Guest Column: A Tribute to Memory
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| Pastor Pierre-Charles Toureille |
Marc Toureille, of Williamstown, just returned from a large ceremonial event on April 29 at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, celebrating the 20-year existence of the museum.
Marc accepted a tribute on behalf of his father, Pastor Pierre-Charles Toureille, who saved hundreds of refugees from the Nazis in Vichy France during World War II and who was named one of the Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli government.
Those attending the event — 4,000 museum supporters, 843 Holocaust survivors, 130 veterans who liberated them, and those, like Marc, representing the non-Jewish rescuers of these survivors — were addressed by Elie Wiesel, founding chairman of the museum, and President Bill Clinton. All the speakers at the ceremony, in their different ways, addressed the question of what a memorial to the Holocaust means.
I have been asking myself part of that question for a long time. I wrote a book about Marc's father, "A Rescuer's Story: Pastor Pierre Charles Toureille in Vichy France" (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). As Marc stood up, obviously moved by the tribute, and accepted the honoring of his father, I asked myself all over again, as I had asked when first meeting Marc in Williamstown, what is the meaning for us now, of Pastor Toureille's courageous actions?
I began the book, in 1995, because of a strong personal interest in how people, ordinary citizens, act in times of war when their country is occupied and dominated by a draconian enemy. Our record as rescuers of our fellow citizens at such times is not impressive, as it was not in France during the Nazi occupation. France, especially the Vichy government, cooperated with the Nazi determination to exterminate the Jews, to the extent of enabling the Nazis to deport to the concentration camps over 25 percent of the Jewish population in France, including the native-born and the refugees who poured into France as a supposedly safe haven from persecution.
How could that happen in a country with the national motto "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," especially fraternité?
Pastor Toureille's story helps us understand how that can happen, and how much extraordinary courage and will he had to gather within himself to fight against what the Vichy collaborationist government and the large majority of the French population were agreeing to under the Nazis. Pastor Toureille held an official position under Vichy, as chief Protestant chaplain for refugees in the French internment camps in the south and as the head of several aid committees in charge of dealing with camp and refugee living conditions. Vichy and the Nazi authorities became increasingly murderous toward the Jewish internees and refugees, and then eventually toward the native French Jewish population, culminating in 1942 and continuing through the rest of the war, in the mass deportation of Jews to the extermination camps.
Toureille's clandestine rescue efforts increased as this violence against Jews increased, and were a crucial part of the French nonviolent "spiritual resistance" against Nazism. He established a wide-ranging rescue network of Protestant pastors and lay people in southern French villages who cooperated in saving hundreds of people and in getting them across the borders to Switzerland, Spain and Portugal. He and his wife and children, and those who worked with him, were in constant danger: He was interrogated seven times by the local Vichy authorities and by the Gestapo, but managed to hide the evidence of his clandestine network and avoid being imprisoned.
His country was suffering from its defeat and occupation — that's certain — but his countrymen considered the setting up of the Vichy collaborationist government as a way to protect themselves from the worst of Nazi oppression, to continue with their own daily lives. They were comforted by the Vichy platform of "moral rearmament," meaning a strong reliance on the "ideals" of "Work, Family and Country" (similar to the Nazis' slogan), and felt contempt for the democratic doctrines of their former leaders who had lost the war to Germany.
This attitude fomented anti-Semitism in France, and the separating of Jews into a different, foreign category made it possible for the majority of the population to blame the Jews, both refugees and French native-born, for all of this happening.
This national attitude, during the war, was antithetical to everything Pierre Toureille believed about how to live and act. As a French Protestant, a Huguenot, he grew up with stories about his ancestors' dealing for hundreds of years with reactionary Catholic regimes that imprisoned and tried to repress and convert them, and the Protestants' sometimes accommodating and sometimes fighting against these authorities, always stubbornly and persistently. The southwestern area of France where Toureille was operating was, historically, a Protestant stronghold of villages with generations of people who were rescuers, both of their own and also other peoples, like victims of the Spanish Civil War.
But this explanation of how Pastor Toureille's special background impelled him to become a courageous rescuer, doesn't apply to most of us. We have to look for a more universal reason. Maybe that resides in the general and imprecise answer given to researchers who ask people why they saved someone at such a risk to themselves: "Isn't that what anyone would do?" they say. "Isn't it the human thing to do?" "There's nothing heroic or special about it. We had no choice."
In our skeptical look at history, particularly at Holocaust history, we can't conclude that this is a widespread or accurate view of how most of humanity thinks in times of life-threatening crisis. But perhaps it is a reminder of how we should think. And a reminder that we need to keep remembering the courageous ones.
One of the phrases often used in the literature put out by the Holocaust Museum is "Never again." But Wiesel and Clinton both implied that, indeed, the events of the Holocaust during World War II, will happen again and already have happened, in varying new shapes, as our recent history has shown us. Wiesel recalled how the West, particularly the United States and Britain, failed in their mission to save people when they stepped away from stopping the Nazi destruction of the Jews, even when appealed to directly by the resisters in the Warsaw ghetto as early as 1942, and by other concerned groups throughout the war.
Clinton commented to the audience and to the supporters of the museum:
Most of us spend 99 and a half percent of our time thinking about the half a percent of us that is different from everybody else, and that makes us vulnerable to the fever and the sickness that the Nazis gave to the Germans. That sickness is very alive all across the world today. Pick a target — as long as they're not you, it's OK. That's what led that beautiful Pakistani girl Malala to get shot just because she wanted to go to school, because it threatened a group whose power rests in no small measure on its ability to control women's lives. It is still the major cause of heartbreak around the world. It is still the biggest threat to our children and grandchildren reaping the full promise of an interdependent world. ... You are our conscience. You know the truth, you have enshrined it here, you must continue to work to give it to all who would come."At the end of the war, Pastor Toureille wrote a tribute to a French Jewish colleague who tried to save people by accepting an official appointment by the Nazi authorities, and who perished in Auschwitz along with his whole family. Toureille spoke from his heart, demonstrating how much he and his story are part of our universal conscience:
R.-R. Lambert knew how to make people devote themselves to the causes he defended. His detractors (There are some, alas, in spite of the fact that he paid with his life and his family's for his loyalty to the position he accepted of his own free will) — his detractors must well know that it is because of men like him that many Christians, of whom I am one, who are susceptible of being not much more than philo-Semites, took to heart his defense of the Jewish cause, to the point of risking their lives and the lives of their families. Because human beings everywhere and always will devote themselves to causes that certain ones among us have identified with, and lived. It is because the memory of men like R.-R. Lambert remains so vivid and survives in spite of time passing, in spite of everything, yes, in spite of everything — that some of us would be ready again to run the same risks, and others, too, if necessary, in defense of the Jews."
Tela Zasloff, of Williamstown, is an independent writer and editor whose works include "A Rescuer's Story" and "Saigon Dreaming." Marc Toureille, also of Williamstown, has spoken of his childhood during the war and his father's rescue efforts.
Tags: anniversary, guest column, Holocaust, world war,
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