I am not writing this to critique the structure of the book, nor the content. I am writing this because I am overwhelmed that an entire village would, and could, combine to smuggle jewish children out of France. The phrase "I did it because I did not want there to be gaps in my conscience" resonates over and over.

The book "Least Innocent Blood Be Shed" arrived in time for my church book club classes and was in new condition. I'm very satisfied.

It is said that, during World War Two, the village of Le Chambon in southern France was the safest place in Europe. It was this small village where Andre Trocme, a Protestant pastor, charged his church and his entire village with the task of protecting refugees, and primarily the Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi oppression. The story of this man and, to a lesser extent this village, is told in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, written by Philip Hallie, a philosopher and ethicist whose study of the horrors of the Second World War had driven him to near despair.



Across all these studies, the pattern of the strong crushing the weak kept repeating itself and repeating itself, so that when I was not bitterly angry, I was bored at the repetition of the patterns of persecution. When I was not desiring to be cruel with the cruel, I was like a monster--like, perhaps, many others around me--who could look upon torture and death without a shudder, and who therefore looked upon life without a belief in its preciousness. My study of evil incarnate had become a prison whose bars were my bitterness towards the violent, and whose walls were my horrified indifference to slow murder. Between the bars and the walls I revolved like a madman. Reading about the damned I was damned myself, as damned as the murderers, and as damned as their victims. Somehow over the years I had dug myself into Hell, and I had forgotten redemption, had forgotten the possibility of escape.



But in his own search for redemption, Hallie found a story that finally broke through the walls of bitterness and anger. He found the story of Le Chambon and of Andre Trocme. When he found out about this town and this man, he knew he had to write about it, not as an example of goodness or moral nobility; not for an abstract end. Rather, he was going to use "the words of ethics to help me understand my deeply felt ethical praise for the deeds of the people of Le Chambon."



And so Hallie shares the story he discovered. And it is an amazing story, the subject of which is a small village of men and women, the vast majority of whom were of Huguenot stock. Andre Trocme, their pastor and leader, was clearly a strange and unorthodox man. He seems to have been driven primarily by his love for Jesus and his respect for the teachings of Jesus, especially as they related to peace. Trocme was a pacifist whose standards of morality were strict. While he might carry a forged identity card, he would refuse to give a false name for himself. He was morally opposed to the war and to all violent forms of resistance. Yet at the same time he was a man of violent temper who often quarrelled loudly and angrily with his wife. And yet he was a man who was more than willing to lay down his life for those who were in danger.



Like many biographies of Christians that are written by unbelievers, it is difficult to know just what to believe about the man. Naturally, an author who is not filled with the Holy Spirit cannot fully understand one who is. I know little of Trocme other than what Hallie tells about him, yet if Hallie is to be believed, Trocme rarely preached about anything other than pacifism. He loved Jesus, but rarely seemed to discuss many of the great truths of the Christian faith. Is this the truth or is this merely Hallie's understanding of the truth? Did Trocme understand the gospel or was he merely a "good man?" Were his actions an expression of the Spirit's work in his life? It is difficult to know and this book offers few definitive answers.



What we do know is that Trocme was, in many ways, a tortured individual. Sadly, the death of his eldest son, the one whom he expected to carry on his work, left Trocme deeply suspicious of God so that he lived the last thirty years of his life after the war with a terrible skepticism. "[N]ever again would he believe that God protects precious life. Never again could he pray to a Protector-God. From now on, God and Jesus were to him powerless, suffering, limited. God was still the Father, but He was as powerless as Trocme the father was. God could only join us in our grief, not save us from it. He never recovered from the loss of his son and, tragically, never did his wife who, it seems, never did turn to Christ as her Savior. At this time she "turned her back on all religion, and on her husband as pastor, so that their marriage for a while was very painful, and later her criticisms of religion went back to their old severity."



Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed is a book that is at the same time inspiring and tragic. The hero of the story is courageous, but deeply flawed. Motivated by his desire to emulate Christ, he accomplished much and saved hundreds or even thousands of lives, all the while holding up the strict standards of morality he felt Christ required of him. This book is a study of character and a study of morality and ethics within the context of great tribulation. While it is not a Christian book and is not written by a Christian author, it does show what God can do through flawed, imperfect people. Sadly, the author seems to have missed the power of God displayed in it. He concludes by saying, "For me, that awareness [of the preciousness of human life] is my awareness of God. I live with the same sentence in my mind that many of the victims of the concentration camps uttered as they walked to their deaths: Shema Israel, Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echod (Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One). For me, the word Israel refers to all of us anarchic-hearted human beings, and the word God means the object of our undivided attention to the lucid mystery of being alive for others and for ourselves." Surely Hallie's hero Andre Trocme would disagree.

It is said that, during World War Two, the village of Le Chambon in southern France was the safest place in Europe. It was this small village where Andre Trocme, a Protestant pastor, charged his church and his entire village with the task of protecting refugees, and primarily the Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi oppression. The story of this man and, to a lesser extent this village, is told in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, written by Philip Hallie, a philosopher and ethicist whose study of the horrors of the Second World War had driven him to near despair.

Across all these studies, the pattern of the strong crushing the weak kept repeating itself and repeating itself, so that when I was not bitterly angry, I was bored at the repetition of the patterns of persecution. When I was not desiring to be cruel with the cruel, I was like a monster--like, perhaps, many others around me--who could look upon torture and death without a shudder, and who therefore looked upon life without a belief in its preciousness. My study of evil incarnate had become a prison whose bars were my bitterness towards the violent, and whose walls were my horrified indifference to slow murder. Between the bars and the walls I revolved like a madman. Reading about the damned I was damned myself, as damned as the murderers, and as damned as their victims. Somehow over the years I had dug myself into Hell, and I had forgotten redemption, had forgotten the possibility of escape.

But in his own search for redemption, Hallie found a story that finally broke through the walls of bitterness and anger. He found the story of Le Chambon and of Andre Trocme. When he found out about this town and this man, he knew he had to write about it, not as an example of goodness or moral nobility; not for an abstract end. Rather, he was going to use "the words of ethics to help me understand my deeply felt ethical praise for the deeds of the people of Le Chambon."

And so Hallie shares the story he discovered. And it is an amazing story, the subject of which is a small village of men and women, the vast majority of whom were of Huguenot stock. Andre Trocme, their pastor and leader, was clearly a strange and unorthodox man. He seems to have been driven primarily by his love for Jesus and his respect for the teachings of Jesus, especially as they related to peace. Trocme was a pacifist whose standards of morality were strict. While he might carry a forged identity card, he would refuse to give a false name for himself. He was morally opposed to the war and to all violent forms of resistance. Yet at the same time he was a man of violent temper who often quarrelled loudly and angrily with his wife. And yet he was a man who was more than willing to lay down his life for those who were in danger.

Like many biographies of Christians that are written by unbelievers, it is difficult to know just what to believe about the man. Naturally, an author who is not filled with the Holy Spirit cannot fully understand one who is. I know little of Trocme other than what Hallie tells about him, yet if Hallie is to be believed, Trocme rarely preached about anything other than pacifism. He loved Jesus, but rarely seemed to discuss many of the great truths of the Christian faith. Is this the truth or is this merely Hallie's understanding of the truth? Did Trocme understand the gospel or was he merely a "good man?" Were his actions an expression of the Spirit's work in his life? It is difficult to know and this book offers few definitive answers.

What we do know is that Trocme was, in many ways, a tortured individual. Sadly, the death of his eldest son, the one whom he expected to carry on his work, left Trocme deeply suspicious of God so that he lived the last thirty years of his life after the war with a terrible skepticism. "[N]ever again would he believe that God protects precious life. Never again could he pray to a Protector-God. From now on, God and Jesus were to him powerless, suffering, limited. God was still the Father, but He was as powerless as Trocme the father was. God could only join us in our grief, not save us from it. He never recovered from the loss of his son and, tragically, never did his wife who, it seems, never did turn to Christ as her Savior. At this time she "turned her back on all religion, and on her husband as pastor, so that their marriage for a while was very painful, and later her criticisms of religion went back to their old severity."

Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed is a book that is at the same time inspiring and tragic. The hero of the story is courageous, but deeply flawed. Motivated by his desire to emulate Christ, he accomplished much and saved hundreds or even thousands of lives, all the while holding up the strict standards of morality he felt Christ required of him. This book is a study of character and a study of morality and ethics within the context of great tribulation. While it is not a Christian book and is not written by a Christian author, it does show what God can do through flawed, imperfect people. Sadly, the author seems to have missed the power of God displayed in it. He concludes by saying, "For me, that awareness [of the preciousness of human life] is my awareness of God. I live with the same sentence in my mind that many of the victims of the concentration camps uttered as they walked to their deaths: Shema Israel, Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echod (Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One). For me, the word Israel refers to all of us anarchic-hearted human beings, and the word God means the object of our undivided attention to the lucid mystery of being alive for others and for ourselves." Surely Hallie's hero Andre Trocme would disagree.

It is said that, during World War Two, the village of Le Chambon in southern France was the safest place in Europe. It was this small village where Andre Trocme, a Protestant pastor, charged his church and his entire village with the task of protecting refugees, and primarily the Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi oppression. The story of this man and, to a lesser extent this village, is told in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, written by Philip Hallie, a philosopher and ethicist whose study of the horrors of the Second World War had driven him to near despair.

Across all these studies, the pattern of the strong crushing the weak kept repeating itself and repeating itself, so that when I was not bitterly angry, I was bored at the repetition of the patterns of persecution. When I was not desiring to be cruel with the cruel, I was like a monster--like, perhaps, many others around me--who could look upon torture and death without a shudder, and who therefore looked upon life without a belief in its preciousness. My study of evil incarnate had become a prison whose bars were my bitterness towards the violent, and whose walls were my horrified indifference to slow murder. Between the bars and the walls I revolved like a madman. Reading about the damned I was damned myself, as damned as the murderers, and as damned as their victims. Somehow over the years I had dug myself into Hell, and I had forgotten redemption, had forgotten the possibility of escape.

But in his own search for redemption, Hallie found a story that finally broke through the walls of bitterness and anger. He found the story of Le Chambon and of Andre Trocme. When he found out about this town and this man, he knew he had to write about it, not as an example of goodness or moral nobility; not for an abstract end. Rather, he was going to use "the words of ethics to help me understand my deeply felt ethical praise for the deeds of the people of Le Chambon."

And so Hallie shares the story he discovered. And it is an amazing story, the subject of which is a small village of men and women, the vast majority of whom were of Huguenot stock. Andre Trocme, their pastor and leader, was clearly a strange and unorthodox man. He seems to have been driven primarily by his love for Jesus and his respect for the teachings of Jesus, especially as they related to peace. Trocme was a pacifist whose standards of morality were strict. While he might carry a forged identity card, he would refuse to give a false name for himself. He was morally opposed to the war and to all violent forms of resistance. Yet at the same time he was a man of violent temper who often quarrelled loudly and angrily with his wife. And yet he was a man who was more than willing to lay down his life for those who were in danger.

Like many biographies of Christians that are written by unbelievers, it is difficult to know just what to believe about the man. Naturally, an author who is not filled with the Holy Spirit cannot fully understand one who is. I know little of Trocme other than what Hallie tells about him, yet if Hallie is to be believed, Trocme rarely preached about anything other than pacifism. He loved Jesus, but rarely seemed to discuss many of the great truths of the Christian faith. Is this the truth or is this merely Hallie's understanding of the truth? Did Trocme understand the gospel or was he merely a "good man?" Were his actions an expression of the Spirit's work in his life? It is difficult to know and this book offers few definitive answers.

What we do know is that Trocme was, in many ways, a tortured individual. Sadly, the death of his eldest son, the one whom he expected to carry on his work, left Trocme deeply suspicious of God so that he lived the last thirty years of his life after the war with a terrible skepticism. "[N]ever again would he believe that God protects precious life. Never again could he pray to a Protector-God. From now on, God and Jesus were to him powerless, suffering, limited. God was still the Father, but He was as powerless as Trocme the father was. God could only join us in our grief, not save us from it. He never recovered from the loss of his son and, tragically, never did his wife who, it seems, never did turn to Christ as her Savior. At this time she "turned her back on all religion, and on her husband as pastor, so that their marriage for a while was very painful, and later her criticisms of religion went back to their old severity."

Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed is a book that is at the same time inspiring and tragic. The hero of the story is courageous, but deeply flawed. Motivated by his desire to emulate Christ, he accomplished much and saved hundreds or even thousands of lives, all the while holding up the strict standards of morality he felt Christ required of him. This book is a study of character and a study of morality and ethics within the context of great tribulation. While it is not a Christian book and is not written by a Christian author, it does show what God can do through flawed, imperfect people. Sadly, the author seems to have missed the power of God displayed in it. He concludes by saying, "For me, that awareness [of the preciousness of human life] is my awareness of God. I live with the same sentence in my mind that many of the victims of the concentration camps uttered as they walked to their deaths: Shema Israel, Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echod (Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One). For me, the word Israel refers to all of us anarchic-hearted human beings, and the word God means the object of our undivided attention to the lucid mystery of being alive for others and for ourselves." Surely Hallie's hero Andre Trocme would disagree.

Philip Hallie, a Jewish philosopher, had slipped in to a state of depression as a result of his research of human cruelty, especially regarding the Holocaust. He felt as though he was a prisoner in that he wished harm on evil doers and had himself become untouched by suffering. He was doing research when he noticed something unusual, he was weeping. The reason? He had come across a short article about a village in France, which had resisted Hitler during the French Occupation (1940-1944). The village was the pacifistic Le Chambon.

The book at hand is the result of Hallie's research (conducted in mid 1970's) into the events surrounding this village. He visited Le Chambon and interviewed several people. The main character of the resistance was André Trocmé (deceased in 1971), a Protestant pastor, who with help of many-including his wife, Magda-provided a safe haven for Jews (especially Jewish children). The book essentially covers the years 1934-1944, with many anecdotes and observations. The bottom line for Hallie is that `ethics' can only make a difference if action is taken. The people of Le Chambon simply helped the Jews because `it was the right thing to do.'

This book is an easy read yet one that will make the reader think. There is an implicit religious basis for the peoples' ethics but a strength of the book is that there are no saints. Especially prevalent is André Trocmé's humanity; he struggles immensely with death, especially of his mother and one of his sons. If you are looking for a morality based on deep and explicit theology you will not find it here. But everyone should take the following from this book: if your ethical stance is to lessen the evil in this world, then helping those who are in harm's way is as powerful, if not more so, than any show of violence.

The true story told in this book is amazing, inspiring, and miraculous. More people should know about it!! Pastor Trocme was the leader of the resistance, and much of the book is about him and his family. He was Pastor in a little Protestant town in France, and he and his townspeople saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish children.
However, I think the book could have been better written. I hesitate to recommend the book to others because I think they would have a hard time getting through it. The story is fragmented. It is not really told chronologically. Each chapter tells a different part/aspect of the overall story. By the time you finish reading the book, the different parts of the puzzle have come together...but its telling is not smooth.
To give the author some credit, he did have a challenging job to write this book so long after the fact. He had to piece together many pieces...through research, reading old diaries and letters, interviewing the handful of still-living people involved in the story, etc. But I still think it could have been "put together" in a better way.
Perhaps someone should write a shorter, less-detailed narrative about this town - that way it might have a wider reading audience. Again, it is an incredible and inspiring story that needs to be told!

I was asked to contrast this book to Christopher Browning's _Ordinary Men_ for a class in Comparative Religious Ethics. While this proved to be an intresting exercise, Philip Hallie's unpolished tale of Le Chambon, a stop on France's "Underground Railroad" for WWII refugees, suffers in the comparison.

Hallie makes tentative steps towards a biography of Andre Trocme (the town's pastor), a specific and narrow history of a French town in WWII, a case study in ethics, and a testimony of praise for people he grew to admire in his research. None of these directions arrive at any satisfying destination, leaving the narrative feeling disorganized and lacking the import the story might have held.

In spite of the ways Hallie's approach disappointed me, I would still recommend this book to those people who enjoy reading simple modern morality tales told in terms of "good vs. evil", or those who want some rather saccharine optimism about human nature in their histories of WWII.

I am a Junior in High School, and we were assigned to read this and write a paper on it (which, coincidentally, is due monday, so I'd better get started!) about any of the multiple themes that run through it. It is a very rich book, and some of the scenes are deeply poignant. I highly recommend this book, but I hold back the fifth star because it became redundant nearing the end. Read this book, you will enjoy it!