FROM LITERATURE TO HISTORY

By: Professor Patrick Henry, Whitman College, Emeritus
October 24, 2022 | Walla Walla, WA

It was probably in the spring of 1988 when I first contacted Philip Hallie. I was beginning to think about editing a collection of essays on Montaigne. Hallie was one of my favorite commentators on Montaigne’s Essays and I wanted him to write an essay for the volume I was planning. He had published The Scar of Montaigne (Wesleyan University Press, 1966), an insightful and important study of the essayist’s irresolution, of his skepticism, and of the importance of experience in the Essays. More crucial still, for me, were Hallie’s groundbreaking studies of Montaigne’s ethics that depicted an ethical revolution that moved ethics away from concentration on the self in “egocentric” ethics toward the value of the deed itself and its consequences.

Hallie was much more than cordial on the phone. He seemed flattered to have been asked and genuinely happy to learn that someone he didn’t know three thousand miles away was interested not only in his work but much more importantly in the ethics of the Essays. Regarding the article for my collection, however, Hallie was not interested. Montaigne clearly remained his favorite philosopher, he said, but he had moved on to other things.

“What other things?” I asked, not wanting to end the conversation abruptly simply because he had turned me down. He said that he had published a book a decade earlier, entitled Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and How Goodness Happened There (Harper & Row, 1979), and had become tremendously interested in the rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust. He suggested that if I read the book and was interested in the ethical questions it raised, I should call Bill Moyers and ask him for a copy of the 1987 PBS video, Facing Evil, in which Hallie appears and reflects upon the village eight years after publishing his study about the importance of what happened there.

I read Hallie’s book, watched the PBS video and, while I continued to teach my courses on French Literature of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, began spending time each semester looking into the phenomenon of rescue in France during the Holocaust in the same area that Hallie had studied.

Although I would never meet Philip Hallie, we talked often on the phone from 1988 until his death in 1994. His enthusiasm was as inextinguishable as it was contagious. Ethical principles were vital to him; he wore his on his sleeve. I invited him to speak at Whitman College, but he fell ill just before this engagement and was unable to make the trip. Although he never set foot on our campus, Hallie did make it to Whitman College: every graduating senior for one two-year period read Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed in our Senior Colloquium.

Just about twenty years after that first phone call to Hallie, I published my own book on the same area Hallie had studied, We Only Know Men. The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Catholic University Press of America, 2007). What struck me more than anything else in my research was to discover so many Jewish people involved in the rescue process in that area: Madeleine Dreyfus brought roughly one hundred Jewish children to the area to be hidden in homes and farms. After she was arrested and deported, she was replaced in the Garel Network by a Jewish man, André Chouraqui. Oscar Rosowsky, a Polish Jew in hiding, made 5,000 false papers that were distributed to Jewish people hiding in the area or just passing through and Pierre Fayol, a French Jew, was the head of the French Resistance in the area. 

I then investigated every area where large numbers of Jews were rescued in France: Marseille, Chabannes, Nice, and on the Swiss and Spanish borders. Everywhere Jews were part of the rescue of other Jews.

Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Queens in New York City, we had always been told that “the Jews went to the slaughter like sheep.”  I continued to do research on the different ways Jewish people resisted the Nazis: flight, rescue, armed conflict in ghettoes, forests, and camps, for example. I decided to put a book of essays together written by specialists working in Holocaust research in specific countries. This five-year research project resulted in the publication of a huge 600-page collection of essays, Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis (Catholic University Press, 2014). Written by two dozen scholars from Israel, Europe, Canada, and the United States, the essays examine the different violent and nonviolent ways Jews resisted the Nazis in every occupied country and in the ghettos and camps. 

Over time, this work became more and more personal for me. I had the impression that I was working my way back home to my neighborhood in Flushing, to my friends I grew up with: the Golds, the Solomons, the Schwartzes, the Schweibels, the Ganzes, the Engelbarts, the Friedmans, and especially my next-door neighbor, Irena Rutenberg, who was a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw (see my tribute to her here). I wish we could all get together now and talk about growing up together in the 1940s and 50s when, even as people sometimes appeared in the street with Auschwitz tattoos, the Holocaust was the elephant in the neighborhood.