Trocmé, Magda (1901–1996)

Italian-born French woman who, along with her husband and the entire village of Le Chambon, relied on nonviolent resistance to save 5,000 men, women and children from Nazi annihilation. Name variations: Magda Trocme. Born Magda Grilli in Florence, Italy, in 1901; died in Paris on October 10, 1996; daughter of an engineer; married André Trocmé; children: daughter Nelly; son Jacques.

On a cold, dark evening in France in 1940, Magda Trocmé, a Protestant minister's wife, heard a knock on the parsonage door. Seeking refuge was a German-Jewish woman escaping from an ever-tightening Nazi dragnet in France's German-occupied northern zone. The desperate woman was invited in with a simple, "Naturally, come in, and come in." This refugee from persecution would become the first of 5,000 endangered souls—70% of them Jewish—who would owe their survival not only to the kind woman who had opened the door, but to an entire village that opened its homes and hearts to provide refuge to those threatened by an evil tyranny. The town was Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small village in southcentral France, situated on a high plateau and surrounded by rugged mountains.

The "Good Samaritan of Le Chambon" was born Magda Grilli in 1901 in Florence, Italy. Magda's father, an engineer who had been a cavalry colonel, was Italian, but her mother was of Russian birth. Intelligent and independent, Magda asserted her independence early, rejecting the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church while a convent student, and embracing Protestantism in a land in which non-Catholics were scarce. While studying social work on a scholarship in New York City, in 1925 Magda met and fell in love with André Trocmé, a Frenchman and fellow Protestant who was a student at New York's Union Theological Seminary. André and Magda married in 1926 and returned to France. After his ordination, André began the search for a congregation that would accept him. This represented a challenge because of his radical views on major issues. For one thing, he was a committed pacifist, who had lived his unpopular beliefs as a conscientious objector during World War I. Regarded as a "difficult type" and a rebel within the French Protestant Church, André was not considered suitable for a normal pastorship.

In 1934, he was appointed pastor to the Reformed church in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, situated in the remote department of Haut-Loire. Le Chambon's population of religious, hard-working peasants was almost totally descended from the Huguenots, French Protestants who had been persecuted in the 17th and 18th centuries and who had sought refuge in isolated places like Le Chambon. The Trocmés quickly became accepted by the villagers, who recognized that there were few contradictions between the Christian values they professed and the modest life they had chosen to live. Feeling they had found a true spiritual home, the Trocmés became rooted in Le Chambon, confidently raising their family in the austere but stable village. In 1938, they founded the Collège Cévenol, a private non-denominational secondary school whose mission would be to serve as an international center for peace and reconciliation.

The late 1930s was hardly a time to dream of peace, as a bloody civil war raged in nearby Spain and Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy increasingly menaced their neighbors. Both Trocmés had firsthand experiences with the darkening mood, since during vacations they would take turns visiting her relatives in Italy and his relatives in Germany (like his wife, André was of mixed nationality, his mother having been born a German). In both nations, they witnessed intolerance and militarism, while the inhumanity of Nazi Germany's anti-Semitism was spreading a moral stain impossible to ignore. Back in Le Chambon, the Trocmés began to alert their neighbors of the possibility of imminent war, he in his sermons and she as a teacher of Italian at the Collège Cévenol.

France was attacked by Nazi Germany on May 10, 1940, capitulating in less than six weeks' time. Numb with shock and disbelief, most

French citizens passively went about their daily lives, accepting the foreign occupation. A large number of French collaborated with either the German occupiers or their French allies, the Vichy regime, which was granted a semi-sovereign status as a Nazi satellite state. At first, the Germans occupied only the north of France, and Le Chambon remained relatively free of interference. But from the start of the occupation, it was clear that a new and oppressive reality had taken hold of France. Even before the frantic woman had knocked on the Trocmés' door, refugees from defeated Republican Spain and French Jews had trickled into Le Chambon in search of sanctuary.

Setting the tone for the days ahead, André alerted his fellow parishioners of Le Chambon regarding the moral challenges they now faced every day: "The duty of Christians is to resist through the weapons of the spirit the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences." After German forces occupied the south of France in late 1942, more and more frightened men, women, and children appeared in the town. Most were Jewish, but many sought safety because of their political beliefs or resistance activities. The peasants of Le Chambon now gave shelter to Jews and others whose lives would be worth nothing were they to fall into the hands of Vichy officials and their Nazi overlords. In protecting its vulnerable guests, Le Chambon acted as a single moral organism, carrying out every day what the townspeople called a "conspiracy of goodness" to protect fellow humans in peril. The Chambonnais never attempted to convert the Jews; rather, they helped to organize Jewish religious services whenever possible.

