by Peter Grose
—PG
Brothers and sisters,
The President of the Protestant Federation yesterday gave a radio talk, to which we would like to add our voice. In his talk, Monsieur Boegner called on the Protestant Church of France to humble itself for the mistakes that led our people to our present state.
Just as the Israelites of the Old Testament suffered, so we have come to our moment of suffering and humiliation.
Therefore let us all be humble, and be ready to carry our own share of responsibility for the general catastrophe. Let us hang our heads in shame for the sins we have committed, and for others’ sins that we failed to prevent; for letting things drift; for our lack of courage; for all of these failings that made it impossible for us to stand firm as storms approached; for our lack of love when faced with others’ suffering; for our lack of faith in God, and our worship of wealth and power; for all the feelings unworthy of Christ which we have tolerated or kept alive in our hearts: in a word, for the sins we all share, which are the real and only cause of all the unimaginable tragedies that befall us.
Let us hang our heads in shame before God, each one of us, as individuals, as leaders or members of a family, as citizens and as Christians, as pastors and church elders, as youth leaders, as members of youth groups, as Church worshippers. We beg God to forgive us for our own sins and for the sins of our people, for the sins of humanity today and of the Church today. In this we are united. It is to God alone that we must look for relief from our suffering. However, we must guard against some forms of humility that would be disobedience of God.
First, let us be on our guard against confusing humility with hopelessness, and from believing and spreading the word that all is lost. It is not true that all is lost. Gospel truth is not lost, and it will be proclaimed loud and clear in our church from this pulpit, and during our pastoral visits. The word of God is not lost, and that is where you will find all the promises and all the possibilities of a recovery for all of us, for our people, and for the Church. Faith is not lost: real humility doesn’t weaken faith; it leads to a deeper faith in God, a more powerful desire to serve.
Second, we must guard against humbling ourselves not for our own sins but for the sins of others, in a spirit of bitterness and rancour. In recent days, during pastoral visits, we have heard many complaints: from soldiers against their officers, and from officers against their soldiers; from bosses against their workers, and from workers against their bosses; from rich against poor, and from poor against rich; from pacifists against patriots, and from patriots against pacifists; from believers against non-believers, and from non-believers against believers. Each accuses the other, each tries to dodge his or her own responsibilities and pass the blame on to their fellow citizens, or foreign nations, forgetting that only God can judge and measure the guilt of each of us. We do not believe that this kind of humility leads us on the proper road to recovery for our country, and for the Church.
Third, in our shame, let us not lose our faith and our convictions, based on the Gospel. We may not have made proper use of the freedom that was given to us, but let us not give up that freedom, under the cover of humility, and turn ourselves into slaves; let us not give in without a struggle to the new ideologies. Have no illusions: the events of recent days mean that the totalitarian doctrine of violence now enjoys formidable prestige in the eyes of the world because it has, from the human point of view, been impressively successful.
So, yes, let us hang our heads in shame, but let us not bow down to such a doctrine. We are convinced that the power of this totalitarianism is like the authority of the Beast of the Apocalypse, described in chapter 18 of the Book of Revelation. It is nothing other than anti-Christianity. For us it is a matter of conscience to spread that message today, as yesterday. We know well that the sons and daughters of our church gave their lives to fight this totalitarian doctrine. So humbly admit to your sins, yes, but don’t give in to a new heathenism. It is by giving our lives to Jesus Christ, according to his Gospel, to his universal Church, that we keep our faith and show true humility.
In this call to Christian humility, brothers and sisters, we would like to add a few exhortations addressed to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. First, let us abandon today all divisions among Christians, and all squabbles among the French people. Let us stop labelling ourselves and others, because that is the language of scorn: let us abandon right and left, peasants, workers, intellectuals, proletarians and plutocrats, all the terms we use to accuse each other of some wrongdoing or other. Let us learn to trust each other again, to receive each other, to welcome each other, reminding ourselves that every time we come together, like the early Christians, we are brothers and sisters in Christ.
Then, having abandoned these suspicions and hatreds, and the political passions that go with them, let us gather resolutely around Jesus Christ, the head of the universal Church, and embrace his Gospel, and only his Gospel, as our source of inspiration, obedience and action.
Finally, understand that the return to obedience obliges us to make some breaks: breaks with the world, and breaks with ways of living that we have accepted so far. We face powerful heathen pressures on ourselves and on our families, pressures to force us to cave in to this totalitarian ideology. If this ideology cannot immediately subjugate our souls, it will try, at the very least, to make us cave in with our bodies. The duty of Christians is to resist the violence directed at our consciences with the weapons of the spirit. We appeal to all our brothers in Christ to refuse to agree with or cooperate in violence, especially in the coming days when that violence is directed against the English people.
