Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

Shortly before the House of the Rocks raid, the Maquis killed Commissioner Praly, a vibrant young Protestant gathering intelligence for the Vichy government in Le Chambon. This was likely part of the reason for the House of the Rocks raid and was certainly part of the reason that Trocmé’s and Theis’s names were placed on the Gestapo death list. Trocmé learned this information from a man who said that he was a double agent for the Maquis and the Gestapo. Though encouraged by the man and later by church leadership to flee, Trocmé was deeply conflicted about leaving his village without a leader. However, he was finally convinced by the thought of his family and the refugees being in greater danger because he stayed.

Trocmé first stayed at a presbytery in Lamastre but was evicted by the pastor. That eviction likely saved Trocmé’s life because the Gestapo came to Lamastre looking for him and seemed to have lost him at that point. He then stayed for some time at a house on a hill in the department of Ardèche, next moving to a country house where he became the object of a woman’s affections and contacted Magda to help him out of the uncomfortable situation. He then stayed at a boardinghouse in the Drôme, where he learned that Jacques was beside himself, missing his father. Trocmé sent for Jacques, and they spent blissful time together playing, learning, and bonding. They were almost discovered when they traveled to Valence for an important meeting and Trocmé ran to catch the train, attracting the attention of German officers performing a checkpoint and roundup.

As he sat in the prison van, Trocmé realized that he would be asked his identity and would either have to lie and betray his conscience or tell the truth and likely be sent to a death camp. In concern for Jacques, he asked the officers to bring his son to him so that he could tell him what to do. The officers realized that Trocmé was not trying to avoid the roundup and took him to the control line after getting Jacques. Trocmé narrowly escaped having his papers examined, and the next day, he and Jacques safely returned to hiding. When the Americans stormed the beach at Normandy, Trocmé returned home to his family.

Theis’s name was also on the death list. He hid by working with the Cimade to relocate Jews from France to safety in Switzerland. He took massive risks and was even arrested, but it was in Switzerland, so the Cimade helped free him. He kept working with the Cimade even beyond the Normandy invasion.

One reason that Le Chambon, unlike many villages near the end of the war, never experienced a major massacre by the Gestapo was the idealism of Roger Le Forestier. A young doctor who studied with Albert Schweitzer, he came to Le Chambon in 1939 and appealed to Trocmé to let him live at the presbytery and be a second village doctor. He was a brilliant doctor and saved multiple lives in Le Chambon. He met and married the love of his life, Danielle, during the occupation, and Magda accompanied them to their wedding in Monte Carlo. Le Forestier was deeply committed to nonviolence but served as a doctor for the Maquis. Near the end of the war, after Normandy, the Maquis demanded that he let them use his ambulance to transport armed troops. He refused, even under threat of death: An ambulance with a red cross was to be left alone by combatants because it couldn’t carry armed soldiers. He was accused of cowardice when he wouldn’t take the ambulance to the site of a supposed battle (which didn’t happen) and thus went to Le Puy to plead for the release of some Maquis prisoners, in part to prove his courage.

On the way, he gave two Maquis soldiers a ride after they told him that they were unarmed. A bank robbery had occurred earlier in Le Puy, and the German police searched Le Forestier’s car. He was arrested and beaten when they found a loaded revolver hidden in the backseat, left there by the Maquis. He was nearly sentenced to death when prosecuted by Colonel Metzger, but Catholic Major Schmehling was moved by Le Forestier’s insistence on his nonviolent beliefs. He refused to convict Le Forestier of a capital crime, instead asking Le Forestier to volunteer to treat the wounded in Germany.

The Gestapo arranged to have Le Forestier taken from the work group and imprisoned in Lyons. Le Forestier, along with many other prisoners including women and children, were taken into the woods surrounding Lyons and shot, and their bodies were then burned. When Trocmé and Magda saw Schmehling years after the war, he explained that his guilt over Le Forestier and his sympathy for the man moved him to use all his influence to prevent a mass raid or massacre by the Secret Service on Le Chambon.

The text compares the time in Le Chambon near the end of the war to author Albert Camus’s The Plague in that although one is history and one is fiction, both narratives concern the pointlessness of death and the goodness of individual men. After the invasion of Normandy, the Germans became desperate, and the fighting and violence in France intensified before dissipating. When Trocmé returned to Le Chambon, he initially thought that his worst fear, that Le Chambon would lose its commitment to nonviolence in his absence, had come true. However, he found that Magda and other women in the village worked together to create a hub for the Cimade teams to evacuate refugees to safety in Switzerland.

In early July 1944, Manou Barraud, a good friend of 14-year-old Jean-Pierre, was accidentally shot and killed by a boy staying at Madame Barraud’s pension. When Manou came home from helping with the Cub Scouts in town, she and the boy went investigating in the temporarily empty rooms of the Maquissards staying at the boardinghouse. The boy, Jean, found a revolver and pointed it in jest at Manou, but a bullet was in the chamber, and he shot and killed her. When Madame Barraud discovered her daughter dead, her first thought was of Jean, whom she repeatedly comforted, telling him that it was not his fault.

A month later, after counseling friends in town, Trocmé and Magda returned home to the presbytery to discover Jean-Pierre hanged in the bathroom. Whether he intentionally killed himself (as the doctor believed) or it was an accident born from an imaginative attempt to emulate a poem he had heard the night before was unclear. His death devastated both parents, seriously challenging Trocmé’s faith in God and ending Magda’s entirely. She never engaged in religious practices again.

At the end of the war in France, cruelty characterized both sides of the fight. German prisoners-of-war in France were often treated terribly in revenge for Germany’s cruelty. Trocmé, holding fast to his belief in the potential of human redemption, prevented much of that cruelty in Le Chambon. As the refugees found family and safety elsewhere, the village began to return to its sleepy beginnings. Trocmé worked hard to reinvest and revitalize the Cévenol school and was successful. The war and his son’s death had changed him, however, and those who returned to Le Chambon after long absences noted that Trocmé had become harder and more authoritarian, more intellectual, and less invested in the individual people in Le Chambon. He left the parish and pursued international work toward nonviolence for the rest of his life.