“The Memoirs of Andre Trocme”

Andre Trocme (1901-1971) may be a name largely forgotten today, but he and his wife Magda deserve to be remembered for a faith-fueled courage in almost insurmountable circumstances. What may help revive and further their memory is the publication of his memoirs in English, appropriately titled The Memoirs of Andre Trocme.  

The work, translated by Patrick Henry and Mary Anne O’Neil and edited by Patrick Cabanel (who also first edited the work in French in 2020), is a conversational, straightforward account of Trocme’s life through the 1950s. He continued to work on the memoir until his death in 1971, but it wasn’t published until nearly 50 years later. Cabanel had the good fortune of using a manuscript containing Magda’s annotations and marginal notes.

 

Trocme was seemingly a man of contradictions. Born into a well-to-do family of a linen curtain manufacturer in Saint-Quentin near the Belgian border, he found himself early on drawn to the religious life. His father was French; his mother, who died when he was young, was German. His parents were firm Protestants in a Catholic region and country. His region of France was occupied by the Germans in World War I; he tells of his embarrassment when his German cousins came to visit. But as the war front shifted, the town’s population was gradually deported to Belgium. But his descriptions of life under German occupation are vivid and often harrowing.

 

The Trocme family about 1930

After the war, the Trocmes landed in Paris; their home in Saint-Quentin had to be substantially rebuilt after suffering damage by the German forces. Andre did his military service, finding himself for a time stationed in Morocco. But again the contradiction: he was also a pacifist and conscientious objector; he would not use a gun to defend or attack. This lifelong philosophy often thrust him into predicaments on both sides in World War II.

 

He decides to enter the ministry and studies at the School of Theology at the Sorbonne in Paris. He wins a scholarship to Union Theological Seminary in New York, and, while studying there, finds work as a tutor of French for two boys in a wealthy family. The family was the Rockefellers; the boys were David, who became CEO and chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and Winthrop, who would become governor of Arkansas. And it’s at Union Seminary that he meets Magda. 

 

The memoir goes on the describe his return to France, pastoral training, the births of their children, and the family’s eventual assignment to a church in Le Chambon, southwest of Lyon in south-central France. Trocme’s pacifism raises questions everywhere, but it becomes especially intense as war moves closer and closer. 

 

And then events seem to happen almost at once – the defeat of France, the collapse of the government, the German occupation of northern France, and the Petain government in southern France. Le Chambon sees floods of refugees, including Jewish refugees from Paris and Germany. When the Petain government begins to facilitate roundups of the Jews, it is Reformed pastor Trocme who organizes hiding them, helping them escape, and moving them around to avoid capture. The police and the Germans always suspect what he’s up to, and he even finds himself arrested and imprisoned for a time (he was arrested in his own home at a time when the family had given refuge to a Jewish man; the man wasn’t caught). He has to go into hiding for a time, when he learns of a plot to kill him. 

 

For their work in hiding and saving Jews, whose number reached the thousands, Andre and Magda were later recognized by Israel as Yad Vashem, the righteous Gentiles who risked their own lives and those of others to save Jews from capture, arrest, and death. 

 

The memoir ends in the 1950s, as the Trocmes are establishing the House of Reconciliation in Paris, an educational establishment devoted to Christian education for peace.

 

Trocme writes in a simple, lively, and almost entertaining style, telling his stories much like a novel or fiction. It’s sometimes astonishing to read what he and his family experienced including personal tragedy, recounting a life lived through some of the most tumultuous times in recent history. While sometimes encountering doubt, it was his faith in God that he held tightly to and that he no doubt today would credit for explaining how he and his family survived. 

 

The Memoirs of Andre Trocme is an eye-opening, thoroughly enjoyable read, a story of courage and faith filtered through history.

Some Monday Readings

 

Walt Disney and the American Civil War – Tom Elmore at Emerging Civil War.

 

Britain: Surveillance is sapping our humanity – Peter White at UnHerd.

 

Illiteracy is a Policy Choice – Kelsey Piper at The Argument. 

