Le Chambon: the village of rescuers
Last night by chance I came across the story of the French village of Le Chambon during WWII. I’d never heard it before, but it’s one of the most fascinating stories of rescuers during the Holocaust.
I’ve written about rescuers several times before, especially here. Different countries had different degrees of cooperation with the Nazi occupation in rounding up their Jews, and as a whole France’s role was a decidedly shameful one. There were individual acts of heroism, to be sure. But Le Chambon was very, very different because the village, as well as the surrounding area, was united in its courage:
From December 1940 to September 1944, the inhabitants of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (population 5,000) and the villages on the surrounding plateau (population 24,000) provided refuge for an estimated 5,000 people. This number included an estimated 3,000”“3,500 Jews who were fleeing from the Vichy authorities and the Germans.
Led by Pastor André Trocmé of the Reformed Church of France [French Huguenot], his wife Magda, and his assistant, Pastor Edouard Theis, the residents of these villages offered shelter in private homes, in hotels, on farms, and in schools. They forged identification and ration cards for the refugees, and in some cases guided them across the border to neutral Switzerland. These actions of rescue were unusual during the period of the Holocaust insofar as they involved the majority of the population of an entire region.
Pierre Sauvage, one of the saved children, grew up to become a documentary filmmaker. In the 1980s he made a film about Le Chambon entitled “Weapons of the Spirit.” Here’s a small clip:
The attitude of the couple is one that I’ve learned is not unusual among rescuers. They almost always deny heroism or any special sort of behavior at all, and act as though what they did was merely normal. The man in the clip says that at first it was not particularly dangerous to shelter the Jews, but then it became so. He’s referring to the fact that during the last year and a half of the German occupation, the Nazis began to crack down more on the people of Le Chambon, even murdering some of the leaders. But the village never cracked, and never betrayed the Jews whose rescue it had taken on.
It’s fairly clear what was going on with Le Chambon, and what was different about it. As Sauvage put it in an interview with Bill Moyers:
SAUVAGE: …[They were a] singular group of people with a singular history: this Huguenot stock, this memory of their persecution, not only the fact that they had a history of persecution but that they remembered it, that it mattered to them.
…I think on the one hand, there was that sense of identification with somebody else who was persecuted. On the other, there was their particular slant on their Christian faith which both mandated deeds””that was essential””but also involved a certain, special kinship with the Jews.
MOYERS: Through persecution, through…
SAUVAGE: Well, even broader than that. Simply because the Jews, for many of the Christians of the area, were the People of the Book. These were Christians whose sense of roots went that far back that they were comfortable with the Jewish roots of their faith.
Sauvage’s parents ended up emigrating to the US, where he was raised. But in a great irony, they (like a small number of other Holocaust survivors) abandoned their Jewish identity to the point of not even telling their son that they were Jewish. This is what happened, as Sauvage tells it:
MOYERS: You grew up in New York. Did you hear growing up about Le Chambon? Did your parents constantly refer to it, make you mindful of that part of your story?
SAUVAGE: Well, I guess the answer to that is perhaps a big paradox about the making of the film. The answer is no, my parents did not talk much about Le Chambon. Oh, I knew I was born there. But I didn’t know that Le Chambon had mattered in any particular way.
They basically were people who had put the past behind them to the extent of not even allowing me to know that they were Jewish and that I was Jewish.
MOYERS: They didn’t tell you?
SAUVAGE: They did not tell me. Till I was 18.
MOYERS: You were 18? Nothing in the home had indicated this, nothing in the conversation had indicated this, nothing in your own intuition had indicated this?
SAUVAGE: You know when you were raised under a taboo, the power of that taboo is extraordinary. People sometimes can’t believe that I could have not suspected or known. But the truth is I did not. I did not.
It may not be meaningless that the film was not the work of a dutiful child fulfilling his parents’ fondest wishes. It was the work of a rebellious child, laying a claim to a part of the past, indeed to a heritage, indeed to an identity that he had essentially been deprived of.
MOYERS: In what sense, rebellion?
SAUVAGE: Well, the mere fact of becoming Jewish was a rebellion. I was sort of sent forth into the world as a “nothing.” I wasn’t a Christian, I was simply a “nothing.”
That satisfied me for quite a while, by the way. I was a student in Paris and it never bothered me. It took a long time for me to start measuring that that was not a productive way to live your life. I think two major influences–one, my wife, who is Jewish, and who sort of was working on me””a lot.
