Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Prelude

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5-Postscript

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Introduction-PreludeChapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction Summary

Content Warning: This section discusses antisemitism, the Holocaust, war and violence, death by suicide, and death from a car accident.

Hallie shares the responses of several readers just after the book’s publication. He places the book’s events in the context of the conflict of World War II, in which he was a US soldier and played a part in the Allied victory. This book is the story of a small village that worked together to rescue hundreds of children, but the light in that message does not counteract the darkness of the Holocaust.

The first response to Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed was a letter from a reader who argued that because Le Chambon was a small place and not strategically important, the story was unnecessary to the broader discussion of the war. Hallie was deeply affected by this letter and questioned whether he should have written the book. Then, he received a letter from a teenage girl who grew increasingly despondent after studying the Holocaust. Her parents gave her Hallie’s book, and she could see the hope of humanity even amid horror. At Hallie’s public reading of the book, a woman stood and said that Le Chambon saved her three daughters during the war. She thanked him for telling the story because it gave Americans, specifically her American friends, a deeper understanding of her experience. She said that “[t]he Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes. And Le Chambon was the rainbow” (xvii).

Hallie follows these anecdotes by commenting on the story of Le Chambon from philosophical and theological perspectives, noting that it demonstrates the power of belief in goodness. He adds that he has moved past the initial negative response because the book demonstrates Le Chambon’s importance to humanity. He finishes the Introduction by asserting that the success of Le Chambon has no rational or strategic explanation. When Hallie asked a mathematician friend how Le Chambon was allowed to exist, the pragmatic academic said that it was a miracle. This leads Hallie to suggest that it was an actual religious miracle, but he leaves that to theologians and simply says that it was beautiful.

Prelude Summary

Hallie first learned about Le Chambon while researching human cruelty. As an ethics philosopher, he studied why and how humans are cruel. This research led him to research the Holocaust and the torture of children by Germany—supposedly to further an understanding of healing. His research began to make him callous and desensitized him to brutality. However, reading about Le Chambon and Trocmé’s courage in his protection of the children there brought Hallie to tears. The village’s kindness and courage penetrated his emotional barriers and led him to go back and reread it. The intensity of his response drove him to tell the story of Le Chambon through the lens of his understanding of ethics.

He traveled to France to visit the village and interview the people who worked together to help and protect Jewish children during the Holocaust. He walked along an icy road with Édouard Theis, a primary actor in the rescue and evacuation of Jews at risk in occupied France. Theis was 75 and grieving the loss of his wife as he walked with Hallie. The men were fresh from an interview describing Theis’s release from a detention camp. The women Hallie interviewed remembered complete silence due to the presence of the Gestapo and Vichy government representatives, looking for a reason to rearrest Theis and Trocmé. Theis has no memory of this silence.

Hallie considers his approach to ethics philosophy as fundamentally focused on people rather than facts or data. He contrasts the quiet, nonviolent resistance of Le Chambon’s villagers with Charles de Gaulle’s violent guerrilla resistance. Le Chambon’s people risked their lives to save others because doing so served their conscience. The guerrilla resistance supported a public and political vision that served the self-interest of the individuals and the fighting units. In contrast to the hero’s reception that de Gaulle received, after the war, Le Chambon remained poor and unknown. Trocmé had to ask US investors to keep his school alive.

Hallie ends the Prelude by defining ethics, contrasting behavior in everyday life with behavior in life-or-death situations. He argues that Le Chambon demonstrated the personal ethics of good in the face of public and active evil. Though the story appears small and quiet, it is a story of great good.

Introduction-Prelude Analysis

Hallie uses three anecdotes from readers to illuminate his feelings about the book. The initial criticism was factually correct, but the respondent failed to understand the transformative nature of the Le Chambon story. Hallie not only summarizes the response but also includes the actual wording of the opening of the letter, acknowledging the facts that the reader pointed out. The critic was correct that Le Chambon didn’t change the war; it wasn’t a strategic position for either side of the conflict. However, when contrasted with the emotional responses of the teenage girl and the grateful mother, those criticisms fall flat. Regardless of the facts of the war, its importance goes well beyond military tactics or political boundaries. World War II is important to the world because of its human cost—not only in the lives lost but also in the effect it had on the moral imagination of humanity. Hallie suggests that Le Chambon’s story is one light, one rainbow, in the darkness that is the larger horror of the Holocaust and World War II. Hallie allowing his early readers’ comments to frame the book invites current readers into the conversation and challenges them to look beyond facts to a larger understanding of human nature.

The metaphor of the rainbow, especially when combined with Hallie’s suggestion that Le Chambon was a genuine miracle, nods to religion or spirituality without specifically arguing for a religious interpretation of the events at Le Chambon. Throughout the book, Hallie places religious discussions and attitudes in the voices of the people he describes. This begins with the rainbow, which is in a quotation from the mother in the bookstore. She’s referencing the biblical story of the flood in the Old Testament, when God promised humanity to never bring another flood or other disaster to wipe out so much of humanity. Hallie explains that “the rainbow reminds God and man that life is precious to God, that God offers not only sentimental hope, but a promise that living will have the last word, not killing” (xvii). The book’s goal is to present hope and the value of human life and to demonstrate an example of living having the last word. Thus, the book uses a religious metaphor to frame the ethical philosophy, thematically introducing The Conflicted Nature of Faith and The Morality of Nonviolence even before the story begins.

In describing how he began to pursue Le Chambon as a research project, Hallie connects with readers and intensifies the book’s emotional impact. His own experience mirrors that of many Europeans during World War II. Just as Hallie’s research into cruelty overwhelmed his empathy through a constant barrage of horror, many civilians in World War II became hardened to the suffering of others. Similarly, just as the courage and kindness that Hallie saw in Le Chambon reawakened his emotions and empathy, many civilians, especially those in Le Chambon, were unable to allow themselves to become callous and hardened against those seeking help. In revealing his own potential human weakness, Hallie exemplifies how the story of Trocmé and his parishioners can help awaken deeper human empathy and strength.