Changes

|title=The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis

|sort=Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis, The

|publisher=Nicholas Brealey Publishing

|date=July 2014

|summary=This book has a great core, of a community rallying against the whole Vichy/Nazi ideology in their humanitarian way, but too much is attempted by the author, leaving a feeling of bloated mis-focus.

}}

We've read it before and been grateful, and now we can read it again, and for the same reasons – educational, entertainment, moralistic – we can be grateful. We've probably all heard how one place or circumstance – most famously, Oscar Schindler's factory – led to a major underhand rescue operation to keep Jews from being the victims of the Final Solution in World War Two. This book is a further example, but one of a whole French district being complicit in helping defy the Nazi authorities. Centred around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the heart of southern France, a very rural community based around Huguenot Protestants with their own experiences of religious persecution decided en masse to act as shelter for a whole host of people – mostly children rescued from transit and internment camps elsewhere in France, and the Jewish victims of the Vichy government rules demanding they be stateless or, worse, victims of a certain one-way train ride. But beyond becoming an idyllic place to hide out in plain view, the towns and villages also conspired to actively export the Jews themselves – to places of safety.