Good Neighbors

By Frank Trippett

Good Neighbors LEST INNOCENT BLOOD BE SHED by Philip Hallie Harper & Row; 304pages; $12.95

Le Chambon is a Protestant village in the Cevennes mountains. Even in France, few have heard of it. The ignorance is not surprising; goodness is not the sort of thing that arouses historians.

The manifestation came during the years of the Holocaust. The people of Le Chambon, by stealth and stubbornness, without violence, at mortal risk, turned their town into a sanctuary for Jewish refugees. They did it, moreover, under the nervous gaze of the Vichy government and in the shadow of a Nazi SS division stationed near by. Thousands of adults and children were saved. Those who could not be concealed were sometimes guided past hostile French police and German troops through the eastern mountains to safety in Switzerland. Years later the state of Israel saluted the work of Le Chambon during "the epoch of extermination" and awarded a Medal of Righteousness to Protestant Clergyman Andre Trocme, who inspired the village in its resistance to evil. The story of Le Chambon is heartening; its neglect is not. It may be, as Author Philip Hallie puts it, that altruism "lacked the glamour, the wingspread of other wartime events." Yet the tale (which is many tales) is rich in potential suspense and drama, and not only of the theatrical sort; it is an exceptional instance of moral force prevailing over brutish military and political powers.

Hallie had never heard of Le Chambon until, by chance, in a vast collection of Holocaust documents, he came across a scant description of what the village had done. A professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Hallie was obsessively studying the cruelties of the Nazi era. As he read the few pages that told of Le Chambon, the researcher found his face covered with tears. That night he decided to pursue the story. Within a year he was in the village itself, interviewing, piecing together the chronicle of how the village had organized and functioned, how its leaders had been arrested and sent to detention camps and then mysteriously released. Hallie accompanies these testaments with philosophical reflections on the conscience of the community in a situation of unrelenting menace. In Le Chambon, he found, there worked a dedication to human life that transcended all religion and politics. It could be seen in stealthy heroics but also in the naive warmth of Trocme's wife Magda: when two policemen came to arrest her husband, Mme. Trocme invited them to have dinner before leaving. Friends later rebuked her: "How could you bring yourself to sit down to eat with these men who were there to take your husband away, perhaps to his death? How could you be so forgiving, so decent to them?" Magda only replied: "What are you talking about? It was dinnertime ... we were all hungry. The food was ready. What do you mean by such foolish words as 'forgiving' and 'decent'?" For her there was no ethical struggle: a hungry man was a hungry man.

Recollections of such incidents were swiftly fading from memory when the author got to Le Chambon 30 years after the war. It may be regrettable that Hallie put them down in a form in which so much drama and suspense are lost in scholarly detail. That he recovered the story at all, however, can only be called another good.

--Frank Trippett

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