The subtitle of this book, “The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There,” sums up the theme of this true story of a small village in southern France during World War II, where many Jewish children and adults were hidden and rescued, during the years that the Vichy government served as a puppet government for the Nazis. The village itself was primarily a Hugenot town, led by a pastor. Hugenots are French Protestants, who were persecuted in the past and largely killed or driven out of France as refugees, but a few pockets exist in isolated places. Le Chambon Sur Lignon is such a place.

The author learned about the village’s courageous role in World War II when he lived there much later, in the 1970s. He became fascinated with the story and the people there. He got to know Magda Trocmé, the Italian widow of the pastor of the village who placed his own life in jeopardy day after day during those years, as did Magda and most of the rest of the village. After this book was first published, he received numerous letters, some questioning the veracity and the importance of Le Chambon.

One person wrote, “There is only one important thing to say about the Holocaust. It was merely a geological-type almost inanimate event (physical event). No one was responsible. No one started it. No one could stop it. ¶ Le Chambon wasn’t even in the war. Nothing happened west of National Route 7 in southern France. The obscurity should be an insight. Reverend Trocmé [the leader of the village] has a minuscule number of equally eccentric kindred-spirits....” The letter “went on to say that only vast forces like great armies ‘make history,’” and that “a few nonviolent eccentrics who did nothing to stop Hitler’s armed forces mattered only to a few mushy-minded moralists like [the author].” Hallie, thinking he might receive a lot of such responses, thought to himself, “Vast institutional cruelties exist because people like you believe that flesh-and-blood individuals can do nothing that counts. ... Real people with their own proper names saved real human beings in that village. And these precious few people count.”

Many others, however, were greatly moved by the book, including young people. Hallie went on to give numerous lectures and discussions about the book and about Le Chambon. One evening he was speaking to a group of women in Minneapolis, leading fund raisers for the United Jewish Appeal. When the lecture was over and he asked for questions, a woman in the back of the room asked if the Le Chambon was in the Haute-Loire. He told her it was indeed the same Le Chambon. She was silent for some time and then said, “Well, you have been speaking about the village that saved the lives of all three of my children.” She thanked him for writing the book. She came to the front of the room and said, “You see, you Americans live on an island, and though your people fought and died in the war, you see the Second World War from a distance....” She went on to say, “The Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes. And Le Chambon was the rainbow.”

The book is the story of that village. The author had discovered it while reading an anthology of documents from the Holocaust. So moved by the story, he went there and came to know the survivors and the rest of the story. He found the current pastor, now a seventy-five-year-old man, and came to know him and the details of Le Chambon’s amazing efforts. They had saved many children by starting a school, where they could live and be occupied, but also find ways to help them escape to Switzerland and other places. The government officials tried to trap Pastor Trocmé and others. One of them said, “It is true that I have already received orders and that I shall put them into effect. Foreign Jews who live in the Haute-Loire are not your brothers. They do not belong to your church, nor to your country! Besides, it is not a question of deportation.”

Trocmé asked, “What, then is it a question of?”

The official went on to say, “The Führer is an intelligent man. Just as the English have created a Zionist center in Palestine, the Führer has ordered the regrouping of all European Jews in Poland. There they will have land and houses. They will lead a life that is suitable for them, and they will cease to corrupt the West. In a few days my people will come to examine the Jews in Le Chambon.”

Trocmé replied, “We do not know what a Jew is. We only know men.”

Not only the Trocmés, but the whole village helped all sorts of refugees, providing them with food, shelter, fake identification papers to save them from deportation and death. Most people in France did not know there were any Protestants in France, let alone a village that would help Jews. Two of the Trocmés’ own children died by the end of the war. Many of the children they saved found their families or were saved by other families.

This is a book the reader will not forget, and in conjunction with several other books about saving children and families in the Holocaust, will give one a much deeper understanding of that era, and of the courage of so many. It is not an adoption story in the usual sense of the term, but it’s an amazing story of a whole village adopting whomever needed help in that desperate time.