A Huguenot Memory That Became a Refuge

In the winter of 1940, a Jewish woman knocked on the door of a stone parsonage in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small village in the mountains of southern France. Magda Trocmé, the pastor's wife, did not hesitate. She invited the stranger inside, fed her, and found her a place to stay. It was the first of thousands of such welcomes.

Pastor André Trocmé and his congregation were Huguenots — French Protestants whose ancestors had been hunted, imprisoned, and killed for their faith across two centuries. They knew what it meant to be a persecuted minority. So when the Vichy government began deporting Jews to Nazi death camps, Trocmé stood in his pulpit and told his people plainly: "We do not know what a Jew is. We know only what a human being is." Over the next four years, this village of roughly three thousand residents sheltered an estimated five thousand Jewish refugees, forging identity papers, hiding children in farmhouses, and guiding families across the border to Switzerland. They did this knowing the penalty was deportation or death. André's cousin Daniel Trocmé was arrested and killed at Majdanek in 1944.

Jesus said, "I was a stranger and you invited Me in." The people of Le Chambon did not see strangers at their doors. They saw the face of Christ — and their own remembered suffering — and they found the courage to open wide.