André Trocmé. The Memoirs of André Trocmé: The Pastor Who Rescued Jews. Plough Books, 2025. $29.95. 480 pp.
Too often, conversations about the Holocaust devolve into generalizations. Six million dead. Entire Jewish settlements across Eastern Europe gone forever—including some my relatives had called home. The complicity of so many ordinary citizens in these deaths continued to roil Europe for decades after, manifesting in physical and spiritual ways. Historian Monica Black, for instance, has examined the strange explosion in reports of witches and the rise of wonder doctors and spiritual healers in post-WWII Germany.
Not everyone was complicit. Less prominently visible yet present is the faithful witness of ordinary people who resisted evil in various ways, risking their own lives to save the Jews, and sometimes laying down their lives because they felt this was the most righteous action for that moment. Consider the Polish doctor, children’s books author, and orphanage director Janucz Corczak, who had opportunities to escape but chose to die with the children from his orphanage in Treblinka. And years ago, I saw the 1987 French film, “Au Revoir, les Enfants,” the true story of Père Jacques, the headmaster of a Catholic boarding school that welcomes three Jewish children in an attempt to hide them. The plan tragically fails, and at the end of the film, the three children and the headmaster file out of the school, on their way to their deaths. “Au revoir, les enfant”—“goodbye, children,” Père Jacques gently says.
But there have been success stories too—stories of those who took extraordinary risks, yet managed to prevail against quite remarkable odds. The Memoirs of André Trocmé is such a story, now made available by Plough Books. A Protestant pacifist pastor in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Trocmé managed what many others who tried to protect the Jews could not. Not only did he and his wife, Magda, organize coordinated efforts in their village that sheltered thousands of Jews and helped them escape to safety, they managed to survive to tell the tale too.
Their story has not been wholly forgotten. In his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Philip Hallie wrote about the work of Trocmé, noting the close ties in the village, whose residents all banded together to protect the Jews hiding in their midst. The book had been adapted into a documentary film, “Weapons of the Spirit.” Another film, “Le Chambon,” tells this same story in a more fictionalized way.
Still, the publication of André Trocmé’s own memoirs, which he had originally written for his children in the 1950s, adds a moving angle to the stories of events that have been told already. For one thing, in his memoirs Trocmé tells of his life from his childhood on, concluding just a few years before his death in 1971. This is an important reminder that people are shaped and formed by their entire lives, and not just a single period. While he is remembered for his actions during the Holocaust, which form the focus of the other books and movies about him, Trocmé’s own memoirs treat his activities in organizing the community to shelter Jews as simply one task among many in his life of faithful obedience.
That is indeed the point that the editor of the memoirs, Patrick Cabanel, makes in his introduction: “One can read these memoirs for the chapters that cover the 1940s in Le Chambon, and I suppose many readers will begin by doing so. One can also read them for their strictly pastoral and Protestant dimension.” But, he adds, this is “at the same time a national story, even a universal one, whether we are talking about revival meetings in Christianity or spiritual resistance against totalitarianism.”
So it is that Trocmé, born in 1901, begins with brief memories of his childhood, then teenage years spent in the shadow of WWI, culminating with an evacuation to Belgium. He notes matter-of-factly the effect of the war on him: still a child when the work broke out, he was an adult by its end. But it was during this war that he had first begun to think about Christian pacifism, a topic that occupies his thoughts further after the war, as he begins education at the School of Theology at the Sorbonne. “I was a Christian pacifist, at least in principle. I began to scrutinize the Protestant church with a critical eye.” Reading voraciously from different traditions, he admits also struggling with sinful impulses and worrying over his salvation. And so, he ultimately decides to serve his two years of military service from 1921 to 1923. Spiritual questions accompany him along.
After the conclusion of his military obligations, a trip to New York City follows, where Trocmé meets a mysterious Italian woman at a party. Talking about her faith, she reflects: “I can’t call myself a Protestant. I have never been able to declare that I believe something I’m not sure of. I prefer not to define what I believe. Human beings have superimposed too many ideas on the essential.” With glee, Trocmé remembers his reaction to the stranger’s words, which echoed so many of his own wrestlings: “My heart burned within me when I realized I had found the one I had always been looking for.”
Trocmé returns to France with Magda. They marry, a daughter arrives, he concludes his pastoral training, and the family begins a life of ministry—first in the industrial North, and eventually in Le Chambon, adding three more children along the way. By then, rumblings of a new war have begun, which forced French Christians—especially pacifists—to consider what they truly believed: “As Hitler became more and more brutal and threatening, most French pacifists abandoned a position founded on feelings rather than principle. The Anschluss of Austria, the humiliation of the Munich Agreement, and Hitler’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia all sparked anguish and justified anger. Pacifism had to be established on something other than confidence that the Germans would remain peaceful.”
What did this mean in practice? For Trocmé, it meant working hard to make Le Chambon a “city of refuge.” With his fellow pastor, he co-founds a school dedicated to the principles of nonviolence. He leads Bible studies, he keeps bringing the community together with his sermons and teachings, and he is living out his principles of Christian nonviolence by offering shelter to those who need it. The village only had about 150 Jews when the war broke out, but he protects them. As others arrive, he thinks of creative ways to incorporate and hide them too.
He also worries much, mostly in secret—health, finances, and of course, the war. His is a simple, normal life—or as normal as it can be in wartime. Arrested for a brief time, he is released but goes into hiding. But unexpected tragedy strikes not from outside but within his family: Shortly before the end of the war, his fourteen-year-old son commits suicide. Grief-stricken, Trocmé finds his faith shaken as never before. And yet, he knows through it all, God will not leave him this easily.
Towards the end of the memoir, in 1967, he reflects: “The church of Jesus Christ, whose face we often seek in vain in our traditional parishes, is nothing but this group of men and women who take the risk of acting out their faith day in and day out in accordance with Jesus Christ. This constantly renewed adventure, whose outcome can’t be known in advance, is made possible by the daily directives God gives to those who listen and strive to obey.” He continues, “Obedience is always imperfect. Errors of judgment, behavior, and orientation are so frequent that the secular world sees nothing special about believers. They are less exciting and appear less effective than the political and military celebrities who dominate the news.”
So what is the value of reading this memoir—the story of a life—in order, beginning-to-end, instead of focusing on the episode in Trocmé’s life for which he is most famous? It is, in many ways, an ordinary life—one filled with duties and obligations, concerns and tragedies, long lists of tasks that must be done, and oh so many worries. But this ordinary life is also a remarkably faithful life, and that is the point. Who will be faithful in crisis, a time when one must make difficult and dangerous decisions that imperil one’s own life? As Trocmé realized, he could do nothing other than what he did, by virtue of having spent a life obeying God’s call.
Christians, like everyone else, have always loved heroes. Martyrs, for instance, are shiny, exciting, glamorous in various ways. Trocmé, though, is an unusual hero—or, to be more precisely, he is an unusually unglamorous hero. He is simply a life-long pastor who worked hard to serve the people the Lord had placed in his path.
But that is the point—and his memoir makes this abundantly clear through placing his work on rescuing Jews in the context of his overall life. If that episode of his life alone were told, perhaps he would seem more glamorous, yet Trocmé has no interest in casting a hagiographic spotlight on himself. But there is much beauty in a life of quiet obedience and gentle love, a life spent proclaiming the faithfulness of God through serving others.
