The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide by Peter Grose

agree with or cooperate in violence, especially in the coming days when that violence is directed against the English people.
    To love, to forgive, to show kindness to our enemies, that is our duty. But we must do our duty without conceding defeat, without servility, without cowardice. We will resist when our enemies demand that we act in ways that go against the teachings of the Gospel. We will resist without fear, without pride, and without hatred. But this moral resistance is not possible without a clean break fromthe selfishness that, for a long time, has ruled our lives. We face a period of suffering, perhaps even shortages of food. We have all more or less worshipped Mammon; we have all basked in the selfish comforts of our close family, in easy pleasure, in idle drinking. We will now be made to do without many things. We will be tempted to play our own selfish game, to cling on to what we have, to be better off than our brothers. Let us abandon, brothers and sisters, our pride and our egotism, our love of money and our faith in material possessions, and learn to trust God in Heaven, both today and tomorrow, to bring us our daily bread, and to share that bread with our brothers and sisters.
    Catherine Cambessédès attended the church service on that Sunday morning. The memory of it is still vivid, as she shows in this account written in an email to me more than 70 years later.
    In the church you could have heard a pin drop. I was only fifteen, yet I clearly remember my mood going from lost and frightened to safe and calm. Can you imagine what a sermon like that meant to us at a time of fear and despair? To be told, in church, that if the military situation had changed, our source of inspiration had not: it was still to follow in the steps of Jesus and the New Testament. We were not lost. We still had a direction. The day remains one of the most illuminating of my life, similar in feel to when I heard De Gaulle speak his message that we’d lost a battle, not the war. When everything seemed lost, there was one man who refused to give up.
    In the fevered atmosphere of France in the days immediately following the Armistice, it was the kind of rallying cry that the country needed, and which it certainly wasn’t hearing from inside its borders. As Catherine recalled, five days before Trocmé and Theis’sdeclaration, on 18 June, de Gaulle had called on all Frenchmen not to be demoralised, and to continue the fight. De Gaulle repeated his message the day before the pastors’ joint declaration. The two pastors and de Gaulle may have chosen different weapons for the forthcoming battle, but their message was the same: Resist, don’t give up. Resist. Resist. Resist.
    There is any amount of evidence that Trocmé’s views were widely sought, and respected, in and around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Olivier Hatzfeld, who taught history at the New Cévenole School, later wrote that whenever an issue arose on the Plateau, the first response was: ‘Does Trocmé know about it? What does he say?’ or ‘Trocmé will have to be informed.’ Now Trocmé and Theis had spoken, with all the considerable force of personality at their command. The message was simple and direct: Stick to your moral principles, stick together and share what you’ve got. But, above all, resist, resist, resist.
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    The next day, Charles Guillon resigned as mayor of Le Chambon. He, too, was entirely clear-headed about it. In his letter of resignation to the council he wrote that after the Armistice there were two possibilities. The new Vichy government could find the terms unbearable and decide to resume fighting. Or they could surrender. In the first case, continuing the fight:
    I have a mission which has been conferred on me by the organisation of which I am secretary general, the agreement with the French government concerning prisoners of war and refugees. I  simply can’t manage two jobs at once. But I can easily be replaced as the head of the