And the other, actually, was Le Chambon. Because I realized that a lot of what they did came out of their strong sense of self, their intimate knowledge of who they were, of what their history was. And I realized that, well, if they were getting such strength from being who they are, then I had to aspire to be who I was.
So for Sauvage it came full circle—Le Chambon saved his life, and then Le Chambon helped to give him back his Jewish identity.
[NOTE: If you want to learn more about the persecution the Huguenots had historically faced, see this.]
Lots of Huguenots emigrated to the new world because of religious persecution in France. There is a Huguenot Society in New York. I was born in Louisiana and my last name is an old French Huguenot name. When I was in France we visited La Rochelle which was a Huguenot stronghold.
My maternal grandfather had a French surname – but his family was Scots-Irish. They are supposed to have been Huguenot. They were all fiercely Presbyterian – and all the various branches of the family retain the belief of having fled France about the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
A well known book on the subject is Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Philip Paul Hallie, 1994. A very good novel, one of my favorites, with the story of Chambon-sur-Lignon as the background is The Innocents Within by Robert Daley, 1999.
there are th9ousands of stories liket his, and not just jews…
but it seems the only ones we are allowed to care about are the jews, and their stories…
read your post… its written in the tradition of ignoring the others as if they dont exist, which is why they dont exist much any more… do they? (and why the knockout game didnt get any play until they started wacking on jewish peopel in brooklyn, then the press wrote that it was an antisemeitc thigand so on… not a white thing and they forgot they were mostly white!)
what about the american airmen who were un buchenwald?
you a say impossible… buchenwald was a concentration camp and service men were kept in prisoner camps… not the same
but the SS refused to consider them to be airmen
they said they put the uniforms on they bought…
and instead said they were political prisoners NOT ?US airmen
I have tried to introcuve many other,s but unless they are jewish, there is no traction…
so i guess that is all that matters in practrice. thoughu not in talking… (though i prefer when words and actions align. dont you? even if one has to make a special effor,. no?)
Phillip (Phil) John Lamason – was the man who led these airmen…
ALSO…
in pavlovian effect, we talk about nazis and doing this, but there is just as large a group that trie to do the same for Stalins occupation… i tried to show that too.. but not ONE example gets talked about… so it also doesnt exist in the publics mind, being erased by this process of singular focus.
almost EVERYONE of the airmen were hlped by french citizens who would have been killed for helping. in fact, one told them that they would not be killed as they wer officers, but the family would be exterminated.
In the summer of 1944, 168 airmen from the US, England, Canada and other Allied countries were captured in Paris by the German Gestapo and sent to the infamous “Koncentration Lager Buchenwald” in Germany. Falsely accused of being “terrorists and saboteurs,” the airmen faced a terrifying fight for survival and a race against time to escape their execution.
and even more surprising..
the group that helped them out a lot, was the NAzi airmen
ie. fellows in arms who did not like what the SS was doing and protested that they were at buchenwald, they talked as to why, but never could figure out why these germans did that (ie. they did not like the system they were in, most didnt any more than people today like what is happening now).
how about giving some time to another group?
almost ten years and i have been patiently waiting.
but to talk of many, and none, and then say there is no pattern, as the pattern remains after commentary stil… well, then there is a pattern.
the pattern is that the shoa is not as bad and useful IF the fates were shared by others…
very sad…
you can read the same thing when the articles on the knockout game came out from brooklun… a complete and utter hateful disregard for others and a manomaniacle focus that they are the reason, rather than coincidence of color!!!
doubly sad that they have defenders who claim otherwis,e but note… you have to ignore an aweful lot, call up conincidence beyond statistical norms, and so on to do so…
hows this.
6 million jews.
6 million others
how many from each colum were brought up in fiscussions… from mamet, to several times the young girl that wasnt that special (unless you ignore the rest)… this family… and on..
not one on ruta… but she aint jewish eh?
not one on the burchenwald pilots, also not jewish
i guess its hard to make and conflat black underground railroad with jewish nazi epxperience if ther ewere other passengers..
after 40 years, and 10 here (almost).. be nice to hear about others too… even if its just to show there are others. no?
or are we to continually erase the others as not worthy of rememberanace? not worth the effort to even acknowlege… as that is what it seems and its not the first time i mentioned it, and its been asuaged… but yet i still wait… for more interesting stories about lesser beings that dont matter and are destined to be erased because they were the wrong faith (And often died helpiong that faith too)
what about Maximilian Maria Kolbe?
or rather SAINT Maximilian Maria Kolbe?
was a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar, who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz, located in German-occupied Poland during World War II.
