The story of a French Protestant pastor who sheltered Jewish people during WWII
André Pascal Trocmé is probably not a Christian of whom many of us will have heard.
But he was a most remarkable man of faith and courage, born on Easter Day 1901 in Saint-Quentin in Picardy, NE France, where Calvin was born.
The Trocmé family had Huguenot roots, but were middle-class and quite worldly. His father was a successful manufacturer of lace. They were posh and rather separate from the other people of the town. André was to rebel against his family’s aloof attitudes and be used by God in a remarkable way.
Christian Pacifist
I don’t think I can defend pacifism from the Scriptures but Christian pacifism is a position to be respected and is very much part of André Trocmé’s remarkable story.
It was while he was young that a couple of events set him on the road to pacifism and the emerging of personal faith in Christ. It began with a family tragedy.
When he was 11, André’s mother died after a motor accident when his father was driving dangerously. His father was beside himself with grief and guilt. And it was this dilemma of André’s – devastated by his mother’s death, but still loving his heartbroken father who had killed her – that began to shape his thinking about always standing against revenge and violence.
Sometime during the years of WWI he joined the Union of Saint Quentin, a Protestant organisation for young people who prayed and studied Scripture together. The town of Saint-Quentin was occupied by the Germans from September 1914 to February 1917 and was only about 20 miles from the Somme. Young André saw many terrible sights of casualties and mutilated wounded men, including a poor German casualty the whole of whose bottom jaw had been blown away.
‘We found Christ’
One day he met a German soldier on the staircase of his own house, part of which was being used as military quarters. ‘Are you hungry?’ asked the German and offered him some black potato bread. ‘No!’ said André, ‘and even if I was I wouldn’t accept anything from you! You’re the enemy!’ But the soldier said, ‘No! I am not your enemy. I am a Christian. Do you believe in God?’ ‘At the town of Breslau,’ said the soldier, ‘we found Christ and we have given him our life.’ This soldier was a Christian pacifist who explained that he had been given permission by his officer to go into battle without weapons – presumably to help the wounded. ‘I am often in danger, but then I sing a hymn and pray to God’ said the German. ‘If he has decided to keep me alive he will. If not… .’ It seems it was through this man, surname Kindler, that faith and courage seemed to burst into flame in young André.
After the war, his family moved to Paris and André studied theology at the University of Paris. Here for the first time he met an Edouard Theis – who turns up again later in the story. He joined a pacifist organisation and got involved with ‘unions’ rather like the one in Saint Quentin – groups of poor people who prayed together and often worked together.
Later he won a scholarship to the theologi-cally liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York. But, though André had liberal tendencies, once there he found the ‘social gospel’ that was taught there too secular for his deeply devout and somewhat mystical mind.
Awakening among the poor
He didn’t like America. But it was in New York that he met his wife-to-be Magda Grilli. They got married and came back to France. ‘I shall be a Protestant pastor,’ said André, ‘and I want to live a life of poverty!’ They first had a parish in Mauberge and then moved to Sin-le-Noble near the Belgium border where they spent six years.
It seems that during the time in Sin-le-Noble there was some kind of an ‘awakening.’ In its full intensity it lasted about three months and it brought enormous love. People became as dear to each other as Jesus was to them – and treated each other as if they were Jesus. Trocmé wrote: ‘It was a spiritual springtime. All those things that had formerly been vague, colourless, seen from the outside… became suddenly living. Each man became inestimably precious in my sight.’
But in 1934 André and his family (they now had four children) felt called to the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in south-central France. And it was here that something very wonderful was to happen.
Resistance is possible
In Le Chambon he linked up again with Edouard Theis and they founded a college with the initial purpose of preparing local country youngsters for university.
But these years saw the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and there began a flow of Jewish refugees. The college took them in. When France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, initially an area South of Loire river was left in the hands of the French collaborationist Vichy Government led by Marshall Petain. Within weeks the radio, newspapers and posters were preaching anti-Semitism. The authorities conspired with the Nazis and set out to round up Jews and send them to death camps.
An order was given by the Vichy Government that each morning all schools should have a ceremony in which the French flag was raised and given a Fascist-style salute. Trocmé, who had previously travelled in Germany, knew that the salute meant the making of some idea about the ‘national soul’ more precious than particular human lives. But instead of being scared, Trocmé saw this as an opportunity to begin his resistance to Vichy and to the Nazis. The ceremony was cleverly organised in such a way that within a few weeks no one bothered with it. The government was unaware, but the 3000 people of Le Chambon understood precisely what had happened. They saw that there was a possibility of resisting and saying ‘no’ to indignity and tyranny.
Sheltering the Jews
Pastor André Trocmé began to encourage his Protestant Huguenot congregation in Le Chambon to shelter ‘the people of the Bible’, the Jews. And these ordinary brave people began to do just that. Secretly the word spread. Jewish people on the run from the authorities began to turn up at the door of the Presbytery and a network of ‘safe houses’ spread to surrounding farms and villages. Trocmé preached that the congregation must do what was right before God, rather than cave in to the inhumanity of the authorities.
And, as they prayed and sought to obey God, a kind of miracle happened. The Vichy police would come, but the villagers somehow were always alerted, sometimes through mysterious phone calls, and no Jews were found in the searches. They had been spirited away into the woods and mountainous countryside before those who would take them captive arrived. After the war, one of the villagers recalled: ‘As soon as the soldiers left, we would go into the forest and sing a song. When they heard that song, the Jews knew it was safe to come home.’
The situation became much more difficult when the Germans took over Vichy France in November 1942. But Trocmé continued to preach to the people to stand firm and trust God. He preached particularly from Deuteronomy 19.1–10, which speaks about the ‘cities of refuge’ ordained by God in Israel ‘lest innocent blood be shed.’*
And although Trocmé, Theis and another man were arrested in 1943, yet nevertheless they refused to compromise and sign papers promising to obey the authorities. Somehow, trusting God, they were later set free. Not only did they shelter Jewish folk, but also helped them to escape across the border into Switzerland. Estimates vary, but they helped between two and three thousand Jewish people.
‘Righteous Among the Nations’
Much later, after the war, André and his wife were designated ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, the highest honour bestowed on Gentiles by the Jewish community. André Trocmé died in 1971, but his story in Le Chambon seems to epitomise the apostle Peter’s great conviction expressed in Acts 5.29: ‘We must obey God rather than men.’
