Le Chambon-sur-Lignon

---

Hannah and I came to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon on the Massif Centrale south west of Lyon, 4 days after being in Terezín, and 2 days after visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau. It has been balm for the soul. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007518

In the 1940, the SS commandeered a Polish garrison complex in the small town of Oświȩcem, known in German as Auschwitz, and established the first site of their most infamous extermination camp. It was soon expanded to accommodate industrial worksites and barracks for yet more worker/prisoners, covering some . Five gas chamber/crematorium complexes were eventually built on the second site, Auschwitz II / Birkenau. Over a million Jews, Romany, prisoners of war, and political opponents died through over-work, neglect, and murder at the Auschwitz complex.

In 1941, the Bohemian garrison town of Terezín, germanized to Theresienstadt, was turned by the SS into a “model” camp, part of the National Socialist campaign to mislead the international community about the lethality of their racial programs. The town’s original three thousand inhabitants were forced to leave, to be replaced by at times as many as 15,000 Jews and other “undesirables.” For tens of thousands of them including thousands of children, it was their next to the last stop on their way to extermination.

In 1942, the German security services and their Vichy collaborators tried to extend their control over the mountainous regions of the Haute Loire. Their efforts to round up Jews and other ‘enemies’, including men, women, and children fleeing fascist Spain, were met with noncooperation and resistance by the local populace who were following the urging and examples of local clergy.

The communities of the Plateau had been providing refuge and assistance for Jews and others fleeing the Nazi persecution since 1940 as part of plan worked out between André Trocmé, one of the leading local pastors, and the American Friends Service Committee representative in Marseilles (and the Swiss Red Cross and various other sympathetic organizations and countries). When the Germans moved into southern France in 1942, things became much more difficult and dangerous. Sweeps by the Vichy and Gestapo became more frequent and more intrusive. Arrests of local leaders and the deportation of a dozen refugees followed. But the communities of the Plateau, both Catholic and Protestant, continued to harbor “the strangers in their midst,” devising numerous deceptions and ruses to keep safe those they felt bound to protect. Jewish children were enrolled in the local schools under Christian names, local police officials provided advance notice of raids and searches, warning systems allowed refugees to disappear into the dense woods and mountainous terrain when trouble loomed, and an “underground railroad” of churches, schools and farms created a safe route to escape to neutral Switzerland.

Less than 20 residents and their “guests” were killed, thousands were saved.

There is a topographical map in the small museum in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon that shows the surrounding towns and countryside. There is a small light for each farm that sheltered children. The map is covered with lights, perhaps as many as 150.

No doubt there were locals who choose not to participate. But no one, it seems, became an informer or collaborator. The entire community acquiesced, and most joined in. When presented with the choice - collaborate, adjust or resist, the communities chose to resist. Between 1940 and 1944, when the region was liberated by the Free French, the people of the Plateau fed, clothed, sheltered and helped 5,000 complete strangers (including 3,000-3,500 Jews) to avoid capture and extermination by the Nazis, all while risking arrest or death if caught. (In comparison, in 1943, the Danish underground and their supporters helped 8,000 mostly Jewish friends and neighbors to escape to Sweden.)

The kind of compassion and courage to take the risks involved for strangers seems very rare. These days, our country of 320 million is too frightened to accept 10,000 refugees from Syria.

The residents of Le Chambon and their neighbors are mostly of Huguenot ancestry, descendants of the first French Calvinists, who fled to the isolation of the Massif Centrale to escape persecution by the central government in Paris. By the time the Vichy and Gestapo arrived, the Chambonaise (?) and their neighbors had been resisting the French government on and off for 400 years. Perhaps the habit of thinking for themselves and not obeying without question was what made the difference. And perhaps a deeply ingrained habit of unquestioning compliance, of law and order, and of suspicion rather than compassion for strangers, is what has made us so hard-hearted today.

---