I have little doubt that Pope Leo XIV will champion the human rights of migrants just as vigorously as his predecessor and mentor did. And it was just two months before his death that Pope Francis, in his remarkably blunt letter to the U.S. bishops, stressed the parable of the good Samaritan, urging that we meditate “constantly” on the story, as well as on “the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
The Trump administration’s planned “largest deportation program in American history” has scary echoes of the past for me, even though I am a naturalized American citizen. During the Nazi occupation of France, my Jewish parents and I were meant to be part of just such a mass deportation—in that especially heinous instance, to the Nazi death camps.
After the fall of France in 1940, the collaborationist French regime, under the leadership of an elderly, popular figure who viewed himself as the salvation of his country—and who claimed to be Christian—had begun dumping foreign and stateless “illegal aliens” into dreadful, French-run internment camps. Soon many French Jews would be arrested and interned as well. Families would be brutally torn apart. The mass deportations “to the East” would follow.
The French Legislature relinquished its responsibilities and formally delegated “all powers” to the new leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, whose government was headquartered in the spa town of Vichy. This led swiftly to the abolishment of parliamentary democracy and the establishment of a harshly authoritarian regime.
Is the present rhyming with the past? As the pre-eminent American historian of Vichy France, Robert Paxton, told me recently: “I never expected my own country to be separating families, deporting parents without their children and imprisoning children by themselves.”
During World War II, a defeated, humiliated France had done just that, deporting people to countries that most victims didn’t know. There were also pro-Vichy and pro-Nazi militia groups who contributed what they could to the ongoing repression, with the help of vigilantes eager to denounce those they saw as the enemies of France.
French Jews then had to reassure themselves, mistakenly, that the deportations would not affect them. Today, green card holders here—I was one of them for a long time—have to think twice about speaking their minds, being at risk of being labeled as anti-American and thus posing security risks to this country.
In an increasingly intolerant regime, could my own naturalized American citizenship be revoked because somebody views my thinking as unpatriotic or subversive? Would the fact that I have been married to an American-born woman for over 50 years, and am the father of two American children, be deemed irrelevant?
Would I be able to count on active good will from my fellow citizens? In the United States during World War II, the murder of the Jews of Europe demonstrated the extent of our capacity to look away when faced with a demanding responsibility. In the end, the Allies won one war—but chose not to oppose the Nazis war against the Jews.
Those who did what they could to counter the apathetic consensus—such as Varian Fry, a New York intellectual who, in 1940 and 1941, led a mission to rescue people from the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators; and Peter Bergson, a Jewish activist from British-occupied Palestine who led a wartime campaign in the United States to make the rescue of Jews in Europe an American priority—remain remarkably uncelebrated today. Why do we delude ourselves into thinking that our less clear-eyed ancestors also did all they could?
As it happens, I was born, and my parents and I were sheltered, in a Christian oasis that truly did what it could. The largely Protestant and rural mountain area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, nonviolently defied the Nazis and their French accomplices, gradually transforming itself into occupied Europe’s most ambitious and most persistent sanctuary community.
In and around Le Chambon, the peasants and villagers turned no one away, betrayed no one and attempted to convert no one. There was something to be done, and they just did it. No big deal: It was who they were. At one time or another between 1940 and 1944, as many as 5,000 Jews may have found shelter in that tiny corner of the world—among some 5,000 Christians.
After the war my parents, while raising me and my siblings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, rejected religion, Judaism and any overt kinship with the Jewish people: I didn’t even know that I was Jewish until I was 18. A dutiful Frenchman, I went off to Paris to study, and initially lived with a Polish Jewish cousin on my mother’s side, a survivor of the death camps. I went on to become a documentary filmmaker, and I chronicled the Le Chambon story in 1989 in “Weapons of the Spirit.”
I am a Jew who deeply welcomes and admires such forceful manifestations of Christian righteousness and solidarity. And it is to that particular strain in Christianity—so insistently embodied by Pope Francis but not always apparent among American Christians today, even among cross-wearing officials—that I may owe my life. (As I strive here to reflect on all this, I also grieve for the innocent victims in Gaza, such as the nine siblings recently killed when their house was bombed by Israel.)
In Le Chambon during the Nazi occupation, there had been no hesitation. During Sunday services on the very day in 1940 after France signed the dishonorable armistice with Germany, the two pastors of the village had spoken their minds to their congregation, anticipating the need for the village to become a haven of refuge. As one of them said, “The responsibility of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences through the weapons of the Spirit.”
These were also the circumstances in which the future Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus, then stranded in the area (to which he had come for his health), was reworking the novel that would become The Plague. In words that could have been written about the people he would encounter during his frequent walks, Camus has his narrator say this: “For those of our townspeople who were then risking their lives, the decision they had to make was simply whether or not they were in the midst of a plague and whether or not it was necessary to struggle against it.”
A Huguenot peasant woman named Marie Brottes was one of the villagers who joined the nonviolent conspiracy of goodness that spread throughout the area of Le Chambon. Explaining her determination to me, she too recalled Jesus’ parable about the stranger who was the only person to offer help when it was needed. Madame Brottes could not pass by, she said, because “the Jews, truly, had fallen among thieves.”
For her part, a member of the Catholic minority in Le Chambon, Marguerite Roussel, asserted that the local response to the French deportations “happened by itself.”
“We all had a stake in these events,” she stressed, “not just the Jews.”
Ultimately, even some officials on the wrong side of history—local French police and administrators, the German officer responsible for that area of France—found themselves looking the other way rather than challenging the locals’ quiet determination to protect those who sought sanctuary.
Righteous Gentiles during the Holocaust acted mostly on their own, and like most rescuers in general, they did not agonize over their decisions. While what happened in Le Chambon would not have been possible without such isolated, individual commitments, this inescapably became a collective effort, in no small measure because the community also had inspired leadership in Pastor André Trocmé, a fervently committed Christian who believed that deeds mattered most.
Is the story of Le Chambon relevant to us today?
At a time of rising intolerance, including a resurgence of antisemitism—which is also a time when anti-antisemitism is being dangerously shanghaied into unrelated causes, with little consideration for the possible effect on those of us who are Jewish—do we not need new examples of effective, incontrovertible witness to universal rights and human dignity?
President Trump recently proclaimed that his administration was going to be “bringing back religion to our country.” Do American Christians not need barometers to evaluate the genuineness of asserted Christian beliefs? Do we not all need reminders, as St. Francis of Assisi put it, to preach by our deeds?
Whatever our individual and collective responses are and will be to the growing number of migrant arrests and deportations, the challenge will be well below the levels of the soul-defying and life-threatening Nazi era. But if we are to become good Samaritans ourselves, we cannot look away. Indeed, we need to stare. Then we need to identify and find strength in the weapons of the spirit that we all possess.
