Pastor Pierre Charles Toureille - Righteous Among the Nations
By Tela Zasloff

(May 1) -- Tela Zasloff, A US-based scholar, is completing a Certain Kind of Rescuer, a book due out next year about Rev. Dr. Pierre Charles Toureille. To mark Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, Zasloff sent us this preview --

Pastor Pierre Charles Toureille was a rescuer on a large scale, in a world at war. He headed one of the major French refugee relief agencies during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, while clandestinely rescuing hundreds of refugees, most of them Jewish. He was in constant danger and was interrogated persistently by Vichy and Gestapo authorities.

French, Czech and German governments later awarded him honors, and he was given an award from Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

It would be difficult to explain what kind of man Pastor Toureille was, without considering his family's special history. They were Huguenots-French Protestants based primarily in the villages of south-central France, who kept alive a strong sense of peoplehood. The Huguenots have a history of persecution and martyrdom under centuries of rule by reactionary Catholic monarchies, and a tradition of providing refuge for hounded peoples.

Their Protestantism was Calvinist, with its severe sense of duty to God's law, not man's, and to their belief that they have a special role in doing God's work-which always placed them under suspicion during times of national instability and testing of political loyalties.

When Toureille was in his 30's, he served actively in the international ecumenical movement of the Protestant Church, which was trying to stave off the growing influence of totalitarian regimes in Europe after the First World War. But by 1937, he concluded that the Church's efforts were anemic and futile.

The outbreak of the Second World War was the ultimate test of Toureille's youthful resolve to serve God. His official roles were Chief Chaplain for refugees interned under Vichy, and Vice President, then President of the Committee of Nimes, a Vichy-sanctioned umbrella organization for national and international relief agencies. It was under cover of these official positions that he saved hundreds of refugees from arrest and deportation, using the network of local Protestant pastors to hide families, until they could be passed over the border to Switzerland and to Spain.

From his home and office in Lunel, near Nimes, he traveled constantly across southern France and into Switzerland, where he coordinated aid from Swiss relief organizations. Bending over a typewriter on his lap, he sent out voluminous correspondence necessary for maintaining the network. He had to calculate constantly the next moves of the Vichy and Nazi authorities, while maintaining a law-abiding appearance. Knowing that all mail was inspected by the government, he kept most names and information in his head, frequently destroying records when a new interrogation threatened him and his family.

Toureille was not a happy rescuer. He had periods of despair-helping so few when tens of thousands were being destroyed in France. He wrote to a friend that his activities had cut him off from his wife and children. At the end of the war, he broke from the French Protestant church and emigrated with his family to the US. He took several pastoral positions, then served as a missionary in Africa and Europe for 20 years. He died in 1976, at age 76.

Toureille once paid tribute to a French Jewish friend, R.R. Lambert, who had bravely agreed to head an organization imposed on Jews by the Nazis and Vichy. He also bravely refused Toureille's offer to help him flee to Switzerland. Lambert was later deported with his whole family to Auschwitz, where they all perished. Toureille recognized Lambert's dilemma, of being "both passionately French and passionately Jewish" in a period that fatally split apart these loyalties. He ends his tribute to Lambert with an explanation of himself: "It is because of men like [Lambert] that many Christians, of whom I am one, who are susceptible of being not much more than philosemites, took to heart his defense of the Jewish cause, to the point of risking their lives and the lives of their families. It is because the memory of men like R. R. Lambert remains so vivid and survives in spite of time passing, in spite of everything, yes, in spite of everything-that some of us would be ready again to run the same risks, and others, too, if necessary, in defense of the Jews.

The writer's A Certain Kind Of Rescuer (University of Wisconsin Press) is due to appear next year.

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