At the end of July 1941, three prisoners disappeared from the camp, prompting SS-Hauptsturmfé¼hrer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men to be starved to death in an underground bunker in order to deter further escape attempts. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, “My wife! My children!”, Kolbe volunteered to take his place.[
he volunteered to starve to death for someone else
thats a bit more than risking life, eh?
but he dontmatter… he will never matter
as you cant get anyone interested in telling the story
the reason the CHRISTIAN RESCUERS of jews are not heroes… you dont even know… or care why…
“There is a Christian morality, there is a human morality which imposes duties and recognizes rights. These duties and rights are derived from the nature of men. It is in the power of no mortal to suppress them. Women, men, fathers and mothers are treated like as vile herd, members of the same family are separated from each other and shipped off to an unknown destination; it has been reserved to our times to see these sad spectacles.
Jews are men and women. Foreigners are men and women. There is a limit to what can be permitted against them; against these men, these women, against these fathers and mothers. They belong to the human race. They are our brothers like so many others.”
Father Jules-Gerard Saliege
your not a hero for following morals
only today when one has to be brave to even ahve morals do we think like that
but then…
morals were what you did EVEN IF YOU GOT KILLED
so they cant be heroes…
they were just mostly lutherans who were following their beliefs…
duh
here are some more…
though they are in Yad Vashem
you wont find lists or stories of rememberance of similar people saving the other 6 millions… those 6 dont count…
Father Arrigo Beccari
Padre Ruffino Nicacci
Father Pietro Boetto
Monsignor Vincenzo Barale
Monsignor Quadraroli, and Father Calliste Lopinot
Father Pierre-Marie Benoit
Father Pierre Chaillet
Father Jacques de Jesus (Lucien Burel) a Carmelite friar
The Abbé René de Naurois
Mother Marie-Angelique
Bishop Pierre-Marie Theas
Father Marie-Jean Viollet
i could list hundreds..
but not one for the others…
think of it.. .
so i say something for all of them
the ones forgotten too
the ones whose religion is wrong, so their stories are not interesting enough to know, or discuss. even if yhou wait 1/10th of 100 years for their turn…
50$ if you can name a jehovas witness from the period!!!!
When asked to sign documents of loyalty to the Nazi ideology, they refused. Jehovah Witnesses were forced to wear purple armbands and thousands were imprisoned as “dangerous” traitors because they refused to take a pledge of loyalty to the Third Reich..
how many ever heard the story of the jehovas witnesses? well, you wont hear it here either, since the tradition cant be broken. can it?
Between 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals died in concentration camps during the Holocaust. “Members and Friends of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Children of Holocaust Survivors”
and they are more remembered than the jehovahs witnesses or the Roma below… 15,000 vs 500,000
Like the Jews, the Rom Gypsies also were a nomadic people that were persecuted throughout history. Both groups were denied certain privileges in many European countries. The Germans believed both the Jews and the Gypsies were racially inferior and degenerate and therefore worthless. Like the Jews, the Gypsies were also moved into special areas set up by the Nazis. Half a million Gypsies, almost the entire Eastern European Gypsy population, was wiped out during the Holocaust.
name one…
how about the handicapped, infirm and so on?
no, we dont remember the deformed or people like me, handicapped… we are always on everyones list to be erased…
how about the thousands who refused to divorce and were sent to camps for having mixed children or could have them??
nope
i never hear about them unless i bring them up
still waiting to hear about others…
will probably wait another 10 years with people saying that doesnt happen..
these stories are only amazing to you becasue you never heard them
spend a lot more time reading more than just jewish life, and you might find the other million or so stories, and trowns and such.
now find the town that failed and was exterminated for trying. finding survivors who were not caught is easy.
on this page is a list of nobles, preists, and others who all helped jews.. hundreds of names. [amazing list! and not even slightly comprehensive!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_individuals_and_groups_assisting_Jews_during_the_Holocaust
there is no list for the forgotten who we dont care enough to remember!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Some people grant the divine power they worship dominion over their lives, deaths, and souls.
