Resistance: When France's clergy saved Jews during WWII
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After the fall of France in 1940, the clergy welcomed Marshal Pétain as a saviour. But when Jewish people started being rounded up in the summer of 1942, Protestant pastors and Catholic clerics spoke out against the deportations. Their words broke the silence of the institutions and encouraged the Resistance, while schools and convents opened their doors to Jewish refugees.
In the spring of 1940, the French army was defeated by the Wehrmacht, and Marshal Pétain agreed to collaborate with the occupying forces. Among the measures taken by his Vichy-based government was the "status of Jews", on October 18. The law excluded Jews from public life and many foreign Jewish refugees were also rounded up in internment camps.
As early as the summer of 1940, some French people were compelled to commit to a moral and spiritual Resistance.
This was the case of Pastor Roland de Pury in Lyon, who declared from the pulpit on July 14: "France would be better off dead than to sell itself."
His words echo the sentiments of Bruno de Solages, rector of the Institut Catholique in Toulouse, who took in refugees from all over Europe, issuing them with student cards to enable them to obtain false papers and go underground.
Yet the real turning point came in the summer of 1942, when the large roundups began. Volunteers working in the internment camps near Toulouse alerted the archbishop to the mistreatment of the Jewish people, as they were directed on foot into cattle cars. Monseigneur Saliège wrote a letter, which he sent to be read aloud in every church in his diocese, denouncing the deportations and appealing to Christian morality.
In Lyon, on the night of August 28-29, 1942, the Amitié Chrétienne association organised the largest rescue of Jewish children in France, thanks to the protection of Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyon. Cardinal Gerlier, who had supported Marshal Pétain in 1940, refused to hand over the children to the Prefect of Lyon, who was directing the deportations. Spiritual power in defiance of the powers that be: the Lyon Resistance amplified this act, making it a pivotal event.
Cardinals Saliège and Gerlier were not targeted by the authorities because of their age and rank in the Church, but many men and women of the cloth were arrested for their moral Resistance. Roland de Pury spent more than five months incarcerated at Fort Montluc in Lyon. Others, such as Solages and three priests from the Institut Catholique in Toulouse, were sent to camps in Germany. They wrote first-hand accounts of their deportation in a collective publication entitled "Pèlerins de bagne" or "Pilgrims of the penal colony". Many of their fellow prisoners never returned.
