David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

the Hotel May by the train station and
then walk around town until she found
homes for them all. In France, under the
laws of Vichy, transporting and hiding
Jewish refugees was plainly illegal. At
other points during the war, the Nazis
had demonstrated that they were not
inclined to be conciliatory on the
question of Jews. At one point, the Vichy
police came and set up shop in Le
Chambon for three weeks, searching the
town and the surrounding countryside for
Jewish refugees. All they could come up
with were two arrests—one of whom
they later released. Why didn’t they just
line up the whole town and ship them to
Auschwitz?
Philip Hallie, who wrote the