"The Vanished Collection" by Pauline Baer de Perignon

The great-grandfather of Pauline Baer de Perignon was well known for his art collection, including his eye for the Impressionists. But his artistic tastes extended to other periods and movements, including the Renaissance and furniture. The man, Jules Strauss, reportedly sold his collection in 1932, to help a relative who’d been ruined by depression. He died in 1943. Pauline had heard the family stories about the great collection of art. But it was something in the long-buried past.  

It was an almost offhand remark by a cousin, whom Pauline didn’t know very well, that sent her into a years-long passionate treasure hunt. “Did you know there was something shady about the Strauss sale?”

 

What could have been shady about the Strauss sale in 1932? Pauline starts talking with other relatives. She learns that Jules’s wife, her great-grandmother, had instituted a claim for stolen artworks during the time when the Germans occupied Paris (1940-1944). The more she looks and studies, the deeper and more plentiful the mysteries become. 

 

Jules and his wife remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation. They were Jewish; friends and relatives, including their son-in-law, were sent to Auschwitz. How did the old couple survive, since Jules died of natural causes in 1943 during the occupation? Why did they change apartments? What happened to their furniture? Why would her great-grandmother file a claim if the collection had been sold off in 1932? And what happened to the artworks?

 

Pauline Baer de Perignon

Baer de Perignon tells this story in The Vanished Collection, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer. It’s a tale of great art; vanished warehouses; the Nazis’ wholesale theft of art collections, especially those owned by Jews; veiled references; obstinate museum workers almost desperate to hold on to artworks they shouldn’t have; art dealers and auction houses; old ledgers and lists; and meeting and working with people on the same journey that she is. As her investigations continue and go deeper into the past, she slowly gathers a picture of who her great-grandfather was. Her work is both tantalizing and extraordinarily frustrating, helped by a sympathetic and supportive husband.

 

Baer de Perignon has worked in the film industry, co-authoring several scripts. She’s also conducted writing workshops. She lives with her family in Paris. 

 

This kind of effort that produces The Vanished Collection requires dogged determination and an almost addictive obsession, and the author demonstrates both in the story. As the book shows, the quest to return artworks stolen by the Nazis continues 80 years after it happened. That quest is not always successful, but it does have it victories.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Shades defining – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

How “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” Went from Morbid Omen to Holiday Mainstay – Ellen Gutoskey at Mental Floss.

 

In Praise of Repair Culture – Peter Mommsen at Plough.

 

Claudine Gay’s way with words – Peter Wood at The Spectator.

 

We Were Taught to Hate Jews – Madeleine Rowley at The Free Press.

"A Temporary Ghost" by Michaela Thompson

So far, Georgia Lee Maxwell is managing her transition from the Florida Panhandle to Paris, despite becoming involved in an investigation into a stolen art object and two murders (See Magic Mirror, the first in the series). Now she has an extended gig as a ghostwriter for a somewhat notorious New Yor society figure who’s living near Avignon in Provence.  

The reason for the notoriety is that her husband was murdered two years before, and she was the chief suspect. She hires Georgia Lee to help her write her side of the story, which, given the publicity surrounding the case, should bring in a considerable income. And the woman needs money; she’s fighting with her husband’s family over the estate. 

 

Georgia Lee finds the group in Provence somewhat strange, to say the list. The daughter seems bereft, wandering around and writing a story called The Book of Betrayal. The family butler or manager from New York is there, and he may know more of what happened with his employer’s murder than anyone. The socialite has also brought along her lover, an artist who seems unable to create anything since the murder. 

 

Michaela Thompson

Someone doesn’t want the book to be written. Georgia Lee has been receiving increasingly threatening letters. The butler dies in what looks like an accident. Georgia Lee herself is pushed down a hillside. And the socialite’s errant son shows up, or has he been there all along?

 

A Temporary Ghost is the second of Michaela Thompson’s Georgia Lee Maxwell International Mysteries. Like its predecessor Magic Mirror, the reader gets both a mystery and a tour of the terrain, in this case Provence in southern France.

 

In addition to the Georgia Lee Maxwell mysteries, Thompson also wrote five other mystery novels. She grew up on the northwest Florida Gulf Coast. She worked as a newspaper reporter and freelance journalist, and she’s contributed short stories to a number of anthologies. She lives in New York City. 

