Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

Back The dreaded day arrived on February 13, 1943, three years into the occupation of France during the Second World War. We are in a tiny village in the mountains of Southern France, maybe 150 miles North of Marseilles and 150 West of Switzerland. As the American philosopher, Philip Hallie, re-tells the story in his book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, a big black car pulls up in front of the manse. Out of the car steps the chief of police for the department (or province) of Haute-Loire, Major Silvani. The woman of the house, Magda Trocme, issues the commands and as the never-locked front door is opened to the visitor, four German Jews head behind locked doors in the attic and cellar.

The major and the lieutenant ask for the pastor, but he is out visiting one of the 13 small Bible study and action groups that are the basis of the parish life and mission. Madame Trocme invites the men into the only room with a rug in their big, cold medieval house, the pastor's office. When Andre Trocme arrives, he is told that he is under arrest. But supper has been prepared and Magda insists they all sit down, including their guests. Grace is said, and the four children look at the visitors, and the neighbors begin t o arrive to say farewell, because the word is out. Bits of rare food, sausage, sardines, candles, socks are pressed into the pastor's hands. The police, who are agents of the Vichy collaborationist government, are increasingly stunned and touched. The people know Trocme will be taken to an internment camp, and possibly from there into Germany and death. The officers are only doing their duty-but in fact, they chose not to search the house. The major begins to weep and can not eat his dinner. But they must go. Perhaps in return for this hospitality, Major Silvani gives the pastor matches- rare in this poverty stricken region-for the candles.

After the hugs, the men step out into the street. Its ten at night, there's snow on the ground, but the villagers are gathering. But its not just villagers, students and refugees are in the mix, hidden in plain sight. The police arrest the head of the church-run Cevenol School, who is also the associate pastor, and the public school principal, and the three men are put into the cars. Then someone starts singing A Mighty Fortress is Our God, and the whole street picks it up. This is an unusual village, but it was the safest place to be in all of occupied Europe, this village of 3000 people, Reformed Protestants or Huguenots, Calvinists like us, standing virtually alone in a desert of collaboration and willed ignorance.

The three men were put in a camp, and did admit that they had sheltered Jews. But they did not say where or with whom or when. No one in the entire village, not just the church, although the village was about 90% Protestant by background, gave evidence against them. The men in the internment camp were Maquis, resistance fighters named for a small spiky bush, the Maquis, and communists. There was one lapsed Protestant who appears to have been a black-marketeer. But the three men are kept together. And supplies begin to come to the camp- like the scene at the farewell dinner table. The other men are amazed, and then amazed when the two pastors and the school teacher share the food equally, even favoring weaker inmates. They are given permission to have worship, and the atheists begin to attend the worship. The key questions: was Jesus a pacifist? How does God deal with evil?

The order then came for the three leaders to the village to be released. A joyful moment. When they are brought back to the provincial headquarters they are seated, and then given papers to sign. The school teacher signs, he is already a functionary of the government-even the Vichy government of Marshall Petain. You may know that Marshall Petain was the 84 year old hero of the First World War who agreed to administer the French hinterland so that Hitler would not treat France like Poland. This also freed up the German army to capture other parts of the world. If the men signed the papers they agree to respect Marshall Petain, and they signed that. Every human being was worthy of respect. But the next part was that they would obey the government of Marshall Petain. Trocme and Associate Pastor, Edouard Theis refused to sign.

Don't you realize what you are doing?! Yes, the men did know. They would not let anyone take their consciences away, their right to judge what is right and wrong, and who deserves care. That's it, back to the camp. Again, the communists and atheists of the camp are amazed. You are truly fools for Christ, we can imagine them saying. The pastors remained steady, carried on their services and food sharing just as before and the revival in the camp revived, so much that the guards were ceasing all brutality. Word of their moral resistance, however, had moved through the whole region, and the pledge to obey Petain was quietly dropped, and the men were released. The village was overjoyed.