As such, even if you kill their leaders that started organizing, you cannot make them obey using worldly desires. They have a higher authority telling them what to do, and that higher authority cannot be made to rescind those orders. Human leaders can be made to order a population to do things, via hostages and coercion. Divine gods that may or may not exist… that’s a trickier proposition.
In a weird sense, giving one’s hierarchy to divinity, removes much of the human temptation to Obey Authority. Much in the same fashion as placing one’s own judgment above the world’s, similar to enlightened warrior-philosophers.
these stories are only amazing to you becasue you never heard them
That’s a weird way to view the world.
For one thing, what’s amazing is that humans did it and didn’t just cave due to pressure, threats, fear of death, and obedience to the crowd. Reading about stories has no effect on their truth or their rarity.
This is a very wrongly centered outline and pov there.
Malcolm Gladwell has
written an article telling how the experience of a Mennonite family and the story of Le Chambon have enabled him to rediscover faith.
“Maybe we have difficulty seeing the weapons of the spirit because we don’t know where to look, or because we are distracted by the louder claims of material advantage. But I’ve seen them now, and I will never be the same.”
This story makes me wonder something, again, about rogue governments. If they killed civil leaders, they, the powers that be at the time, knew something was going on. So?
So… they wanted these people to, of their own accord, collude with evil. They wanted to pressure them to surrender, but not just the Jews. They wanted those people’s innocence, goodness. If they knew enough to kill people, they could have just slaughtered everybody. And they did, sometimes.
It is something to think about any time a government asks you to ‘say something if you see something’. There are times when that will be right. If I think we might be… about to hit some of the edge of that. Actually, with Verizon, MS, academia, and the rest in cahoots… some of those edges have already been breached. Now they will be coming for us, personally, and our innocence. Many will simply go along.
artfldgr:
Another incorrect assumption on your part. I don’t know where you got it.
I never used the word “amazing.” I singled out the village/region of Le Chambord because it was unusual that an entire region of many of thousands of people (especially in France) would cooperate in order to do this as a group; I’ve written about other countries (such as Bulgaria) that also refused to cooperate, and why they were relatively successful at it.
I gave a link to one previous LONG post of mine about Holocaust rescuers and how often people did rescue people, in the face of great odds and dangers.
Heroism is hardly confined to people rescuing Jews, either, nor have I written only on that subject. I could link to many posts of mine on the subject of people who exhibit bravery in risking their lives to rescue others. I happen to find the rescuer mindset a very interesting one.
See this and this for my two big posts on the subject of WWII rescuers (including the history of the resistance to harming the disabled within Nazi Germany). I’ve also got a bunch on the German resistance that tried to kill Hitler, and many other heroes of many other types.
When the world declares Jews, Republicans, and whites to be non humans that need to be exterminated to get rid of a threat to humanity, most people will Obey.
Most will. They have nothing in their spine that can resist the Power of the World and its numbers. Nothing.
Doom,
Remember the Hearst heir the Left brainwashed via torture into joining the bank robbery?
Evil grows via corruption. It doesn’t create or give birth to new life, so it has to corrupt what currently exists in order to grow. By that art, they win when their enemies kneel down and declare the righteousness of the Left’s cause.
My maiden name was Huguenot. Our family came to North America after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. My paternal grandfather told me about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the “Iniquitous” Revocation of the Edict of Nantes as if both events had happened in his lifetime. I know first hand from my family the tendency of Huguenots to identify with Jews, although we certainly cannot claim any acts of courage like the people of Le Chambon.
Ymar says: “Evil grows via corruption. It doesn’t create or give birth to new life, so it has to corrupt what currently exists in order to grow.”
That is as profound a thought as I’ve ever seen grace these pages.
Always looking for the tiniest chink in our moral armor.
artfldgr
Inre: USAAF airmen liberated within Buchenwald.
My Uncle was just such an airman. He was caught out of uniform, chopping wood, within earshot of American 105mm howitzers.
Patton’s breakout came only two-weeks later.
The traitor that turned him in to the Gestapo, apparently crossed up the American 105mm howitzers with the German 105mm howitzers — because they were identical.
(The German design was new in 1918, and was adopted by the US Army. These weapons were completely identical — as the German blueprints were seized in 1919. Indeed, Patton’s 3rd Army showed a full battery of captured German howitzers being used to shell their former owners during the Lorraine Campaign!)
