We May be Tempted
A Feature Review of
The Memoirs of André Trocmé: The Pastor Who Rescued Jews
André Trocmé
Edited by Patrick Cabanel, translated by Patrick Henry and Mary Anne O’Neil
Paperback: Plough Publishing, 2025
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Reviewed by Michelle Van Loon
Visitors to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, will discover the names of Gentiles who risked their lives to help Jews and other people groups targeted for annihilation by the Third Reich during World War II. While there are a few well-known names like Corrie ten Boom and Oskar Schindler included in this sacred list, the lion’s share of those listed are unfamiliar to most of us.
André Trocmé is one of them. Though he is recognized for his leadership in the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, I suspect many in America have never heard of him. His efforts to protect Jews and other targeted individuals in and around the town of Le Chambon sur Lignon in southern France are credited with saving thousands of lives. He penned this memoir for his four beloved children in the 1950’s, while the story was still fresh, yet he’d had time after the war for perspective and reflection.
Pastor Trocmé’s deep faith and pacifist convictions fueled his efforts. The roots of his deeply Protestant faith were cultivated in a childhood of financial and social privilege in the French town of Saint-Quentin-en-Tourmont before being marked by the twin tragedies of the loss of his mother when he was ten, and the devastation, poverty, and eventual exile to Belgium during World War I when he was in his teens. He reflected on what it was like to repatriate to his hometown in France after the war:
I had imagined beforehand that liberation would be like heaven, but it was hell on earth. I have not yet gotten over this disappointment. I have always tended to believe that there is a better world somewhere else on this earth (Germany during my childhood, Free France from ages fourteen to eighteen, England when I discovered the Fellowship of Reconciliation, America, where I lived during the time of Prohibition), while at the same time knowing I was deluding myself. Each time I discover the truth, as I do today at age fifty-four faced with an America that can’t hide its materialism, debauchery, and militarism, I experience the same deep disappointment I did that evening on the streets of liberated Brussels.
Despite loss and disappointment, his longing for a better world led him to seminary study in Paris, where there were a variety of theological and ideological currents flowing and mixing simultaneously: the liberalism of post-war modernity, historic traditionalism, Pentecostal renewal, and Christian socialism and pacifism. He experimented with it all and integrated from each what was authentic to his God-given hope for a better world – a hope that led him to further study in the United States at Union Seminary in New York City.
He found himself a fish out of water in America, which cultivated in him a deeper commitment to caring for those on the margins even as part of his work during his time in the country was to serve as a tutor for the Rockefeller children. He met his future wife, Magda, in the US, and they returned to France so André could step into the pastorate. While Magda didn’t embrace her husband’s faith, she was committed fully to his mission of service. After seven years in a war-depressed town in the north, he accepted a call to a small church in Le Chambon in 1932.
It was there, during those pre-war years, that his preaching and ministry formed a community that was willing to act in resistance to the Nazis after they invaded France in 1940. Trocmé described the iron commitment that shaped the response of other church leaders in his region – a commitment shared by many in their community. He wrote,
No one knew in 1942 exactly what would happen to the Jews who were deported. We learned about Auschwitz, Dachau, or Maidanek only after the liberation. Nazi Germany created such terror among Germans themselves that no one among those who knew dared utter a word. They didn’t dare believe it. They didn’t want to believe it, for fear of being sent there themselves. Where? To the death camps, the gas chambers, the crematoriums.
Therefore, we knew nothing, but what we did know was that it was wrong to turn over a brother who had entrusted himself to us. No one in Le Chambon in 1942 would agree to do that.
As a result, Le Chambon had many citizens willing to risk their own safety to transport and hide Jews fleeing from deportation orders, others who forged paperwork, took in children, and stretched their meager rations to feed others. Trocmé was arrested and held for several weeks in 1943 in response to his refusal to answer authorities about his actions and was forced underground for the duration of the war. His leadership and the willing participation of many in the Le Chambon region are now credited with saving as many as 5,000 Jewish lives.
After the war, he and Magda gave themselves to the work of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. His memoirs end with his advocacy for peace in Algeria in the mid-1950’s, when the country was engaged in a war for independence from France. In acknowledgement of his sacrificial efforts during World War II, Trocmé was named in 1971 by Yad Vashem as one of those Righteous Among the Nations. He died the same year.
His memoir is at once both dense and lively reading. He packs many, many names, places, and meetings into the pages, which makes sense given his original audience – his children. But it can make for a sometimes-ponderous read, particularly in the first half of the book. That said, his gracious, expansive voice and willingness to live out his deep commitment to nonviolence offer modern audiences committed to human dignity a three-dimensional mentor for our own troubled times. In 1940, he called on his congregation to stand against what he could see was about to unfold in France with these words:
Presently, we are going to be deprived of many things. We will even be tempted to try to escape unscathed, to take advantage of what we have left, even to dominate others. Let us abandon our pride and our egoism, brothers and sisters, and our love of money and our confidence in material possessions. Let us learn, today and tomorrow, how to rely on our heavenly Father, waiting for our daily bread and sharing it with our brothers and sisters, who we must love as ourselves.
He lived those words then. And those words still speak today.
Michelle Van Loon
Michelle Van Loon is the author of seven published books about spiritual formation. Her
newest book, Downsizing: Letting Go of Evangelicalism’s Nonessentials, releases this fall from
Eerdmans. To learn more about her work, visit MichelleVanLoon.com
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