André Troeme

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André Troemé was a Protestant Pastor in southern France in the late 1930s remembered for saying "Look hard for ways to make little moves against destructiveness." In his preaching he spoke out against descrimination as the Nazis were gaining power in neighboring Germany.

When France fell to Nazi Germany on June 22, 1940, his mission to resist the Nazis became increasingly important. Troemé and his church members in the small French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, helped their town develop ways of resisting the dominant evil they faced. Together they established first one, and then a number of "safe houses" where Jewish and other refugees seeking to escape the Nazis could hide. These houses received contributions from International Quaker, Catholic, American Congregationalist, Jewish, and World Council of Churches groups, and from the national governments of Sweden and Switzerland, to buy food and supplies for the fleeing refugees.

Many private families also took in children whose parents had been shipped to concentration camps in Germany. Troeme refused to accept the definitions of those in power. "We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men," he said when asked by the authorities to produce a list of the Jews in the town. [Hallie, 1979, p. 103] Between 1940 and 1944 when World War II ended in Europe, Troemé estimated that about 2500 Jewish refugees were saved by the tiny village of Le Chambon, because the people refused to give in to what they considered to be the illegitimate legal, military, and police power of the Nazis.

He and his town in the Cévennes mountains are honored at Israel's official Holocaust memorial in its "Righteous Among the Nations" section for those who worked to save Jews from the Nazis.