DURING THE years when Jews were hounded in France and in the rest of Europe, I spent my summers, between the ages of nine and twelve, with my younger brother Philippe and our Alsatian Catholic caretaker Mazéle (short for Mademoiselle) in hiding in a refurbished attic. Unlike Anne Frank's urban attic, though, this one was part of a functioning farmhouse near the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the central mountains of the “Free Zone” run by Marshal Philippe Pétain. And unlike Anne Frank, I was not confined in the attic, but able to move about near the farm, ride my bike, visit friends, and shop for food in the village proper and beyond. My parents, Jewish Parisians from the seventh arrondissement, had resettled in St-Étienne, a major town near there, and it was probably through the grapevine in St-Étienne that they had learned about this now-celebrated village.
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was in those days an unusual community. In a mostly Catholic France, it had a Protestant majority; its young pastor, André Trocmé, an ardent pacifist from a wealthy northern French family, had spent a year in New York as a theology student, met his future wife there, and briefly tutored the Rockefeller children. The village boasted an experimental private school named Collège Cévenol, and in various locations around the village were children's homes, unpretentious hotels, and guest-houses. For a while the novelist Albert Camus, recovering from tuberculosis, lived in one of those guest-houses.
The Protestant atmosphere was reflected in the stern look, a barbershop, a Protestant temple, a Catholic church, and a square with a fountain where once or twice a year farmers would trade their cows and pigs. I do not remember a cafe in the village. The college gave the village an unusually intellectual atmosphere, and the numerous places to stay made of this village of three thousand inhabitants something of a resort, though one with a singular image. The hotel we stayed at before finding our more remote hiding place was run by ladies from the Salvation Army, nice ladies who wore traditional bonnets tied below the chin when they went out. Little did I know that the hotel symbolically named “Clos Gentil” (sweet enclave) was but one of many local residences run by well-known international charities.
