
    The so-called Phoney War, when nothing much happened on land (other than a fairly disastrous campaign by Russia to conquer Finland), lasted seven months, until 9 April 1940. Then Hitler struck again. He attacked Norway and Denmark simultaneously. Danish resistance lasted four hours. Norway, with support from Britain, proved slightly tougher. However, by 7 June, Norway, too, had fallen.
    Meanwhile, on 10 May, Hitler launched his major assault to the west, spearing his way into neutral Holland and Belgium. The Dutch lasted five days, surrendering on 15 May. The Belgians lasted a little longer: they surrendered on 28 May. There was still some hope that the Germans could be stopped there. In mid-September 1939, with the war only two weeks old, the British government had prepared for just such an eventuality by stationing a First Expeditionary Force in France, mostly along the northern border with Belgium but also reinforcing the so-called Maginot Line. The Maginot Line was an elaborate French defence installation further east and strung along the French–German border. Its sole purpose was to keep the Germans out of France. To do its job, the Germans would have to attack obligingly from Germany and not from elsewhere. However, they chose to bypass the Maginot Line and attack from Belgium. The combined resources of the British First Expeditionary Force and the French Army in the north were no match for Hitler’s blitzkrieg, and the two Allied armies fell back to the port of Dunkirk, in northern France.
    Between 26 May and 2 June some 338,000 men—198,000 British and 140,000 French—were evacuated from the Dunkirk beaches to Britain. It is called a miracle to this day, but in reality it was a massive and humiliating defeat for the Allies. The triumphant Germans, having neatly bypassed the Maginot Line, now wheeled south through France. On 10 June, exactly a month after Hitler made his move, the Frenchgovernment abandoned Paris and moved to Bordeaux. That same day, the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy decided that it had better join the winning side quickly, while there were still spoils to be had, and declared war on the retreating Allies. France was squeezed from both sides.
    Trocmé’s dilemma was now acute. Having failed to persuade Boegner to clear a path to a new parish in the war zone, he had decided to volunteer to work with the Red Cross. On 22 May he wrote (in English) to the American Red Cross offices in the Champs-Élysées in Paris, offering his services as a nurse or driver, stressing that he wanted to work with the civilian population in the combat zones, where danger was most pressing, and that he required no salary. He gave as references John D. Rockefeller junior and Marc Boegner.
    He followed up by going with Édouard Theis to the Red Cross offices in Lyon. There they were told that the French government had limited Red Cross recruitment to volunteers from neutral countries, which in practice meant volunteers from Sweden and Switzerland. Trocmé and Theis trudged back to Le Chambon, defeated.
    • • •
    Rapid-fire events now engulfed France, to the point where it was almost impossible to keep track. On 14 June the Germans occupied Paris, and continued southwards. There was still some possibility of slowing their progress: not all British troops had left France at Dunkirk. Instead huge numbers had retreated