Now my Uncle had been forewarned to stay quiet and hidden. In the event, his savior was unable to convince the traitor that it was the US Army that was advancing south, that the Germans were being ripped to shreds. (It was all the talk thereabouts. There’s only so much the Germans could do to suppress their casualties.)
So, he was off to the east, a priority asset for the Gestapo. He hit all of the low spots from Paris onwards. His savior was hanged, IIRC. They wouldn’t shoot women — it was always the noose. (This had more to do with their own morale. Bullet festivals on the Eastern Front had proved to be ruinous to military efficiency.)
He was ultimately classified as an enemy agent/ spy/ escapee/ whatever — and sent into the Kamps — with a red badge — as if a political offender.
Kamp policies made that even more frightful and depressing than being Jewish… and a dozen other victim groups.
He spent most of his misery digging within a punishment/ grave detail within the Dora Kamp — think A4/ V2 missile production caves.
By the time he was there, the core of the mountain had been hollowed out for the V-2 line. Nothing had ever been done for plumbing, so the entire cave crew had to use porta-potties even more crude than used on today’s construction sites.
The soils were toted away by bottom rank inmates… to be spread around the countryside… in pits dug by my Uncle and a many another inmate.
These endless pits served two purposes: they were also used on a mass basis for the inmates themselves. My Uncle’s crew — and many another — were the end-of-the-line for burnt out victims.
His brutal SS guard would murder at least half of the digging detail every single Tuesday, the day that the Kamp system set aside for prison transfers/ culling. These fresh fatalities would be tossed straight into the very pits that they’d just dug on Monday.
Wiki is fulsomely incorrect. The SS never shipped inmates south back to Buchenwald for cremation. They’d never suffer the trouble and expense. That camp never had remotely enough capacity for even its own locally created fatalities.
Because the V-2 was the ultimate priority at that time, (’44 – 45), and owned by all of the top Nazis, the Wiki is wildly under-counting the victims of Dora. Indeed, most modern Westerners haven’t a clue when I mention Dora. It’s not even recognized as being a critical node in the Nazi Kamp system.
[BTW, it got its name because it was, on paper, started out as annex D for Buchenwald — even though it’s not really proximate. It’s paperwork was routed through Buchenwald, straight through to the end, IIRC. (Such is the nature of secrecy, even in the paperwork.) (A lack of ‘office space’ was also a consideration. Dora was so rough that it lacked all manner of traditional camp attributes… like even huts.(!)
Whereas D means Delta in the American military lexicon, D always meant Dora in the German military lexicon. You’ll find there were a zillion ‘Doras’ in their paperwork. One example out of the many:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxuW8gG8Hfg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav
[When reading the Wiki note the extremely common error: they’ve double counted the single gun. The Gustav and the Dora are the EXACT SAME GUN. The factory named it after their owner-icon Gustav. The German Army — in the field — informally named it Dora. (This sustained a German tradition: big guns were named after women — a lot. Hence, big Bertha, etc.)]
I mention huts because my Uncle spent most ordinary nights out in the open/ tented. The tempo was so frantic that no attempt was made to build out huts — and all the rest. As it was, he was on a persistent work-death detail that was outside any notion of a traditional camp compound. This still was effective because everyone was weak as a new born lamb and pretty much in a crawling state.
Turnover was phenomenal — even by the standards of Nazi Death Kamps. His detail was the Dora equivalent to Sonderkommando in the main camps. Like the Sonderkommandos they never mixed back in with the other victims.
Because camp policy was that anyone wearing a red badge had to be beaten whenever a Jew was beaten, he ended up unconscious every Tuesday as adjunct to the bone breaking truncheon of the SS guard. Whereas the culling in the main camps sent the victims to the ‘showers’ — at Dora they had their heads caved in right on the spot. The determination as to how hard the beatings would go was left to the discretion of the SS guard — as long as he kept his crew size down. As a practical matter, he always murdered as many victims as the system supplied as replacements… most right on the spot.
My Uncle only survived because of Remagen bridge. (Ludendorff Bridge) For a military reverse that was supposed to be a secret, everyone in Germany knew about it in 36 hours.
My Uncles insanely brutal SS guard suddenly decided that he needed a new very-best-friend. He was shipped off, back to Buchenwald, proper. He was in such pathetic shape that he went straight into the SS ‘hospital’ there.
He’d been left on thin liquids — in the staggering filth of that joint until (Jewish) American Army medics walked in. He was practically the only American voice they heard — and he was almost unable to talk. He did, with some struggle, manage to establish his name, rank and serial number — to the complete astonishment of the medic.
