I embarked on Village of Secrets because all the women I write about in A Train in Winter had left France by January 1943, and I wanted a story to take me through to the liberation of France in the summer of 1944. I also wanted a story in which, I believed, I would be writing about how well many of the French behaved. I suppose I hadn’t really taken in the full extent of Vichy’s collaboration with the Germans, or the atrocious conditions in the Vichy detention camps. That research fascinated—and appalled—me.
Can we learn any lessons from the people of Chambon?
I suppose that courage is a rare and wonderful thing and that many of the people in Plateau Vivarais-Lignon did not actually believe that they were doing anything other than their duty. Courage, then, and imagination and thinking of other people.
Read on
Caroline Moorehead on Village of Secrets: “I received warnings”
First published on theguardian.com. Reprinted with the consent of The Guardian.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2011, when I started work on my book Village of Secrets, the second in what will be a trilogy about resistance to dictatorship in France and Italy during and before the second world war, I received several warnings. This inspiring story, about the rescue of Jews, resisters and communists from the Vichy police and the Gestapo on a remote plateau in central France was, local historians told me, a hornets’ nest. In the years since the war, a particular group, united around the activities of a single man, had appropriated the story, forged their own version of events and would consider no other. I chose to think that by taking immense care to document every step of the way I would be able to steer safely between the conflicting truths. I was wrong. I have been shocked by the malice and personal nature of the attacks. After the book was nominated for the Samuel Johnson prize, they became organised and relentless, including a campaign to have Village of Secrets disqualified.
All writers enter history and memory at their peril. You do not have to move beyond the apocryphal tale of the policeman who, called to the scene of a car crash, questions six witnesses and hears a different account from each. How much more unstable, then, must memory be when dealing with events that took place more than 70 years ago and dealing with matters of survival, fear and heroism? But there is something different at work here, that goes far beyond recall. It is about ownership of the past, possession of what is perceived to be the sole true version of events, to be guarded with ferocity. The deeds done on the plateau Vivarais-Lignon during the grey and terrifying years of German occupation and Vichy rule have been turned into a struggle over degrees of goodness.
The account of what took place between the summer of 1940, when the Germans entered France and Pétain set up his collaborationist state, and the liberation of France in 1944, has gone through many twists and turns. Little was known about the plateau’s heroic past until the 1970s and 1980s when books and films, chronicling the “goodness” of its inhabitants, and particularly its pacifist Protestant pastor, André Trocmé, began to appear. As this version of events spread, with claims that about 5,000 people were saved, many of them Jewish children, so all the other people in the area, who had also taken part in the saving, began to observe that they were being left out of the story. Why, they asked, was there so little mention of the Catholic rescuers or the remarkable Darbystes, descendants of the Plymouth Brethren John Darby, who preached there in the 1830s, or the maquisards, the armed resisters, who had also done some saving and were certainly not pacifists? Why were the other villages and hamlets on the plateau, also places where much saving happened, somehow ignored? In my book, I wanted to tell all their stories without favour or prejudice.
It is no coincidence that it has taken more than 30 years and innumerable bad-tempered meetings to open a museum on the plateau to celebrate the war years, even though money to do so was found long ago. Even now, there are people on the plateau who feel excluded, airbrushed out by the more ruthless custodians of the story. No European country has been more interested than France in the nature of historical memory: how it is understood, perceived, recorded, written and transmitted. In what have been described as “memory wars,” “militants of memory” have picked obsessively over the past, questioning, accusing. There are said to be about 10,000 French “lieux de mémoires”—sites of remembrance, which can be places, ideas or even people, with their implied suggestion that memory is both a fluid, living phenomenon, something in permanent evolution, a structuring of forgetfulness, and yet at the same time calcified, with people’s own memories fixed in stone.
Even so, few stories of wartime France have attracted such controversy, such entitled competitiveness, as if the poison that was Vichy and the German occupation has somehow seeped into a place in which people behaved with courage and imagination.
That the plateau Vivarais-Lignon witnessed a remarkable experiment in saving people from deportation to the Nazi camps is beyond question. But there was no monopoly on “goodness.” Rather, there were many different individuals who, for complex reasons of their own, set out to defy the occupiers and between them accomplished exceptional things. To see the story mired in rancour is indeed sad.
