Days of Awe (Robert Zaretsky,| September 25, 2025, The American Scholar)
Yet perhaps we do not need alpine guides, but instead moral guides to experience this emotion. As a historian of France under the Nazi occupation, I cannot help but return, time and again, to the case of André Trocmé. He was a Protestant pastor and an ardent pacifist in the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, a dot on the map of the rocky and austere Massif Central region in south-central France. Eighty-five years ago, that dot soon became a haven of safety for men, women, and children who were in fear for their lives.
In 1940, Trocmé and his equally remarkable wife, Magda, launched their effort to rescue as many Jewish refugees as possible who were fleeing Vichy police and SS officials. From his pulpit, Trocmé used his pulpit to spur les Chambonais to action. “Tremendous pressure will be put on us to submit passively to a totalitarian ideology,” he warned his parishioners. Yet, Trocmé continued, the “duty of Christians is to use the weapons of the Spirit to oppose the violence that they will try to put on our consciences. … We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.”
Over the next four years, while Vichy collaborated with the Nazi implementation of the Final Solution, Trocmé and his congregation were, in every sense of the phrase, as good as their word. They made, in fact, their word flesh. As a growing stream of Jewish refugees, as well as French Jews whom Vichy had denaturalized, fled to Chambon, the townspeople opened wide their doors. They created safe houses, forged identity cards, sheltered, fed, and educated thousands of desperate Jewish men, women, and children.
The moral imperative of caring for children was the driving force in the young life of Trocmé’s nephew, Daniel Trocmé. He had come to Chambon to be a teacher, but he eventually found himself in the role of their protector. When the police captured his group of students, the young Trocmé refused to abandon the children. Instead, he kept them close, calming them as best he could. And he died with them at the extermination camp of Maidenek. Daniel Trocmé freely chose to follow the same ethical teaching expressed by his uncle. (In fact, Trocmé and his fellow pastors were also arrested and sent to a concentration camp, but they were mysteriously released a few months later.)
In his landmark account of Chambon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the late American philosopher Philip Hallie was obsessed by a single question: Why did goodness happen not only in Chambon, but also the surrounding towns and villages? Historians, psychologists, and philosophers have since widened and deepened the search for an answer to this question. It turns out that the nature of goodness is perhaps even more difficult to isolate than is the nature of evil. But if one had to boil it down, it might come down to the words spoken by André Trocmé to a French officer who had demanded the whereabout of the Jews the pastor had hidden. “We do not know what a Jew is,” Trocmé replied. “We know only men.”