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

contrition, almost apologetic. There must be something rotten about the way France had been operating in the recent past, he told his fellow countrymen, otherwise these humiliations could not have been inflicted on their great nation. The Jews, the foreigners, the communists and the politicians had let France down. The only way for France to recover its pride and power was by cleansing itself: in the marshal’s words, by
rénovation
, along German lines.
    Not everyone was convinced. On 10 July some 80 deputies from the exiled French government in Bordeaux, almost without exceptionfrom the political left, refused to support Pétain. They voted against Petain’s proposed rewriting of the French constitution to enshrine the terms of the Armistice. One of the leading mutinous deputies, André Philip from the socialist SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, or
French Branch of Workers International
), gathered up his feisty wife, Mireille, and their five children, and left town. They chose to move to a remote village in the Haute-Loire, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. André Philip did not stay long. Two weeks later, on 26 July, he joined General de Gaulle in London.
    Although Marshal Pétain remained popular on the Plateau until well into 1941, André Philip later wrote that the people of the Plateau were quick to show where their loyalties lay. For their first month in Le Chambon, his family ate for free: the local farmers thought it was an honour to give them food because he had voted
non
. The same farmers refused to sell anything to the Pétainists.
    • • •
    With the fighting now spread across most of Western Europe, André Trocmé’s worst fears had been realised. The war he had argued so hard to prevent had now arrived on his doorstep. So how should he respond? And, in particular, how should a Christian pacifist respond?
    The answer was little short of electrifying. The Armistice was signed on 22 June, a Saturday. The following day, André Trocmé and Édouard Theis issued a joint declaration. Trocmé read it as a sermon in the regular Sunday service in the church of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, while Theis sat below the pulpit in full pastor’s robes. At the end of the service, the two men walked side by side out of the church. No one who was present would ever forget their declaration. 11 In it, the pastors addressed themselves to their congregation, to the people of the Plateau, and to the wide world. It was an intellectual tour de force and it set the tone for the Plateau for the next four years.
    Trocmé and Theis began by quoting a radio broadcast made the previous day by Marc Boegner, who had called on the French Protestant Church to humble itself for the mistakes it had made in helping to bring the French people to their present unhappy state. 12 Trocmé’s rhetoric soared above Boegner’s. What everybody now faced, said Trocmé, was a test comparable with the biblical sufferings of the Israelites.
    First, he told the congregation, everyone should keep hope alive. All was not lost. Second, people should be honest about their own failings, and not blame others for their problems. But, third, people should remain true to their own beliefs. Totalitarian violence seemed to have won the day, but that was no reason to accept it. The power of the totalitarians was comparable to the power of the Beast of the Apocalypse. And like that diabolical power, it should be furiously resisted. The task of Christians was to stay united, whatever their politics and whatever their place in society. They should trust each other, stay close to each other, welcome each other, and remind themselves that, like the earliest persecuted Christians, they were brothers and sisters together. Then came the most striking phrase in the entire declaration:
    The duty of Christians is to resist the violence directed at our consciences
with the weapons of the spirit
[emphasis added]. We appeal to all our brothers in Christ to refuse to