A village in the hills, a pool of light in the gloom

In a fairly gloomy world, a story that casts a little light is a precious thing. So I thought I’d tell talk about Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village in the high country of central France.

One of the more depressing developments these days is the growth of nationalism, with its still uglier relative, xenophobia, and its particularly toxic cousin, racism. 

“If you prick us,” cries the Jew Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, “do we not bleed?” 

Yes. We’re all the same flesh and blood. Jews, Christians and Muslims. Whites and blacks. Gays and straights. So why do we build so many walls, with such contempt, or even persecution, aimed at those kept outside them?

It’s fascinating – perhaps the right word is horrifying – to see the most recent survey of British attitudes on national and racial distinctions. Nearly half (47%) believe that people who lost their jobs during the Covid pandemic must have been under-performing at work. They blame the victims for a misfortune not of their making.

What’s worse, the survey found that 13% of the population believe that economic hardship suffered by black people is down to lack of motivation or willpower.

This hostility towards ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’, is on the rise across the world. In Britain, it led to Brexit, where people who will be among the first victims of the damage it is causing voted for it, such was their dislike of foreigners. In the US, it led to small children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents and held in cages. Across Europe, it has led to a proliferation of barbed wire and discgraceful political leaders, such as Matteo Salvini who closed ports in Italy to ships carrying migrants rescued from drowning at sea.

That makes it heartwarming to come across the story of the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village of 2500 people on a high plateau south of Lyon. This is a community which has maintained for centuries a tradition of offering refuge to those in need.

Back in the seventeenth century, it took in Protestants fleeing persecution in a France determined to become entirely Catholic. The population is predominantly Protestant to these days.

That Protestantism, however, didn’t prevent the village taking in priests too, when they needed a safe haven, during the French revolution.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the village became a holiday resort for children from poor families. Barns were converted, hostels were built to accommodate the visitors. That meant that it was well-equipped to help people out when it continued its tradition of welcoming refugees in the twentieth century.

Some of its visitors were celebrities. Albert Camus, later to be a world-renowned novelist and Nobel prize winner, spent a year there from the autumn of 1942, recovering from tuberculosis and finishing his outstanding novel, The Plague.

Others were just fleeing persecution. In the late thirties, it was Spanish republicans escaping the Franco dictatorship. This was a time when France was imprisoning such refugees in what were in effect concentration camps where thousands died.The few who made it to Le Chambon were treated as they deserved, as human beings.

One was Juliette Usachs, a Catalan Protestant doctor who took charge of a house made available to receive mothers and children escaping Franco’s Spain. Before long, though, she found herself looking after a new and different population of refugees: from 1941, she cared for Jews fleeing the German Nazis and their collaborators in Marshall Petain’s puppet government in the southern half of France.

In the end, something like 2500 Jewish refugees were kept hidden in Le Chambon, and survived the war. 

Some of the children Le Chambon saved
with the adults who helped save them

One of the young Jews who made it to Le Chambon was Erich Schwamm. He arrived with his family, when he was 12, in 1943. He may have met Albert Camus. He made it through the war and felt he’d been so well treated in Le Chambon that he stayed until he’d completed his school education, in 1950. At that point, he went to Lyon, where he qualified as a pharmacist and had a successful career, with his French, Catholic wife from the region.

He never forgot the village that rescued him, however. When he died, on 25 December 2020, his will included a legacy to the village of nearly 2 million euros.

The village has maintained its tradition. Today, fifty migrant children are being educated in its school, while they wait for the French authorities to decide whether they can stay in the country or not. As far as Le Chambon is concerned, they are children, and like any child they need to be looked after and deserve to be educated. Whatever their creed, colour or background.

What struck me most about Le Chambon and its behaviour during the war is how the inhabitants stayed silent and kept their secret. You can imagine what fate awaited any refugee, or indeed anyone harbouring one, if they were caught by the Nazi or collaborationist authorities. But no one in the village ever denounced either the people in hiding or the hosts that hid them. There was solidarity across a village which felt that the first duty of humanity was to protect other humans. 

The village inhabitants remain quiet to this day. They don’t make a show of their humanity. No street is named for anyone. There is no rue de Gaulle, there is no rue Juliette Usachs, there will be no rue Erich Schwamm. It’s only others who honour them. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, has awarded the whole village the status of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, one of only two villages honoured this way, alongside Nieuwlande in the Netherlands. But Le Cambon itself makes no boasts about its behaviour.

But, as the Spanish paper El País points out, Le Chambon sets no price on the help it offers others. And it expects no prizes for it. 

So isn’t it great that it got one?