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

commune. Because with you, municipal councillors, and in spite of the swelling population, the material wellbeing of the community is assured for the days to come. All the refugees havea roof, the whole population knows where its next loaf of bread is coming from, and they know where to find enough food to get by.
    In the second case, surrender: ‘The running of the community passes officially to other hands, or the council stays in place and carries out orders. In that second case, I  do not believe I have the right to remain at the head of your council.’ He would remain a council member, but not mayor. Mayors were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Vichy government, and Guillon would have none of it. The truth is that Guillon hated the Armistice, and thought it shameful and probably illegal. However, he realised that as mayor of a small village on a remote plateau in France he could make little difference. From Geneva he could carry on the fight far more effectively. He would have a ready-made network in the Church, among his political contacts, in the UCJG, even in the Boy Scouts, plus access to money and contacts, particularly American contacts.
    He stayed in Le Chambon for three weeks, expecting a visit from Boegner, with whom he could ‘set up a coordinated plan of action for the reorganisation of work in the unoccupied zone’. When Boegner failed to turn up, Guillon left for Geneva, arriving on 1 August. He then wrote a long ‘Letter from France to her friends’. It was not intended for publication, being more of a private meditation. It was written at the suggestion of Tracy Strong, secretary general of the Universal Alliance of the YMCA, who was about to set off for the United States. The letter was addressed to Willem Visser ’t Hooft, secretary general of the provisional committee of the newly created World Council of Churches in Geneva.
    ‘If people saw Munich [in 1938] as an act of wise diplomacy,’ Guillon wrote,
    then it was a fateful date in the moral history of France. Diplomatic victories are not necessarily moral victories. Here is the question wemust ask ourselves. What part can we still play? Our duty is to be ready for anything: our duty is to save the soul of our country and to work to the limit of our ability to save the Christian church. We [in France] appear in the eyes of others to have shown weakness of character, but we still have a soul and
we will defend it
[Guillon’s emphasis]. If you ask me now what we are going to do, I tell you we will make ourselves something to be reckoned with. This means we should not only draw up a list of those who have survived, but also draw up a list of those on whom we can count in the future to carry out a clearly defined mission. We are French, and we intend to stay that way.
    • • •
    The first big wave of refugees came from Alsace-Lorraine, on the border with Germany. Some were evacuated by the French government and placed in refugee camps in southwest France. Others left under their own steam, and some of these found their way to the Plateau. The pace quickened with Hitler’s strike against the Low Countries on 10 May. French, Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourgeois civilians fled south. Some, of course, were Jews, but the Jews were not a distinct group: most of the refugees were simply civilians trying to get away from the fighting. Again, some found their way to the Plateau. As will be maddeningly true for the rest of this narrative, there is no trustworthy record of numbers. In his letter of resignation as mayor, Charles Guillon had written to the councillors of Le Chambon about the ‘swelling population’, adding that ‘all the refugees have a roof’. So there must have been a significant number of refugees settled in Le Chambon by that date, 24 June 1940. On 14 July, Guillon wrote to Visser ’t Hooft:
    I have had to take care of many thousands of refugees, and right now I am still full of Belgians, people from