David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

and trembling from the cold. She was Jewish, she said. Her life was in danger. She had heard Le Chambon was a welcoming place. “And I said, ‘Come in,’” André Trocmé’s wife, Magda, remembered years later. “And so it started.”
    Soon more and more Jewish refugees began showing up in Le Chambon. Trocmé took the train to Marseille to meet with a Quaker named Burns Chalmers. The Quakers provided humanitarian aid for the internment centers that had been set up in southern France. The camps were appalling places, overrun with rats, lice, and disease; at one camp alone, eleven hundred Jews died between 1940 and 1944. Many of those who survived were eventually shipped east and murdered in Nazi concentration camps. The Quakers could get people—especially children—out of the camps. But they had nowhere to send them. Trocmé volunteered Le Chambon. The trickle of Jews coming up the mountain suddenly became a flood.
    In the summer of 1942, Georges Lamirand, the Vichy minister in charge of youth affairs, paid a state visit to Le Chambon. Pétain wanted him to set up youth camps around France patterned after the Hitler Youth camps in Germany.
    Lamirand swept up the mountain with his entourage, resplendent in his marine-blue uniform. His agenda called for a banquet, then a march to the town’s stadium for a meeting with the local youth, then a formal reception. But the banquet did not go well. The food was barely adequate. Trocmé’s daughter “accidentally” spilled soup down the back of Lamirand’s uniform. During the parade, the streets were deserted. At the stadium, nothing was arranged: the children milled around, jostling and gawking. At the reception, a townsperson got up and read from the New Testament Book of Romans, chapter 13, verse 8: “Owe no one anything except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.”
    Then a group of students walked up to Lamirand, and in front of the entire town presented him with a letter. It had been drafted with Trocmé’s help. Earlier that summer, the Vichy police had rounded up twelve thousand Jews in Paris at the request of the Nazis. Those arrested were held in horrendous conditions at the Vélodrome d’Hiver south of Paris before being sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Le Chambon, the children made it clear, wanted no part in any of this. “Mr. Minister,” the letter began:
    We have learned of the frightening scenes which took place three weeks ago in Paris, where the French police, on orders of the occupying power, arrested in their homes all the Jewish families in Paris to hold them in the Vél d’Hiv. The fathers were torn from their families and sent to Germany. The children torn from their mothers, who underwent the same fate as their husbands.…We are afraid that the measures of deportation of the Jews will soon be applied in the southern zone.
    We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. But, we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching.
    If our comrades, whose only fault is to be born in another religion, received the order to let themselves be deported, or even examined, they would disobey the order received, and we would try to hide them as best we could.
    We have Jews. You’re not getting them.

2.
    Why didn’t the Nazis come to Le Chambon and make an example of the residents? The enrollment at the school started by Trocmé and Theis rose from 18 pupils on the eve of the war to 350 by 1944. It didn’t take any great powers of deduction to figure out who those extra 332 children were. Nor did the town make any great secret of what it was doing. We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. One aid worker described coming up on the train from Lyon several times a month with a dozen or so Jewish children in tow. She would leave them at the Hotel May by the train station and then walk around town until she found homes for them all. In France, under the laws of Vichy, transporting and hiding Jewish refugees was plainly illegal. At other points during the war, the Nazis had demonstrated that they were not inclined to be conciliatory on the question of Jews. At one point, the Vichy police came and set up shop in Le Chambon for three weeks, searching the town and the surrounding countryside for Jewish refugees. All they could come up with were two arrests—one of whom they later released. Why