“Are my mama and papa here?” Jacob asked anxiously, and the tall boy shook his head.
“No, they aren’t. But you have friends here who want to help you.”
“His name is Jacob,” Gaëlle explained to him, and smiled at the child she had delivered. The young man said his name was Simon.
He brought him farther into the garage then, with Gaëlle following them, and knocked on a door, which opened a moment later and a pretty young woman smiled and took the child from his arms. “This is Jacob,” he introduced the boy, and she looked ecstatic, as though she had been waiting for him to arrive. Gaëlle could see that there were other children in the room, and then the door closed behind them.
“You’re just in time,” Simon explained to her. “We’re taking five others to Le Chambon tonight. He can go with us.” She knew that Le Chambon sur Lignon was in the Haute Loire in Auvergne, in south-central France, but she knew nothing else about it, and he acted as though she should. “We’ve taken more than two thousand children there in the past two years, all Jewish refugees like Jacob. Friends and neighbors have been hiding them in homes, hotels, farms, and schools.” He explained it to her for a few minutes.
Le Chambon and the neighboring villages had made a deep commitment, three months after the Occupation began, to bring Jewish children to safety. The movement had been founded by Huguenots, led by Pastor André Trocmé, whom everyone thought was a saint. There were safe houses all over France now, with people like Simon and the woman who’d taken Jacob waiting to help the children reach safety. And by some miracle, Jacob’s mother had heard about them, and wrote the address down for Jacob to give to whoever found him. “We get them to the Swiss border when we can, or hide them with locals, or keep moving them around. We give them new papers, and new identities.” Pastor Trocmé had given a speech a few months before, in Paris, accusing his fellow countrymen of cowardice for giving in to anti-Semitism. He was an outspoken pacifist, determined to undermine the local authorities whenever he could. And so far they hadn’t touched him. Trocmé was working closely with American Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee, and their leader Burns Chalmers, who had been trying to negotiate the release of interned Jews for two years, but they had nowhere to go. And Trocmé had turned his entire village into an underground network to protect and harbor Jewish children, and two or three of the neighboring villages were involved now too. Simon said they were the bravest people in France, and that the Swiss Red Cross was assisting them as well. And the Swedish government had recently begun sending funding to assist Trocmé’s efforts in Le Chambon.
“Are you a church group of some kind?” Gaëlle asked him, mystified by what he told her.
“We work for the OSE, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, the Children’s Aid Society. If anyone gets the children to us, we get them to Le Chambon. We work hand in hand with Pastor Trocmé, and the American Quakers, and whoever else will help us. Would you ever carry a package for us again?” he asked her directly. She hesitated and then nodded. She had never thought of it before, but it seemed like the right thing to do, and she wanted to help. She thought Rebekah would be pleased, and it was a way of making penance for what Gaëlle hadn’t been able to do for her. All she had managed to do was visit her, she couldn’t free her. She wondered if she could have saved her, if she’d gotten her to Le Chambon. But it was too painful to think of now. “Jacob will be in good hands,” he reassured her, as he walked her to the gate.
“I just happened to see him escape from a window when they took his parents and their three other children.”
“It was lucky for him you did.” She found it hard to believe that an entire town was successfully defying the Germans. Pastor Trocmé must have been an extraordinary individual to get everyone to rally, to help save so many children, and even enlist the help of foreigners for their cause. “He’ll have a new name and identity by tomorrow.”
“And his family?” Gaëlle asked sadly, but already knew the answer.
“Once they’re deported, it’s much more difficult. Burns Chalmers has done some successful negotiations, but very few. They’re sending the families away to camps in Germany now, and they don’t come back. Most of the children we hide will be orphans by the end of the war or already are,” he said seriously. And she knew it applied to Rebekah too, who had been with her family and had been sent to God knew where. “We’ll be in touch,” Simon said as she got on her bike. He looked a little like her brother, and she tried not to think about it.
“I live at the Château de Mouton-Barbet,” she told him shyly, “but so does the commandant of the Gestapo for our region. They let us live upstairs.” He nodded, and realized they’d have to be cautious approaching her, but she was obviously a brave girl.
“You did a great thing today,” he said quietly to encourage her.
“He’s only one boy, and they’ve taken so many,” she said sadly. Too many that she knew of, friends from school, families from her village, the Feldmanns, and others she’d heard about.
“There’s a saying in the Talmud that to save one life is to save a world entire. That’s true. If you saved Jacob, that’s a miracle for him.”
“Are you Jewish?” She was curious about him.
“No, I’m Protestant, a Huguenot like Pastor Trocmé. But it really doesn’t matter. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Huguenot, we all want to save these children. They deserve it. What the Germans are doing is an abomination, trying to turn a whole country, even all of Europe, against one race. We can’t stop them, but hopefully we can save as many of the children as we can. So welcome to the OSE. Have a safe trip back,” he said seriously as she got on her bike.