Nelly Trocmé Hewett, 85, had a thoroughly enjoyable life as a teenager in France.
In a town of about 900 people and “lots of cows,” she was an athlete, went to schools with excellent teachers, and traveled by foot or by bicycles that often had tires filled with hay. (These bicycles were “hard on the fanny, I can tell you.”)
She did notice, though, that people with strange accents came into or passed through town, and her family’s house was “Grand Central Station” for many of them. Some of her teachers also had accents, and in her classes there were fellow students she didn’t ask about.
Not until much later did she understand and appreciate what the town and her parents were doing, she told an audience of about 70 at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center on Oct. 11.
The town was Le Chambon sur Lignon, located in the plateau region of south-central France. During World War II and the Nazi German occupation of France, this town, along with 12 other communities in the area, rescued between 3,500 and 5,000 Jews from the Nazi genocide project.
And Nelly’s parents, Pastor André and Magda Trocmé, were among the leaders of that effort.
“You get to know your parents when you are more mature,” Trocmé Hewett said in response to a question. “I realized when I was a mother and had children” that her parents were extraordinary people who helped do extraordinary things.
Trocmé Hewett moved to the U.S. after the war, and today is a retired French teacher who lives in St. Paul.
Her appearance in Milwaukee was the first in a series of events about “Extraordinary Heroes: Holocaust Rescuers” sponsored by the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center and co-sponsored by the JCC and the Jewish Museum Milwaukee.
Her parents had remarkable stories even before the Nazi occupation. Her mother was part Russian, a descendant of one of the Decembrists, the first 19th century Russian revolutionaries; and she grew up a rebellious orphan in Florence, Italy.
Her father was born to a strict Calvinist family, one that demonstrates “How very good people can be awful,” his daughter said. He was a creative man who could draw and sing, and he became a Protestant minister and a dedicated pacifist who was disliked by officials in the French Protestant church.
Both ended up as students in New York City, she attending the New York School of Social Work, he the Union Theological Seminary. Six weeks after meeting, they were engaged.
They were “two people from different places with the same ideas” about “serving humanity” and “doing something useful on this earth,” their daughter said.
But when they returned to France, Le Chambon was the only Protestant parish that would accept him as its pastor.
“Little did they [Protestant church officials] know they were placing the right man at the right time in the right place,” Trocmé Hewett said.
But then, the townspeople might have been particularly hospitable to rebels or non-conformists. France is a predominantly Catholic country, and the Catholic majority horribly persecuted French Protestants, or Huguenots, from the 16th to the early 18th centuries.
Le Chambon was among the few places within France where Huguenots could find refuge and live undisturbed. “It is on a plateau, it is isolated, it has a lousy climate, it was poor, its farmers were barely surviving,” said Trocmé Hewett. “It remained a Huguenot enclave.”
These characteristics apparently also served to make it a good hiding place for Jews. It was so isolated there wasn’t even a French police office in town, much less a Gestapo outpost. At one point the only Germans present were wounded soldiers who had been sent to two Le Chambon hotels for rest and rehabilitation.
But the people of the town did not regard themselves as doing anything remarkable in helping Jews escape the Nazis.
Trocmé Hewett showed the 1987 documentary film “Weapons of the Spirit” by Pierre Sauvage, a Jew whose parents fled to Le Chambon in time for him to have been born and sheltered there. Time after time, the townspeople told Sauvage that helping Jews was the natural thing for them to do.
“It was a very simple life compared to society today,” Trocmé Hewett said. People had simple routines, “food, washing, keeping alive. An extra person comes, that person is included in the family.”
And for all the seriousness of her parents’ beliefs and work, Trocmé Hewett said, “They had a fun life. They laughed.”
For more information about the “Extraordinary Heroes” series, contact HERC, 414-963-2719 or visit www.holocaustcentermilwaukee.org.
HERC is a program of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
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