‘Come in,’” André Trocmé’s wife,
Magda, remembered years later. “And
so it started.”
Soon more and more Jewish refugees
began showing up in Le Chambon.
Trocmé took the train to Marseille to
meet with a Quaker named Burns
Chalmers. The Quakers provided
humanitarian aid for the internment
centers that had been set up in southern
France. The camps were appalling
places, overrun with rats, lice, and
disease; at one camp alone, eleven
hundred Jews died between 1940 and
- Many of those who survived were
eventually shipped east and murdered in
Nazi concentration camps. The Quakers