By: Renée Rockford
President & CEO
On a recent hike in the mountains of the southern Massif Central in France, a guide pointed out the 16th Century and still-operating Hotel Du Buet in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. The building was remarkable for its age, yes, but even more so for how the hotel was used by the surrounding parishes during World War II.
Inhabitants of the tiny remote villages waged an extraordinary campaign of non-violent resistance and saved thousands of people wanted by the Gestapo, most of them Jews, and many of them orphans whose parents had already been deported to concentration camps. Encouraged by their Protestant pastor André Trocmé, the community took in, provided warm clothing, and guided hundreds of fugitives over the mountains into neutral Switzerland. According to Caroline Moorhead’s 2015 book, Village of Secrets, there were no informants, and no one broke ranks. The villagers saved as many as 5,000 people. After the war, Le Chambon became one of only two places in the world to be honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
Their efforts did not begin as an organized effort, but according to Magda, the pastor’s wife, it was just one person helping another: “Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done — nothing more complicated. It was not decided from one day to the next what we would have to do. There were many people in the village who needed help. How could we refuse them? A person doesn’t sit down and say I’m going to do this and this and that. We had no time to think. When a problem came, we had to solve it.” One villager reported, “We all just seemed to know that we had to do what we could…”
There was never any question among them as to how they would behave in a given situation. They constituted a “community” in the best sense of the word.
It is that collective sense of community and accountability that is part of the lesson of this week’s parsha, Noach, and the familiar story of Noah’s Ark and The Flood. The Flood tells us what happens to civilization when individuals rule and there is no collective. “The world was corrupt before God, and the land was filled with violence.” God saw a world consumed by violence and corruption. “All flesh had perverted its way on the earth” (Gen. 6:11-12). The lack of accountability to one another meant there was systemic moral failure. And so, God sought to destroy it.
May we all be inspired by the villagers of Le-Chambon and their concrete reminder of what it means to act generously and ethically for no reason other than it is just the right way to live.
Shabbat Shalom.
Please email Renée Rockford at rrockford@jewishcolorado.org with questions or comments.