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Praise for
Village of Secrets
“Compelling and deeply informed. . . . Offers readers a nuanced portrait of the Holocaust as it unfolded in the rest of southern France’s unoccupied zone. . . . [Moorehead] has done us the great service of unveiling the real lives behind the myth and in demonstrating that fallible human beings are far more interesting and dramatic figures than those who make up the stuff of legends.”
—New York Times Book Review
“The definitive account. . . . As with her previous history A Train in Winter (2011), another unblinking exposé of resistance during the war.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Le Chambon has long been mythologized in France for the actions of its inhabitants, who sheltered the refugees and helped many escape to Switzerland. But, as this riveting history shows, the story is more complex. . . . If the picture Moorehead paints is messier than the myth, this only serves to enhance the heroism of the main actors.”
—The New Yorker
“The vivid narrative takes on a cliffhanger quality. . . . A rich, haunting account that leaves us with an uncomfortable question: What might have happened if more people had refused to go along?”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Impressive. . . . Moorehead showcases a valiant counterpoint to the cruelties of occupied France and the slow creep of restrictions and regulations that made life for French Jews first intolerable, then impossible.”
—Newsday
“A wonderful story of the people of more than twenty communes who saved more refugees, proportionately, than anywhere else in France. . . . Moorehead’s knowledge of the people, the area, and the history make this one of the most engrossing survival stories of World War II.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Harrowing and luminous. . . . Even this pessimist could not have imagined the death camps of the Third Reich, or the villainy of Adolf Hitler’s French collaborators. Their indecency has been exposed many times since the end of WWII, but rarely with the force and detail of Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets.”
—Moment
“The best account I’ve seen in any medium. Emphatically not a debunking, this telling of the story is nonetheless deeply nuanced.”
—Christianity Today
“An exciting history of nearly forgotten individual and group courage. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Informative, comprehensive, and nuanced. . . . Moorehead’s deeply researched, crisply written, and well-paced work will stand as the definitive account of a heroic, hazardous, and uplifting initiative during the German occupation.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Moorehead not only recounts the heroics but also the everyd
ay ordinariness of those involved, busting the embellished mythology while emphasizing the essential humanity of the entire operation.”
—Booklist
Praise for the
British Edition
“A tremendously well-written and important book.”
—The Independent
“Compelling and authoritative.”
—Financial Times
“Moments in her narrative linger long after you have turned the final page. . . . Moorehead draws vivid portraits. . . . The emotional heart of the book beats in the children’s stories.”
—The Times
“Extraordinary.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“Impressive. . . . An uplifting tale of courage and morality.”
—The Sunday Times
“Vivid. . . . It is impossible to read this book without asking ourselves discomfiting questions. . . . Perhaps the most honest answer is silence. We may feel we need no reminders of that prolonged awfulness, but we need books like this to make it impossible for us to forget.”
—The Spectator
Also by Caroline Moorehead
A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France
Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era
The Letters of Martha Gellhorn (ed.)
Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees
Martha Gellhorn: A Life
Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia
Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross
The Lost Treasures of Troy
Bertrand Russell: A Life
Betrayed: Children in Today’s World (ed.)
Beyond the Rim of the World: The Letters of Freya Stark (ed.)
Freya Stark: A Biography
Sidney Bernstein: A Biography
Fortune’s Hostages: A Study of Kidnapping in the World Today
Credits
COVER DESIGN BY JARROD TAYLOR
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © AP IMAGES
Copyright
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers.
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VILLAGE OF SECRETS. Copyright © 2014 by Caroline Moorehead. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2014 by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Random House Group Ltd.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2015.
ISBN 978-0-06-220248-2
EPub Edition October 2015 ISBN 9780062202499 (reissue)
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* Daniel was the lover of Maï Politzer, one of the 230 women who appeared in A Train in Winter and who died in Auschwitz.
* In due course, having hidden and escaped one deportation train, Martin was also returned to le Chambon.
* When France was liberated, Bernard was shot as a collaborator.
* Three women from A Train in Winter, Charlotte Decock, Olga Melun and Yvonne Noutari, died with her.
Village of Secrets Page 42
