The Village That Became a Wilderness

In the winter of 1940, Pastor André Trocmé stood before his congregation in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small village in the mountains of south-central France, and spoke words that would define their resistance: "We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel." What followed was extraordinary. When the first Jewish refugees arrived fleeing Nazi persecution, the villagers — most of them Huguenot Protestants who remembered their own history of persecution — simply opened their doors.…