It was most probably in the spring of 1988 when I first contacted Philip Hallie. I was beginning to think about editing a collection of essays on Montaigne.¹ Hallie was one of my favorite commentators on the Essays and I wanted him to write an article for the collection. He had published The Scar of Montaigne,² an insightful and important study of the essayist’s irresolution, of his skepticism, and of the importance of experience in the Essays. More crucial still, for me, was Hallie’s article entitled “The Ethics of Montaigne’s ‘Of Cruelty,’”³ a groundbreaking analysis of the ethical revolution constituted...

How French people acted and reacted during the 1940–44 German Occupation of France has been the subject of fierce, diverse, and radically conflicting debates from the very first day after the German Army exited the country.² One might even claim that the myth of a united French resistance, later ironically dubbed Résistancialisme, began with de Gaulle’s June 18, 1940, BBC speech urging the French not to give up in their struggle against the occupier and included, dramatically, at the moment of the liberation, his August 25, 1944, march down the Champs-Elysées. In any event, in an attempt to unify...

Houses of refuge were established in and around Le Chambonsur-Lignon to feed, clothe, protect, and educate young children and adolescents who, among others, had been brought out of internment camps, sometimes just before their parents were deported. By the middle of the Occupation, there were seven such houses in and near the village. Although Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was relatively free from Nazi and Vichy raids, on the morning of June 29, 1943, disaster struck the house of refuge known as La Maison des Roches.¹ The building, located two kilometers from Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, was formerly the fashionable Hôtel des Roches. As of...

Madeleine Dreyfus¹ was one of the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) Jewish fieldworkers who placed children in homes and institutions in the south of France. More specifically, she escorted children from Lyon to the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Born Madeleine Kahn,² the first of five children, in 1909, into an atheistic family of Jewish origins, she was deeply loved by a father whom she adored but, at the same time, was the victim of her mother’s enduring hostility, which caused her long-term anguish and made her crave her mother’s approbation. During her youth, she never experienced any feelings of...

Up to this point, we have dealt with the people who rescued Jews on the plateau during the Holocaust. The future Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus also lived on the plateau at this time. He was simply a visitor who had a completely different connection to the area. He was not part of any network and did not rescue Jews. But as a writer attentive to what was going on around him, he incorporated local people and events into the novel he was writing, which portrayed, in allegorical form, the conditions of life in Occupied France. He published that widely...

The rescuers are hard to find in the great explosion of literature on the Holocaust. Those who concealed Jewish children and protected Jewish adults from the Nazis have themselves been hidden in the accounts of this horrific European genocide. For one thing, many rescuers died in the years immediately following the end of World War II, and others, like many of the Jews they rescued, simply wanted to forget the past and get on with their lives. Also, the great majority of rescuers did not come forth looking for recognition. Almost all accounts, in all countries, show that most rescuers...