Review by New York Times Review
BETWEEN 1940 AND 1944, France's Vichy government collaborated actively with the Nazis, and the French police conducted arrests and deportations. During these harrowing years, the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Haute-Loire region hid Jews after the Nazi invasion and is said to have saved thousands of people. Le Chambon became a light in dark times, heralded by the former French president Jacques Chirac as "the conscience of our country." In 1998, Yad Vashem honored it as Righteous Among the Nations. The biographer and historian Caroline Moorehead doesn't dispute the villagers' bravery in her new book, "Village of Secrets," but she does separate fact from fiction. "What actually took place on the plateau of the Vivarais-Ligno during the gray and terrifying years of German occupation and Vichy rule is indeed about courage, faith and morality," she writes. "But it is also about the fallibility of memory." Drawing on archives and interviews with survivors, Moorehead paints a more nuanced portrait of Le Chambon. She reveals that it was only one in a network of defiant villages on the plateau. The hero of the story, a pacifist pastor named André Trocmé, emerges as a complex figure, compassionate but judgmental - and, as it turns out, just one of 24 Protestant pastors who participated in the resistance, along with Catholics and atheists. Minor characters also come into relief, and Moorehead highlights the contributions of women such as Madeleine Barot and Madeleine Dreyfus, who risked their lives to save Jewish children. Indeed, the plateau was the center of a thick web of resistance operations, and structural conditions - including the region's isolation and abundance of hotels, pensions, and homes for children - facilitated rescue operations. In the end, villagers saved not thousands but about 800 people and gave safe passage to many more. Following the fates of several immigrant and French families, their children and rescuers, Moorehead also offers readers a nuanced portrait of the Holocaust as it unfolded in the rest of southern France's unoccupied zone. There, foreign Jews were rounded up in refugee camps originally built for Spanish Republicans fleeing Franco, taken to Drancy and then deported to Auschwitz. The noose tightened when the Nazis occupied the zone in 1942 and French Jews realized that the Vichy regime was not going to protect them. Moorehead vividly evokes the experience of Jews in hiding, the secret resistance networks that moved them to safe houses and across the borders of Spain and Switzerland, the terror provoked by the police, the unexpected betrayals and the suffering of hidden children who knew their parents had perished. Some minor quibbles with this otherwise compelling and deeply informed narrative: Moorehead's assertion that the Wehrmacht, the German Army, did not treat the locals brutally because they were not Nazis reiterates a debunked notion about the Wehrmacht, whose relations with the SS were porous. The Wehrmacht, for example, protected the Montluc prison where Klaus Barbie, the SS "butcher of Lyon" and head of the city's Gestapo, tortured resisters and Jews. Moorehead focuses on the heroic role of witnesses in Barbie's 1987 trial, but doesn't mention the struggle for recognition between Jewish "racial" and gentile "political" victims (the latter resistance fighters) that underscored French reluctance to recognize the particularity of Jewish suffering during the war. In the end, these details only support Moorehead's broader conclusion (also the consensus among historians) that Vichy France abetted the Holocaust, and that Le Chambon-sur-Lignon played an essential part in a courageous resistance network. At the same time, she has done us the great service of unveiling the real lives behind the myth and in demonstrating that fallible human beings are far more interesting and dramatic figures than those who make up the stuff of legends. CAROLYN J. DEAN is a professor of history at Yale.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Moorehead, A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France, traverses similar territory in her latest examination of an extraordinary pocket of people who selflessly risked their personal safety in order to do the right thing. Inspired in part by fiery Protestant pastor André Trocmé, the citizens of Le Chambon-sur Lignon, a tiny village ensconced in the mountains of eastern France, saved scores of Communists, Freemasons, resistance members, and Jews from deportation to concentration camps between the invasion, in 1940, and the liberation of France, in 1944. The inhabitants of this town and its environs banded together to form a network of nonviolent resisters in what was, according to the author, a remarkable adventure in imagination and cooperation. Moorehead not only recounts the heroics but also the everyday ordinariness of those involved, busting the embellished mythology while emphasizing the essential humanity of the entire operation.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
British historian and biographer Moorehead (A Train in Winter) offers an informative, comprehensive, and nuanced account of why and how the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon hid hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust. Moorehead addresses the agonies mothers suffered at the French internment camps of Gurs and Rivesaltes when they gave up their children to be hidden; the fact that, as early as the fall of 1942, flyers in Paris concerning the deportation of Jews "spoke of the gassing of the weak and elderly"¿; and the role of the Darbyists, an austere, evangelical Protestant sect, in the hiding of Jews. Moorehead introduces readers to courageous rescuers both in Le Chambon and the surrounding region: Protestant pastor Andre Trocme; master document-forger Oscar Rosowsky; and Moussa Abadi, a Syrian Jew who befriended the bishop of Nice (from whom he obtained an office to forge life-saving documents). She also covers the German capture of key individuals such as Madeleine Dreyfus, who helped Jewish children find refuge, and examines the ambiguous role played figures such as Major Schmahling, who commanded the local German garrison. Moorehead's deeply researched, crisply written, and well-paced work will stand as the definitive account of a heroic, hazardous, and uplifting initiative during the German occupation. B&w photos (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. For the small village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, World War II was both a terrifying and exhilarating time. Living in the remote mountainous region of eastern France, the village's historically Huguenot population was not unfamiliar with religious persecution. When the dispossessed of Europe-including Jewish refugees and orphans, as well as escaping prisoners of war and French Resistance fighters-began, in 1942, to find their way to Le Chambon and its environs, they found protection and safety from Nazi capture. Protestant pastors and villagers provided fugitives with shelter, schooling, food, false identities, secure hiding places, and occasional escape to Switzerland. Because of its extraordinary bravery, the village is recognized by Yad Vashem, the World Center for Holocaust Research, as one of their "Righteous Among Nations." Based on interviews with survivors and relatives and extensive archival research, activist Morehead (A Train in Winter) skillfully describes both the "felicitous combination of timing, place and people" in addition to the myth that has grown up around the events that took place there. VERDICT An exciting history of nearly forgotten individual and group courage. Highly recommended.-Linda Frederiksen, Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Moorehead (A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France, 2011) recounts the story of a small area in eastern France where opposition to the Nazis succeeded for years. In and around the small village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the mountains of Ardche, the residents were led in their "remarkable adventure in imagination and cooperation" by one man in particular, Pastor Andre Trocm. If not for the pastor, his family and his fellow citizens in the surrounding parishes, so many could never have been hidden and saved. They were descendants of the Huguenots whose history of modesty and silence enabled them to keep a secret and to keep to themselves. As Trocm delivered his fiery sermons, he also instigated the nonviolent resistance to the oppressors. The remarkable part of this story is how many people were involved in saving not only Jews or French, but anyone on the Nazi's list of "terrorists." The pastors, the farmers who took in refugees, the forgers who created ration books and passports, and the passeurs who guided people through the mountainsall were aided by the mayor and the prefect, who looked the other way and even warned of danger. Even when 170 convalescing German soldiers were sent to the village, not a word was spread about their arrival. This is a wonderful story of the people of more than 20 communes who saved more refugees, proportionately, than anywhere else in France. Hundreds were hidden and saved, and many thousands passed through. It's proof that the smallest gestures can often make the biggest difference. While celebrating the courage and sacrifice involved, the author also examines the often contentious dynamics behind the history and its legacy. Moorehead's knowledge of the people, the area and the history make this one of the most engrossing survival stories of World War II. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