Not surprisingly, he was given priority. (The US Army takes care of its own, first.) It took him just forever to get back to the States because he was so physically devastated. He spent five months in England — most of it on IV’s! He finally got up enough strength to demand repatriation.
Even upon discharge he was too thin.
And this is where my Grandmother entered the picture. She dedicated herself to fattening him up — by feeding him five to six meals a day. That’ll give you an idea of how shrunken his stomach had become. (IV’s are no help on that front.)
Even when he gave me his account, he still looked thin. Naturally, he went into the food business — trying his best to prevent starvation as best he could.
As for his psychic state: to the end of his days he never lived more than a short jaunt from a VA hospital. He spent more time with shrinks than you can imagine: survivor’s guilt, perhaps.
Dora, as a hell zone, has only come to Western attention after the Cold War. It was wrapped up in missile secrets — and much else.
…
As to why Dora was such a huge deal for the Nazis: they were concentrating essentially EVERY super high tech weapons program there. The V-2 was merely the first to go into production.
They had V-1 assembly going on there, too.
And a slew of cutting edge weapons were projected — with the caves already being dug out — when the US Army liberated Dora. It was from Dora that America dispatched all of the V-2s that we launched from White Sands, etc.
So, you can see why the entire matter was quickly officially suppressed. “Nothing to see here, move along , move along.”
The hell of Dora was suppressed as it wouldn’t give the Peenemé¼nde crew any laurels and would certainly stink up the USAF missile research program in Congress.
Watching the clip, I just love the facial reactions of the woman when asked “why?” It seems like she is surprised at such a question, as if the real question should be “why not?”
That seems to be the reaction of many whom we would call “heroes” even when they, themselves, do not consider themselves to be such.
I have always been amazed at death camp survivors. More than astronauts, more than sports heroes, more than anyone. It’s beyond my understanding and the fact that there was endurance and longevity after the fact strengthened my faith.
I had the honor to share a dinner with a survivor. I was most impressed that he was so ordinary. I thought surely he would do and say things beyond normal but he did not. He had a robust appetite and chewed his food very vigorously. I instinctively knew that he would not enjoy my perception of him as a super ordinary person. So I refrained from praise and comment and even observation. I felt a presence of something, and that presence said “let it be.”
Western civilization used to worship life in all its venues, joys, and despair.
But no more. Life and death dramas are in short supply by the popular media and what there is, is derivative or merely stolen from older works.
Cherishing the human desire and indomitable will to live above all else, is no longer a subject Westerners feel worthy of or fit for. It’s much more popular to talk about the human blight on Gaia and the human blight on the economy.
I have to go all the way to the Japanese speaking sources for an idea of what the West looked like in the old days.
Don Carlos,
Thanks, glad you liked it.
As I come to study human nature in more depth, I start to understand why the ancient sages didn’t interfere with human affairs or get too close to human society. At the time when I was younger, I thought that these highly placed individuals that had a lot of knowledge were selfish or unwilling to share. Now I understand that if they attempted to educate the population, the Authoritarians in power would have gotten rid of them like they did Socrates. And the people would have cheered it on as a matter of Great Justice and Righteousness.
Human society is full of plagues and communicable diseases. When one becomes aware of these things, it becomes increasingly difficult to love humanity while also being in the middle of conflicting factions and emotions. Because to a human, the enemy is not human and the enemy is always that “other faction”, driven by the emotion of fear, greed, or hate.
By stepping away from humanity and breaking the bonds of authoritarian social morality/rules, it is easier to see humanity as a whole in objective terms. Whether people would still like their humanity or not afterwards… it’s difficult to predict.
It is the responsibility of the Leftist alliance to convince people that action is required, to convince them that evil exists and that brainwashed zombies are easily made. It is not my responsibility or place to convince people or change the world.
I wish “Weapons of the Spirit” was available as a DVD or via streaming from Amazon or Netflix.
I read in Everyday Holiness by Alan Morinis about the Huguenots saving 3-5 thousand Jews . I have Huguenot Ancestry and reading it, made me cry with such joy and thankfulness, to know yet another amazing story of my ancestors. I hope to visit this town in November when I go see my son that lives in Marseille.
If anyone has any connections or can tell me now to get there, please let me know
selahtorah@mac.com
Thank you ,
Valerie