Butterfly Effects for Change – Part 3 – Le Chambon-Sur-Lignon
From December 1940 to September 1944, the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its surrounding area became a safe haven for almost 5,000 Jews. The day after the Vichy Government in France, made an agreement with the Nazis to hand over all Jewish refugees, Andre Trocme, Pastor of the Protestant church set the tone for this constructive resistance in his sermon by telling his parishioners that they should use the ‘weapons of the spirit’ to resist.
“Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty. Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. 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.”
Throughout the entire Nazi occupation, not one Chambonnais ever handed over a Jewish refugee to the authorities. Elizabeth Koenig-Kaufman, who was a child refugee in Le Chambon, described it thus –
Nobody asked who was Jewish and who was not. Nobody asked where you were from. Nobody asked who your father was or if you could pay. They just accepted each of us, taking us in with warmth, sheltering children, often without their parents — children who cried in the night from nightmares.
The people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon couldn’t stop World War II or the Nazi occupation of France. They couldn’t stop the atrocities or persecutions – they had no control over any of those things. They did, however, have control over themselves and their own actions.
Their individual actions contributed to a cohesive, unified whole which had a massive effect, but even so, each individual in Le Chambon had to choose and act according to his or her own view of what constituted ‘doing the right thing’ independent of chances of success or outcomes.
These Butterfly Effect actions saved 5,000 innocent people – most of them children.
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(1) Photograph by Robert Capa, A refugee boy waits for resettlement in a refugee camp in Germany. (UNHCR Photo)
(2) Jewish children sheltered in the children’s home Maison des Roches, directed by Daniel Trocme (back, center, with glasses). Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, between 1941 and 1943 — Daniel Trocme and 18 of his students were killed by the Nazis. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Related articles
- http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007518
- Those That Helped. (asthelamplighter.wordpress.com)
- Xlibris Releases Before the Holocaust: (prweb.com)
- Litfuse Blog Tour AND ‘Giveaway’: “How Huge the Night” by Heather Munn and Lydia Munn (onedesertrose.wordpress.com)
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