 

Related:

 

Magic Mirror by Michaela Thompson.

"Invisible Ink" by Patrick Modiano

Jean Eyben is a young private detective, working for an older, far more experienced boss in a detective agency. His boss gives him an assignment from a new client – find a missing woman, or at least find out what happened to her. 

Jean dutifully undertakes the job, but he soon learns two things. One, so little is known about her or her last whereabouts that every lead is a blind alley. And two, his boss certainly knows more than he initially let on and appears to have held back certain key pieces of information that might have made the assignment easier.

 

The search ends in failure. Jean does not find the missing woman.

 

Three decades later, Jean is prompted to resume the search. His boss is long gone; the trail of the missing woman is absolutely cold, with places, buildings, and people gone or irrevocably changed. But the no-longer-young detective feels what is almost a compulsion to resume the search. And this time, in spite of all the obstacles from the passing of 30 years, Jean begins to learn and see things he didn’t as a much younger man.

 

Patrick Modiano

Invisible Ink by Nobel Prizewinner Patrick Modiano is the fascinating, at times riveting story of Jean’s search for the mysterious Noelle Lefebvre. It is, and it isn’t, a detective story, for like many literary novels, it is the story of man really searching for himself.

 

Born in 1945, Modiano has published more than 35 novels, novellas, and screenplays. He’s known for using the genre of the detective novel as a platform for creating more literary fiction. A bestselling author in France, he’s received numerous awards and recognitions for his writing, including the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014. 

 

Invisible Ink is a captivating story of a private detective conducting his own cold case and slowly realizing how much of that case involves himself. 

“I Love You My Child. I’m Abandoning You” by Ariella Palacz

You’re eight years old. Your father wakes you up in the middle of the night and tells you to get dressed. Soon you find yourself, your four-year-old brother, and three-year-old sister bundled up, [laced in a car, and taken away by two women you’ve never seen before. They take you to a state-run home for orphaned children, and they tell you will never see your parents or your older brother again.

This is what happened to Ariella Palacz. She was living in Paris. The year was 1942. Her family was Jewish. What she will find out years later is that her mother had disappeared from a psychiatric hospital, her father and young-teenaged brother were going into hiding, and she and her two younger siblings were placed in the orphanage in an effort to save them from deportation by the German Nazis occupying Paris.

 

I Love You My Child, I’m Abandoning You is Palacz’s story of that time and what happened afterward. It is a moving, often disturbing, and sometimes horrifying account of what happened to a Jewish girl and her family during the Holocaust. 

 

Palacz spent several months in the orphanage before being sent south to a foster family. On the train, she discovers her younger brother and sister, but they’re once again separated and sent to different families. She won’t see them again for years. She’s housed with an older couple in a small town south of Paris. They did not know she was Jewish; had they found out, her fate might have been very different. Her treatment varied from cruel to kind. She was raised as a Christian, and attended both school and church, where she was enrolled in catechism classes.

 

Ariella Palacz

Sometime after the end of the war, her father finds her and brings her home to Paris. He and her older brother successfully remained hidden during the occupation. Her mother was killed by the Nazis; like in Germany, psychiatric institutions were emptied and closed, their patients and inmates sent to the extermination camps. The family’s large number of Polish relatives did not survive; most died in the Treblinka camp.

 

Palacz tells her story from both a first-person, “this is happening now” perspective that alternates with the years in Jersualem when she’s actually writing the account. Evoking the memories of that time is especially painful, and finds respites in a rare snowfall, a pine tree outside her window, and the beauty she sees in Jerusalem. 

 

In 1970, some 15 years after she marries, she, her husband, and her two children emigrate to Israel. A third child is born there. A woman who had largely rejected her faith or any belief, Palacz eventually convinces herself, and then her husband, to move to Israel. Her account was written in the 1999-2003 times period. A mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, she died in 2017.

 

I Love You My Child, I’m Abandoning You is the story of one woman, what happened to her as a girl during a terrible time, how she survived, and the psychological scars that time left on her. It’s also the story of human resilience in the face of cruelty and horror.

"Where Every Man" by Charlie Garratt

It’s the late winter and early spring of 1940. James and Rachel Given have moved from England to a small town in Brittany. James has been a policeman, but he’s left the force; too much reality and too much evil that always seemed to find new life. They’re now working and living on a farm, helping the farmer with planting and sales in the weekly market. 

France is at war with Nazi Germany, but the war still seems far away. James has been asked by MI5 to keep an eye on anything that might look like German fifth column activity. He sends his disguised reports to a stamp collecting store in Paris. And for a time, things are quiet. James and Rachel even start attending the local Catholic church; they’re both Jewish, and they have false identity papers that might get them out of immediate trouble if the Germans come but won’t last much beyond that.

 

Then the town librarian dies in what may or may not have been a suspicious accident. The local policeman and the mayor prefer it to be an accident, but James himself isn’t sure. His wife urges him to look into it. And then he learns that the librarian is a former MI5 agent and that she had come across something, or someone, that might be an enemy agent. 

 

Charlie Garratt

A man from outside the area has taken a room in town and been asking questions about local military bases. He’s found with his throat slit, but the murderer may have been local patriots or another enemy agent. With local police approval, James slowly plows through the case, helped by a teenaged girl who takes violin lessons with Rachel. And all the time the threat of invasion is growing.

 

Where Every Man by British writer Charlie Garratt is the story of James, Rachel, and the French village where they live. The author does a fine job of slowly building suspense, creating a number of possible suspects, and using the menace of the war to underscore the tension. And he makes the narrative personal for James by locating close relatives some 30 miles away, an uncle, aunt, and cousin who have already fled the Nazis once and now face having to do it again.

 

Garratt is the author of three previous Inspector Given mysteries, including A Shadowed Livery, A Pretty Folly, and A Patient Man. He also published several community participation guides, until he retired and began writing short stories. One of those stories led to his first novel, A Shadowed Livery. He lives in Shropshire in England.

 

Where Every Man is a solid mystery and a suspenseful tale of World War II.

"The Baker's Secret" by Stephen Kiernan

The small town of Vergers lies a short mile from the Normandy coast in France. It has been under the fist of the German occupying army for four years. Jews have been shot or taken away. Men 15 years and older have been sent to Germany, to work in munitions factories. The people remaining survive as best they can – a few in the Resistance, a few collaborators, most just trying to survive.

Emmanuelle is 22 years gold and has become the town baker. She had been apprenticed the the long-time baker, but he was Jewish, and she and the other townspeople had seen his shop wrecked and the man shot in the head. She is required to bake the baguettes for the German army commandant, 12 loaves picked up every morning like clockwork, the flour provided by the Germans. But Emmanuelle has a secret; she grinds straw into powder and adds it to the dough. Doing so allows her to have 14 loaves instead of 12. She uses the extra two loaves to help people stay alive.

But her secret is bigger than two loaves of bread. She’s able to build an underground economy, supplying food needs and occasionally other things – a light bulb, a little gasoline. Without hope for liberation, Emmanuelle is the pivot of hope for keeping people alive.

And it’s June 5, 1944. The day before the D-Day invasion. The last day Emmanuelle will bake bread for the German commandant. The last day many of the Germans and the people she knows in her town will be alive.

The Baker’s Secret by Stephen Kiernan is Emmanuelle’s story, and what a story he tells. It’s filled with memorable characters like Odette the café owner, The Goat who secretly hides ammunition, Monkey Boy who climbs trees, Emmanuelle’s grandmother Meme, and the church priest who walks a fine line between collaboration and resistance, but can always be relied upon to show up with his wheelbarrow to bury the dead. 

Stephen Kiernan

Kiernan, a former journalist, is the author of two previous novels,The Curiosity (2014) and The Hummingbird (2016), and two non-fiction books, Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System (2007) and Authentic Patriotism: Restoring America’s Founding Ideals through Selfless Action (2010). His work has won more than 40 awards. He lives in Vermont.

We’ve seen the story of Nazi occupation and the story of D-Day told over and over again. What we haven’t seen as much is the story of the people in French villages and towns who experienced both. Kiernan points out in the afterword that some 4,400 Allied soldiers died on the first day of the invasion, with some 9,387 eventually buried in military cemeteries in France. But it’s estimated that more than 50,000 French civilians died in the invasion and the days that followed.

