During World War II, the little French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the farms around it became a refuge. Led by Pastor André Trocmé, his wife Magda, and his assistant Pastor Edouard Theis, ordinary church people took in an estimated 5,000 refugees, about 3,000 to 3,500 of them Jews fleeing the Vichy government and the Germans. They hid people in homes, hotels, farms, and schools, and guided some of them about 300 kilometers to the Swiss border. These were descendants of persecuted Protestants, and they remembered what it felt like to be hunted. After a mass roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942, Trocmé said in a sermon that “the Christian Church must kneel down and ask God to forgive its present failings and cowardice.”