More than a generation later, when interviewed for Pierre Sauvage's documentary film, Weapons of the Spirit, many of the surviving villagers of Le Chambon found it difficult to understand why their deeds should be commemorated. "I helped simply because they needed to be helped," said an old woman. "What happened had a lot to do with people still believing in something." Another villager who had offered his home as shelter could only say, "When people came, if we could be of help…," and then could not think of any other words of explanation. Other villagers offered succinct reasons for why they had acted as they had: "There was nothing admirable. It was merely logical," or, "Ours was a very solid faith which was put to the test, and was not found wanting." When asked to explain how the rescue efforts had been organized, an elderly woman shrugged off the idea that there had been any real plan, noting, "If we'd had one, we'd have failed." Another villager, a pious old woman of granite-like fundamentalism, said of the Jews that she and the others had sheltered, "For us they were the people of God. That's what mattered."

When Magda Trocmé was asked why she had chosen to help Jews and others threatened by a seemingly all-powerful tyranny, she responded: "Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done—nothing more complicated…. 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?" Much less a theologian or philosopher than her husband, Magda insisted that true religion had to be practical, or else it was little more than idle piety:

I do not hunt around to find people to help. But I never close my door, never refuse to help somebody who comes to me and asks for something. This I think is my kind of religion. You see, it is a way of handling myself. When things happen, not things I plan, but things sent by God or by chance, when people come to my door, I feel responsible.

On one occasion during the Nazi occupation, the people at the Trocmés' door were French police who had come to arrest André. Since they had arrived around dinnertime, Magda invited the startled officers to eat with the family, later explaining to those who could not fathom it, "What are you talking about? It was dinnertime." Fortunately, André would be released from custody unharmed, immediately resuming his dangerous activities. Although both Trocmés survived the war years despite the key roles they played in saving thousands of people sought both by the Nazi and Vichy authorities, another member of their family was much less fortunate. André's cousin Daniel Trocmé, who directed the children's home Maison des Roches, was betrayed, most likely by a German officer staying at a military convalescent home in Le Chambon. Arrested on June 29, 1943, Daniel was taken to Moulins for interrogation and, after readily admitting his role in the rescue of Jewish children, was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, where he perished in April 1944.

Le Chambon was liberated in the summer of 1944, and its guests soon returned to their homes in various parts of France or departed to the four corners of the world. Decades later, the inspiring story of the remote village "where goodness happened" was told in books by Philip Hallie and other authors, as well as in Weapons of the Spirit, a powerful documentary by Sauvage, who was born to Jewish parents in Le Chambon in 1943, thus owing his very life to this community. After the war, the Trocmés departed from Le Chambon when André became the European secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a universally respected United States-based pacifist organization. During the 1950s, the couple made several FOR fund-raising tours in North America. Later, André became pastor of a church in Geneva, Switzerland, where he died in 1971.

After his death, Magda moved to Paris to be closer to her son Jacques and some of her ten grandchildren (her daughter Nelly lives in the United States). Magda Trocmé died in Paris on October 10, 1996. Although she had been honored as one of the Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem, Israel's Martyrs' and Heroes' Memorial Authority, she never could comprehend why what she and her husband had done during the Holocaust had been in any way remarkable. Perhaps it was not an accident that Albert Camus had lived for a while in Le Chambon when he was writing The Plague, his novel-parable of the moral decay that was Hitlerism.

sources:

Fogelman, Eva. Conscience & Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. NY: Doubleday, 1995.

Gushee, David P. "Learning from the Christian Rescuers: Lessons for the Churches," in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science [The Holocaust: Remembering for the Future, Franklin H. Littell et al., eds.]. Vol. 548. November 1996, pp. 138–155.

——. "Many Paths to Righteousness: An Assessment of Research on Why Righteous Gentiles Helped Jews," in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Vol. 7, no. 3. Winter 1993, pp. 372–401.

Hallie, Philip P. Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There. NY: HarperPerennial, 1994.

Jostad, Karen Gail. "Area Jews Will Honor Heroes of Holocaust," in The Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN]. November 30, 1996, p. 7B.

"Magda Trocmé, rescuer of French Jews, dies," in The Christian Century. Vol. 113, no. 33. November 13, 1996, p. 1106.

Paldiel, Mordecai. "Le Chambon-sur-Lignon," in Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 3. NY: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 859–860.

——. The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV-The Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers, 1993.

Rittner, Carol, and Sondra Myers, eds. The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. NY: New York University Press, 1986.

Rittner, Carol, and John K. Roth, eds. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1993.

Silver, Eric. The Book of the Just: The Unsung Heroes Who Rescued Jews from Hitler. NY: Grove Press, 1992.

Thomas, Jr., Robert McG. "Magda Trocmé, 94, Is Dead; Sheltered Victims of Nazis," in The New York Times. October 19, 1996, section I, p. 52.

collections:

American Friends of the Collège Cévenol Papers, American Congregational Association Archives, Boston, Massachusetts.

André and Magda Trocmé Papers, Peace Collection, Swarthmore College Library, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

John Nevin Sayre Papers, Peace Collection, Swarthmore College Library, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

related media:

Gardner, Robert, and Elie Wiesel. The Courage to Care, (video), Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1999.

Gossels, Lisa, and Dean Wetherel. The Children of Chabannes (video), NY: Perennial Pictures, 1999.

Sauvage, Pierre, and Bill D. Moyers. Weapons of the Spirit (video), Los Angeles: Friends of Le Chambon, 1994.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia