It is with a heavy heart that I pick up anything to do with the Holocaust. Not because it’s wearisome or too familiar, or because — in Solzhenitzyn’s memorable phrase — you need only a mouthful of seawater to know the taste of the ocean. No: my reluctance to contemplate that world, even as a distant spectator, is because it was so awful and the detail so compelling that I’ll be unable to put the book down. It will echo inside my skull for as long as I inhabit one.
So it is with this vivid account by Caroline Moorehead of remote mountain villagers high up in France’s Massif Central during the second world war. These were ancient, largely Protestant communities, whose ancestral memories of the Huguenot persecutions engendered isolation, independence, undemonstrative endurance and a grim biblical devotion that enabled them to survive almost untouched by the modern world or the Enlightenment. Their lives were narrow, hard and poor, yet they sought no other and their words and actions expressed a religious intensity lost to the rest of Europe sometime in the 17th century. Probably almost all Christians believe that they should do good — or at least do no evil — and many try, but very few do it as these did, principled, disinterested and at great risk to themselves. To paraphrase a saint they would not recognise, they gave and did not count the cost.
What they gave was refuge to persecuted strangers, mostly Jewish and mostly children, whom they hid from the Gestapo and their own French Vichy government. Estimates vary — one of Moorehead’s themes is the fallibility of memory, the variety of truth and the potency of myth — but she reckons they probably helped about 3,000 escape to Switzerland and elsewhere and saved (by permanently hiding) a further 800.
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