The Baker’s Secret tells their story.

Top photograph: A beach in Normandy by Philippe D. via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Out of Sorts” by Aurelie Valognes

Ferdinand Brun is a rather miserable old man. He’s 83; his younger wife left him for the mailman; his daughter moved to Singapore with his grandson. He lives in a Paris apartment house, monitored closely by the apartment manager and surrounded by other residents who would like nothing better than to drive him away and preferably into a retirement home where he’ll be even more miserable.

His one joy in life is his Great Dane, Daisy. That is, she’s his one joy until she’s killed, apparently by an automobile. Ferdinand decides to join her; what else does he have to live for? And so, he steps in front of a bus – and wakes up in the hospital with only minor injuries. Life is so miserable it won’t even allow Ferdinand to leave it.

He begins to plan his suicide again, when he’s interrupted by the arrival of a new family, including a baby who cries at night and a schoolgirl named Juliette who decides to take Ferdinand on as a kind of project of redemption. She’s remarkably insightful and smart, and she doesn’t put up with any of his usual guff. And one of the residents, a widow even older than Ferdinand, begins to smother him with kindness.

Very slowly, Ferdinand begins to discover that life may not be so miserable after all.

Aurelie Valognes

Out of Sortsis a novel by French writer Aurelie Valognes. The book was published in 2016 and helped catapult Valognes into the top ranks of French popular fiction. Her second novel, Will You Ever Change?, was published in 2017 and sold more than 600,000 copies in France.

Valognes was born and raised near Paris. She studied management and worked for a number of American companies as a brand manager. When she and her husband moved to Italy for an international assignment, she began to write fiction, and Out of Sortswas the result. She and her family live in Milan. 

Translated from the French by Wendeline A. Hardenberg, Out of Sortsis funny, sad, and often moving. These characters may be French and Parisians, but it’s easy to see ourselves in their plots and prejudices. The novel is an entertaining, insightful read.

Photograph by Alessio Lin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The 6th Lamentation” by William Brodrick

I’m always on the lookout for new mystery series, and a few weeks ago I came across a fictional detective named Father Anselm, a brother at the Larkwood Catholic monastery in England. He’s a former barrister, familiar with the workings of criminal law, judges, and the Old Bailey (or Royal Courts of Justice).

In The 6^th Lamentation by William Brodrick (first published in 2003 in Britain and 2004 in the United States), Father Anselm unexpectedly finds himself doing detective work, and all because of a man arriving at Larkwood and asking for sanctuary.

The year is 1995. The first issue that has to be tackled is that the man seems to have nothing wrong. Second, sanctuary is no longer a church practice. Third, the brothers gradually learn that the man is suspected of being a Nazi war criminal, who as a young Gestapo officer helped deport thousands of Jews from Paris to the death camps in the east.

Father Anselm is drawn into the case of the man, and is sent to the Vatican in Rome when the monastery seeks guidance. Officials there are more than mildly interested; it turns out that a sister monastery in France may have helped the Gestapo officer and a fellow French police collaborator escape to England.

The 6^th Lamentation would have been a fascinating story with this as the narrative arc, but Brodrick layers in a second story, that of Agnes Aubret, who was almost 21 at the time of the fall of France to the Germans. Her father was Jewish; she is given “total Christian” identity papers to help her survive occupation and help a clandestine group smuggle Jewish children out of the country. But she was caught and sent to Auschwitz, and the German and the collaborating Frenchman were involved. Agnes survived, married an Englishman, and eventually settled in London. She believes her own child, born out of wedlock, did not survive the war.

William Brodrick

In his own life Brodrick reverses the story of Father Anselm. He was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written eight of the Father Anselm mysteries, with The Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. Born in the UK but having spent a portion of his life in Canada, he holds both British and Canadian citizenship. He, his wife, and three children live in France.

Nothing is as it seems to be in The 6^th Lamentation. Heroes and villains change roles, and more than once. It is a story of how the past is never really the past but continues to affect and change the present. It’s an outstanding story.

Top photograph: The German Army matching on the Champs Elysses after the surrender of France in 1940; via Bundesarchiv and Wikipedia.