During their absence the village had not stopped its courageous work. Each of the 13 groups was headed by a "responsible," dedicated to the mission of that congregation and virtually the entire village. Nothing is written, all is informal, but the mission is to be "city of refugee" (as in Deuteronomy 19 and other passages) for people fleeing from all over Europe. The school teacher and members of the church continued the preaching-we are talking Protestants here-and many of you would find yourselves able to preach if this church were without a pastor. But the situation was getting worse. Shortly after Trocme and Theis were released the second time, their internment camp was shut down and all the men in it sent into Germany or Poland. All died in forced labor.

Only one safe house was ever found, unfortunately one filled with children. All but one boy were taken to their deaths. The one boy was the son of Spanish communists who had saved a German soldier who had fallen in the river. Magda Trocme had pretended to be a maid and personally begged a German regular army officer for his release. But she had watched her husband's cousin, Daniel Trocme, the leader of the children's house, taken away with the children for who he was responsible. He could have escaped, but had tried to protect the house.

A handsome young doctor, Roger Le Forestier, was taken and tortured before being killed. He testified that Jesus was against violence but that he would not betray anyone. As many of you know, as the tides of the war turned, the occupation became increasingly ruthless. A German regular army officer who had been touched by the testimony of the doctor who was killed kept the SS Tartar Legion from destroying Le Chambon as other resistance villages were destroyed. The Gestapo put the pastors on the death list, but they escaped.

There are many wonderful stories in this book. The author, a Jewish American WWII veteran, wrote the book to try to understand how in a very dark time, this oasis of moral clarity and action could exist. As a philosopher who concentrated on understanding evil, he kept being moved to tears by the information he obtained, the survivors he interviewed. He documented everything -that it was Mrs. Steckler, who was half-Jewish, who started singing A Mighty Fortress. (Is it a coincidence that the Hoffman's have asked for that hymn to be sung next week, at the baptism of their daughter Alexandra?)

Our position is quite different, for the issues are not so clear, and we have much more luxury to deal with. We think we can keep political and economic questions to the side. We don't spend our time in groups discussing the most important things in life and searching the scriptures together. I don't know how strong my own conscience is, or how strong our solidarity would be. When the Jews started coming to the doors of people in Le Chambon, they remembered the words over the door of the church: Love one another. When their pastor said, I believe we can become a city of refuge, they could remember back 300 years of resistance. Previous pastors and members of their church had been burned at the stake and hung. Many were descendents of people who fled from Southern cities in the years they call desert years of persecution, when Protestants had no rights. Hallie looks at the heritage of being a conscientious minority.

Hallie also tries to explain the Trocme's and other leaders. Andre Trocme was half-German, over six feet tall, with blond hair and blue eyes. He spoke German fluently and passed as one when he was on the run. His mother was killed in an auto accident when he was 11 years old, an accident partly caused by his father's road rage. Trocme became a pacifist because of the witness of a German soldier in WWI who refused to carry a gun. Though of wealthy background-his father owned lace factories-they were briefly refugees in Belgium. Magda was from Italy, of part Russian background, related to people who had tried to free the serfs twenty years before the Communists took over. But when Trocme brought the city of refuge proposal to his Session, he had been in that village only a couple of years. They knew he was tending toward pacifism when he came, that he was a bourgeois liberal from the North married to a foreigner. But the story is, that the vote of his Session was unanimous that they would take on the risks. Hallie realized that they did not do it for glory, and that it did indeed take a village-a congregation-a Le Chambon-- working together to resist successfully for four hard, poverty-stricken years.

It is hard to think of a whole community shaped by the values of the Good Samaritan parable, that every life is valuable, and that if you have a door you can open it-like God opens the door to us. Thomas Friedman in The New York Times frankly affirms that we should fight for control of oil supplies-our economy does a lot of good in this world-but the value of human life, Iraqi life, appears to be very secondary to him. Are we one people in this world, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female? We have let many dictators grow, millions live in poverty, and now invite assassins to kill one dictator, Saddam Hussein. Trocme, pacifist though he was, considered becoming like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and trying to assassinate Hitler. The German Christian resistance failed at that. I can not tell you where we will be led, but I know we need examples of people of faith like those at Le Chambon, lest we lose our moral compasses, lest we lose our consciences, lest more innocent blood be shed. Amen.
Back