The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide by Peter Grose Read Free Book Online
Authors: Peter Grose
for a moment, and then went on.
TARDY: I’ll tell you what. I’ll ignore your case for the time being. I don’t give a damn whether you have a rifle or not as long as we are not attacked. But, if we are ambushed and if I order my men to fire their weapons in self-defence, and you don’t carry out my order for any reason, then you will be court-martialled and only God knows what will happen to you after that. Is this understood?
TROCMÉ: Yes, sir.
Happily, none of this eventuated. The Berbers fired a few shots one night, but the platoon sheltered behind a stone wall and waited forthe attackers to lose interest, which they eventually did. No one was ordered to fire his weapon in self-defence, so there was no court martial and no God-knew-what to follow.
Shortly afterwards, the unit returned to Paris, to find that the whole 54th Regiment had been dissolved. Corporal Trocmé’s rather unpromising military career could now end, as long as he could come up with the appropriate discharge papers. Perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out that all his military papers had been lost, and he could not find his old commanding officer or anyone else to release him. As far as the army was concerned, he didn’t exist. A unit of air force balloonists had taken over his old barracks, and the phantom corporal managed to persuade an air force sergeant there to issue him with a stamped paper that declared for all the world to see that TROCMÉ, André Pascal, had been lawfully discharged from the air force, not the army, and was now a civilian. He never heard from the army again, nor they from him, undoubtedly to the relief of both.
• • •
By then it was 1923, the year Adolf Hitler made his first bid for power in Munich with the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. The attempted revolution may have failed (and led to Hitler’s trial for treason) but the civil unrest that drove it seemed ever more ominous. Throughout Europe people sensed that the Great War, the war to end all wars, was far from over.
André Trocmé returned to his studies at the Faculty of Theology in Paris, this time in slightly reduced circumstances. The family home in Saint-Quentin had finally been restored, so his father and family gave up their apartment in Rue Jacob in the Latin Quarter and moved back home, while André shifted into student accommodation at the college. This was another turning point: he was now much more exposed to persuasive individuals at the college who were already taking public stands in the cause of pacifism. Jacques Martin went to prison threetimes for refusing conscription. Henri Roser was thrown out of the Missionary Society after returning his military papers, and had to end his studies at the college. Édouard Theis, another pacifist, became an important ally and lifelong friend and colleague of Trocmé’s. Arnold Brémond mingled anti-war militancy with support for workers’ causes. Surrounded by these powerful voices, André Trocmé now made up his mind: in 1924 he joined the MIR (Mouvement International de la Réconciliation), an international pacifist organisation, and became a member of its European Council. He was now a publicly declared pacifist, at a time when refusal to serve in the military was a criminal offence. The public saw pacifists as cowards and traitors, and this view was supported by the established churches, Catholic and Protestant, and by just about every government in the world. Pacifism could be a lonely business.
Two ideas now dominated André’s thoughts. His experience in the army left him in no doubt about the rightness and practicality of pacifism. The mounting tension in Europe gave fresh urgency to the cause. At the same time, he grew increasingly conscious of the cruel contrast between his own comfortable, middle-class life and the lives of the poor. His Christian duty, he was convinced, was to help them.
In September 1925 he moved to New York after winning a scholarship to the Union Theological
TARDY: I’ll tell you what. I’ll ignore your case for the time being. I don’t give a damn whether you have a rifle or not as long as we are not attacked. But, if we are ambushed and if I order my men to fire their weapons in self-defence, and you don’t carry out my order for any reason, then you will be court-martialled and only God knows what will happen to you after that. Is this understood?
TROCMÉ: Yes, sir.
Happily, none of this eventuated. The Berbers fired a few shots one night, but the platoon sheltered behind a stone wall and waited forthe attackers to lose interest, which they eventually did. No one was ordered to fire his weapon in self-defence, so there was no court martial and no God-knew-what to follow.
Shortly afterwards, the unit returned to Paris, to find that the whole 54th Regiment had been dissolved. Corporal Trocmé’s rather unpromising military career could now end, as long as he could come up with the appropriate discharge papers. Perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out that all his military papers had been lost, and he could not find his old commanding officer or anyone else to release him. As far as the army was concerned, he didn’t exist. A unit of air force balloonists had taken over his old barracks, and the phantom corporal managed to persuade an air force sergeant there to issue him with a stamped paper that declared for all the world to see that TROCMÉ, André Pascal, had been lawfully discharged from the air force, not the army, and was now a civilian. He never heard from the army again, nor they from him, undoubtedly to the relief of both.
• • •
By then it was 1923, the year Adolf Hitler made his first bid for power in Munich with the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. The attempted revolution may have failed (and led to Hitler’s trial for treason) but the civil unrest that drove it seemed ever more ominous. Throughout Europe people sensed that the Great War, the war to end all wars, was far from over.
André Trocmé returned to his studies at the Faculty of Theology in Paris, this time in slightly reduced circumstances. The family home in Saint-Quentin had finally been restored, so his father and family gave up their apartment in Rue Jacob in the Latin Quarter and moved back home, while André shifted into student accommodation at the college. This was another turning point: he was now much more exposed to persuasive individuals at the college who were already taking public stands in the cause of pacifism. Jacques Martin went to prison threetimes for refusing conscription. Henri Roser was thrown out of the Missionary Society after returning his military papers, and had to end his studies at the college. Édouard Theis, another pacifist, became an important ally and lifelong friend and colleague of Trocmé’s. Arnold Brémond mingled anti-war militancy with support for workers’ causes. Surrounded by these powerful voices, André Trocmé now made up his mind: in 1924 he joined the MIR (Mouvement International de la Réconciliation), an international pacifist organisation, and became a member of its European Council. He was now a publicly declared pacifist, at a time when refusal to serve in the military was a criminal offence. The public saw pacifists as cowards and traitors, and this view was supported by the established churches, Catholic and Protestant, and by just about every government in the world. Pacifism could be a lonely business.
Two ideas now dominated André’s thoughts. His experience in the army left him in no doubt about the rightness and practicality of pacifism. The mounting tension in Europe gave fresh urgency to the cause. At the same time, he grew increasingly conscious of the cruel contrast between his own comfortable, middle-class life and the lives of the poor. His Christian duty, he was convinced, was to help them.
In September 1925 he moved to New York after winning a scholarship to the Union Theological
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