To love, to forgive, to show kindness to our enemies, that is our duty. But we must do our duty without conceding defeat, without servility, without cowardice. We will resist when our enemies demand that we act in ways that go against the teachings of the Gospel. We will resist without fear, without pride, and without hatred. But this moral resistance is not possible without a clean break from the selfishness that, for a long time, has ruled our lives. We face a period of suffering, perhaps even shortages of food. We have all more or less worshipped Mammon; we have all basked in the selfish comforts of our close family, in easy pleasure, in idle drinking. We will now be made to do without many things. We will be tempted to play our own selfish game, to cling on to what we have, to be better off than our brothers. Let us abandon, brothers and sisters, our pride and our egotism, our love of money and our faith in material possessions, and learn to trust God in Heaven, both today and tomorrow, to bring us our daily bread, and to share that bread with our brothers and sisters.
May God free us from both worry and complacency. May he give us his peace, which nothing and nobody can take away from his children. May he comfort us in our sorrows and in all our trials. May he see fit to make each of us humble and faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ, of the body of Christ, waiting for his kingdom of justice and love, where his will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing is supposed to be a lonely business, but the writing of a book like this is impossible without the continual, massive and totally unrewarded support of a multitude of experts and participants, and others who simply take an interest and want to help.
My first thanks must go to those eyewitnesses who gave generously of their time. When I was starting out on my research, I conducted long interviews with Oscar Rosowsky, Max and Hanne Liebmann, Rudy Appel, Nelly Trocmé Hewett, Catherine Cambessédès and Pierre Sauvage. Their contribution did not end with the interviews: afterwards I bombarded them with emails and phone calls demanding impossible acts of recall. What was the exact date when this or that happened? How much money was in the suitcase? Perhaps as an act of self-defence, some of them read the manuscript when it was still a work in progress, and made myriad helpful suggestions and corrections. I am deeply grateful to them all.
Nelly Trocmé Hewett needs special mention. She more than any other suff
ered from my endless emails and queries. She generously and unhesitatingly introduced me to her extraordinary network of friends from the Plateau. She is a retired schoolteacher, and her habit of correcting pupils’ homework has happily survived into her retirement. If the accents on French words like Cévenole and Saint-Agrève now face the right way in the preceding text, readers can thank Nelly and her eagle eye. As well as saving my stumbling French from many a spelling or grammatical howler, Nelly was also a remarkable fact checker. Any mistakes in this book are mine and mine alone, and there would have been more of them without Nelly’s help. Merci, Nelly.
Catherine Cambessédès, another retired French teacher, also did her bit correcting my homework. At one point she sent me 27 pages of handwritten notes, many of them adding revealing little details to the story she first related to me when I interviewed her back in May 2012. Merci, Catherine.
My thanks to Dr Wendy Chmielewski for permission to quote from the André Trocmé and Magda Trocmé papers, part of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Roger Darcissac was a keen photographer (he took the stunning photograph of his son Marco that appears on the cover of this book) and his family donated his photographs and albums to the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. My thanks to Aziza Gril-Mariotte, the chef de projet of the Lieu de Mémoire’s collection of photographs and papers, for permission to use them in this book. Others who contributed have been acknowledged in the text.
As will be clear from the bibliography, the historian Gérard Bollon is a prolific writer on Plateau topics. He was one of my first interviewees, and he took me on a conducted tour of the Plateau while I photographed the House of Rocks, The Wasps’ Nest, The Flowery Hill, Tante-Soly’s, the New Cévenole School and other landmarks. He patiently answered endless email queries written in my beginner’s French, and for more than two years generously steered me in right directions.
Nelly Trocmé Hewett’s friend Joann Cierniak, who writes about music, theatre and the performing arts, came to my rescue when I was getting bogged down in the research. She read parts of the book as a work in progress, and her encouraging response reassured me and kept me going.
Nobody can tackle a subject like this without taking advantage of the research already done by other authors and historians. My first need when I began my research was an accurate chronology: step forward François Boulet, author of the excellent Histoire de la Montagne-refuge; step forward also Léon Chave, who prepared a very full chronology as his contribution to the 1990 symposium Le Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Accueil et Résistance 1939-1944 (The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Welcome and Resistance 1939-1944).
That symposium occupied a central place in my research. There is endless controversy over the events on the Plateau. Who did what? Who mattered? Who didn’t? A lot of the uproar was triggered by the publication of Philip Hallie’s 1979 book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the first attempt to tell the Plateau story. The book was translated into French and published as Le sang des innocents (The Blood of Innocents). It was widely and disapprovingly read by some French survivors from the Plateau. Hallie was a moral philosopher, not a historian or a journalist, and he got a lot wrong. (He got a lot right, too, let it be said!) The symposium set out to put the record straight. The beauty of it, from my point of view, was that everybody who took part had to stand up in front of their contemporaries and fellow survivors from the Plateau to tell their story. If they strayed from the path of truth or righteousness, there were people on hand to pull them up. So in general I preferred to accept the version of events set out in the symposium, simply because each story in there had survived the scrutiny of an army of live fact-checkers.
Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit had an important role in the creation of this book. My friend Winton Higgins lectures in, among other things, genocide prevention, at the University of Technology, Sydney. His work led him to Pierre’s film and to the Plateau’s story. Winton in turn suggested the subject to me. So Pierre’s documentary began the chain of events that led to this book. I must have watched the documentary 50 times or more. Again, it was crucial to my research, because it contains interviews with Magda Trocmé, Edouard Theis, Pierre Fayol, Henri and Emma Héritier, Madeleine Barot, Georgette Barraud, Roger Darcissac and others who appear in the preceding pages. It enabled me to visualise them as people, not just as names. Further thanks to Pierre for patiently answering my endless requests for information and sometimes for reassurance. We don’t always agree, particularly on rescue numbers, but he has been an important and generous ally in the creation of this book.
The staff at the departmental archive of the Haute-Loire were tirelessly helpful as I ploughed through police reports, departmental directives, pleading letters, arrest warrants and all the other trivia that adds up to collective repression. It makes for sorry reading.
The staff at the Mémorial de la Shoah (Holocaust Museum) in Paris were equally helpful, digging out old press cuttings and pointing me in the direction of helpful books and articles. I spent some time in the National Archive in Paris where the staff were, again, endlessly helpful. It was wonderful to read old issues of Combat, the Resistance newspaper edited by Albert Camus.
My wife Roslyn’s French is fluent, unlike mine, and I could not have conducted the original interviews with Oscar Rosowsky and Gérard Bollon without her help.
That leads me to thank my two French teachers, Alain Bohée and Christelle Dubois. With Alain, I practised storytelling and dialogue in French. Christelle set about drumming the complexities of French grammar into me. A lot of this book was written as part of my French homework for Christelle: I translated from French, and Christelle (who normally teaches English, not French) checked my translation. Such infelicities and inaccuracies as survived this process are all my own work, and Christelle shall remain totally blameless.
I received a lot of encouragement from the engaging mayor of Le Chambon, Eliane Wauquiez-Motte. Her fluent English made communication simple, and her warmth and generosity are outstanding. The people of Le Chambon are lucky to have her. Her son Laurent is a deputy in the French National Assembly and was Minister for Employment in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy. He is spoken of as a future leader of the Gaullist UMP. We shall see.
My thanks to those who gave me a place to rest my head while I was conducting this research. Nelly Trocmé Hewett took my wife and me in for two nights in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a city I’d never visited before but would certainly go to again. Further thanks to an old friend, the writer Cyra McFadden, who kept us dry externally (but not internally) in her Sausalito houseboat while I was researching in the San Francisco area.
My friend Tom Keneally, who has some experience in these matters (he is the author of the remarkable Schindler’s Ark, filmed by Steven Spielberg as Schindler’s List) gave me a lot of advice on post-publication problems. Tom’s words of wisdom remain untested at the time of writing, and will remain so until the book is actually out there, but I am the better armed for having received them.
Clara Finlay did an extraordinary job copy-editing the manuscript. As well as her excellent trimming of my wayward prose, she submitted no fewer than 1003 entirely sensible queries (Microsoft Word counts them), and the whole book is much the better for her painstaking fact-checking and incisive questioning. My regular editor, Angela Handley, has done her usual stylish job of converting my word mountains into a book. Richard Walsh agreed to read the early chapters as a work-in-progress, a request which all publishers sensibly resist, and was a vital source of encouragement when the burden of the research threatened to overwhelm me.
My final thanks must go to the people of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, whose unfailing decency and sheer courage give hope that the human race might be capable of good as well as evil. When I began researching this book, I often asked myself whether the people of the Plateau would behave the same way today. In the years 1939 to 1944 they were a community of farmers, living simple lives in rural isolation. Now they h
ave television and broadband to bring the outside world into their homes. Might this new sophistication mean that those old values have gone, squeezed out by the secular embrace of the global village? If they were asked to do it all again today, could they?
Let me tell a story. On the night of the preview screening of the remastered version of Weapons of the Spirit in Le Chambon in June 2013,1 found myself seated next to an old woman from the village, a total stranger, perhaps in her eighties. She asked me over and over when the film would start, and each time I did my best to explain to her. Finally, her daughter leaned across her and apologised to me, saying that her mother was a bit forgetful these days and had a habit of asking questions again and again. I murmured that it was no problem, and we waited. The film finally began. At several points in the film, a community group of villagers sings an old Protestant hymn, Ta Cévenole’. The old lady sang along with them, in a clear voice, remembering every word. It occurred to me then that the old values were still alive, and would be passed on. So if the question is: ‘Could they do it again?’ I would answer yes, they can.
