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

didn’t they just line up the whole town and ship them to Auschwitz?
    Philip Hallie, who wrote the definitive history of Le Chambon, argues that the town was protected at the end of the war by Major Julius Schmehling, a senior Gestapo official in the region. There were also many sympathetic people in the local Vichy police. Sometimes André Trocmé would get a call in the middle of the night, warning him that a raid was coming the next day. Other times a local police contingent would arrive, following up on a tip about hidden refugees, and treat themselves to a long cup of coffee at the local café first, to give everyone in town ample warning of their intentions. The Germans had enough on their plate, particularly by 1943, when the war on the Eastern Front began to go sour for them. They might not have wanted to pick a fight with a group of disputatious and disagreeable mountain folk.
    But the best answer is the one that David and Goliath has tried to make plain—that wiping out a town or a people or a movement is never as simple as it looks. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak. The Huguenots of Le Chambon were descendants of France’s original Protestant population, and the truth is that people had tried—and failed—to wipe them out before. The Huguenots broke away from the Catholic Church during the Reformation, which made them outlaws in the eyes of the French state. One king after another tried to make them reunite with the Catholic Church. The Huguenot movement was banned. There were public roundups and massacres. Thousands of Huguenot men were sent to the gallows. Women were imprisoned for life. Children were put in Catholic foster homes in order to rid them of their faith. The reign of terror lasted more than a century. In the late seventeenth century, two hundred thousand Huguenots fled France for other countries in Europe and North America. Those few who remained were forced underground. They worshiped in secrecy, in remote forests. They retreated to high mountain villages on the Vivarais Plateau. They formed a seminary in Switzerland and smuggled clergy across the border. They learned the arts of evasion and disguise. They stayed and learned—as the Londoners did during the Blitz—that they were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid. 1
    “The people in our village knew already what persecutions were,” Magda Trocmé said. “They talked often about their ancestors. Many years went by and they forgot, but when the Germans came, they remembered and were able to understand the persecution of the Jews better perhaps than people in other villages, for they had already had a kind of preparation.” When the first refugee appeared at her door, Magda Trocmé said it never occurred to her to say no. “I did not know that it would be dangerous. Nobody thought of that.” I did not know that it would be dangerous? Nobody thought of that? In the rest of France, all people thought about was how dangerous life was. But the people of Le Chambon were past that. When the first Jewish refugees arrived, the townsfolk drew up false papers for them—not a difficult thing to do if your community has spent a century hiding its true beliefs from the government. They hid the Jews in the places they had been hiding refugees for generations and smuggled them across the border to Switzerland along the same trails they had used for three hundred years. Magda Trocmé went on: “Sometimes people ask me, ‘How did you make a decision?’ There was no decision to make. The issue was, Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!”
    In attempting to wipe out the Huguenots, the French created instead a pocket in their own country that was all but impossible to wipe out.
    As André Trocmé once said, “How could the Nazis ever get to the end of the resources of such a people?”

3.
    André Trocmé was born in 1901. He was tall and solidly built and had a long nose and sharp blue eyes. He worked tirelessly, lumbering from one end of Le Chambon to the other. His daughter, Nelly, writes that “a sense of duty exuded from his pores.” He called himself a pacifist, but there was nothing pacifist about him. He and his wife, Magda, were famous for their shouting matches. He was often described as un violent vaincu par Dieu —a violent man conquered by God. “A curse on him who begins in gentleness,” he