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

wrote in his journal. “He shall finish in insipidity and cowardice, and shall never set foot in the great liberating current of Christianity.”
    Six months after the visit from Minister Lamirand, Trocmé and Édouard Theis were arrested and imprisoned in an internment camp (where, according to Hallie, “personal possessions were taken from them, and noses were measured to ascertain whether or not they were Jewish”). After a month, the two were told they would be released—but only on the condition that they pledged to “obey without question orders given me by governmental authorities for the safety of France, and for the good of the National Revolution of Marshal Pétain.” Trocmé and Theis refused. The director of the camp came up to them in disbelief. Most of the people in the camp would end up dead in a gas chamber. In exchange for signing their names on a piece of paper, to a bit of patriotic boilerplate, the two men were getting a free ticket home.
    “What is this?” the camp director shouted at them. “This oath has nothing in it contrary to your conscience! The marshal wishes only the good of France!”
    “On at least one point we disagree with the marshal,” Trocmé replied. “He delivers the Jews to the Germans.…When we get home we shall certainly continue to be opposed, and we shall certainly continue to disobey orders from the government. How could we sign this now?”
    Finally the prison officials gave up and sent them home.
    Later in the war, when the Gestapo stepped up their scrutiny of Le Chambon, Trocmé and Theis were forced to flee. Theis joined up with the underground and spent the remainder of the war ferrying Jews across the Alps to the safety of Switzerland. (“It was not reasonable,” he explained to Hallie of his decision. “But you know, I had to do it, anyway.”) Trocmé moved from town to town, carrying false papers. Despite his precautions, he was arrested in a police roundup at the Lyon railway station. He was thrown into turmoil—not just at the prospect of discovery but also and more crucially at the question of what to do about his false papers. Hallie writes:
    His identity card gave his name as Béguet, and they would ask him if this was indeed true. Then he would have to lie in order to hide his identity. But he was not able to lie; lying, especially to save his own skin, was “sliding toward those compromises that God had not called upon me to make,” he wrote in his autobiographical notes on this incident. Saving the lives of others—and even saving his own life—with false identity cards was one thing, but standing before another human being and speaking lies to him only for the sake of self-preservation was something different.
    Is there really a moral difference between giving yourself a false name on your identity card and stating that false name to a police officer? Perhaps not. Trocmé, at the time, was traveling with one of his young sons. He was still actively engaged in the business of hiding refugees. He had plenty of extenuating circumstances, in other words, to justify a white lie.
    But that is not the point. Trocmé was disagreeable in the same magnificent sense as Jay Freireich and Wyatt Walker and Fred Shuttlesworth. And the beauty of the disagreeable is that they do not make calculations like the rest of us. Walker and Shuttlesworth had nothing to lose. If your house has been bombed and the Klan has surrounded your car and pummeled you with their fists, how can things get any worse? Jay Freireich was told to stop what he was doing and warned that he was risking his career. He was heckled and abandoned by his peers. He held dying children in his arms and jabbed a thick needle into their shinbones. But he had been through worse. The Huguenots who put their own self-interest first had long ago converted to some other faith or given up or moved away. What was left was stubbornness and defiance.
    The arresting officer, it turned out, never asked for Trocmé’s papers. Trocmé talked the police into taking him back to the railway station, where he met up with his son and slipped out a side door. But had the police asked him if he was Béguet, he had already decided to tell the truth: “I am not Monsieur Béguet. I am Pastor André Trocmé.” He didn’t care. If you are Goliath, how on earth do you defeat someone who thinks like that? You could kill him, of course. But that is simply a variant of the same approach that backfired so