Chapter 2
DAYS OF AWE
Blessed are You, Lord our God,
King of the universe,
Who creates the fruit of the tree.
—ROSH HASHANAH BLESSING FOR THE APPLES AND HONEY
YOU OPEN THE BOOK OF LIFE and the story begins. And what do you first see?
“Good night, darling,” the nanny would whisper to him, in some of the few English words she knew. “Sleep well . . .”
Daniel was a boy with wavy light brown hair and ears that stuck out in magnificent curves. He had a soft, round mouth, and eyes that could lock into the distance. They say he was a smiling child. A laughing child. Un enfant délicieux—a delicious child. Surely he loved his nanny, who lived with his family in their home outside Verneuil-sur-Avre, in Normandy, and who called him, softly, darling. One day she was sick with a cold and he thought she was crying. “’Zelle”—mademoiselle, he said, rushing to her—“you shouldn’t cry! Dani is here!”
Daniel’s parents, Henri Trocmé and Eve, née Rist, were both from old and influential families. The ancestral tree was solid as an oak, its history written in the annals of great French lineages. From the seventeenth century forward, Trocmés settled in a cluster of villages in the northeast region of Picardy, France, where many of the local noble families—Trocmés included—had converted to the dangerous new religion of Protestantism. In the centuries that followed, with religious wars and then the antireligious aftermath of the French Revolution, the Trocmés and their neighbors lived, on and off, in fear, worshipping in hiding, at night, in a chalky quarry known as the Boîte à Cailloux, the Box of Stones. As Protestantism became more and more normal in France—and as Protestants were able to come out of hiding and into broader society—the Trocmé family flourished. Soon, along with the landowners and ministers of Daniel’s line, there was a noted sculptor, a médecin aliéniste—a nineteenth-century proto-psychologist—and even a Knight in the Legion of Honor.
Daniel’s father was one of the founders and directors of the elite boarding school École des Roches. The school was leafy, orderly, Apollonian; the core of the campus included large lawns, tall trees, and the ribbon of a river, all surrounded by hundreds of acres of fields and woods. Everywhere were signs of dewy wealth: the stables, the outdoor pool, the tennis courts, the elegant residences where staff and students lived together in cozy homelike environments with huge hearths and pianos in the foyers. But while the school was patently intended for the rich, it was founded, too, on a kind of modern get-up-and-go principle called active learning, where, along with classical subjects, students were exposed to down-to-earth problem solving. The study of science required actual lab work in the classroom; out in the fields and waters and stables beyond the classroom, students would figure out how things grew by growing them, or how things flew by flying them. It was a real innovation at the time, that you could aim to create, among the nation’s most fortunate sons, an uncoddled generation of problem solvers who, as the school’s motto read, would be bien armé pour la vie. Well armed for life.
Still, there was much at Roches that reinforced the school’s ties to that elite wider world where class and continuity ruled. The director would smoke a pipe with children sitting in a circle around him, heads tilted back, looking up at him, rapt. Religious education and worship—in both Catholic and Protestant chapels—were crucial. The older students wore ties and jackets with fashionable pointy collars; the younger ones wore knickers that puffed out below the knees. At the beginning of the school year, parents dropped off their children in great shiny motorcars, or—just years after the Wright Brothers figured out how—on an airstrip a couple of kilometers away. The children of Roches would lead France someday, from the fields and from the skies.
Henri and Eve had nine children: Marianne, Charles, Elisabeth, Michel, François, Suzanne (Suzie), Daniel, Geneviève, and Robert. When Daniel was born, the mayor sent out a birth notice for him. It was late April 1912, and just weeks earlier the Titanic had set out from the nearby port city of Cherbourg toward the unconquerable seas. It was the end of the age of unself-conscious empire; the beginning of the age of great world wars; and the time of the full ascent of those gods of modernity—the nation, the race, the ethnically pure. Daniel was born into a world, then, at the edge of a great precipice. And that April, clouds were darkening in the distance.
At Roches, young Daniel—with his owl glasses, and his magnificent ears, and his curly hair, and his smile that appears more wistful in photographs than the notes of his brothers might lead you to believe—was beloved, if not, in any outward measure, extraordinary. He was a child who possessed some curiosity, yes, and a certain talent in mathematics and physics—in those subjects he was at the top of his class—but otherwise, he was an unremarkable student. Notes from his teachers would say things like “evident goodwill” but “a chatterbox [bavard] . . . and inattentive,” or “has difficulty singing on the right notes,” or “a good little man—a little childish (that’s a compliment)—but already so serious, so grave.”
Childish, childlike, alternatively chatty and grave, singing out loud but wrong, Daniel also suffered crippling bouts of pericarditis, a condition where fluid collects around the heart and can lead to terrifying pain in breathing. Suzie and Daniel, closest in age, “loved each other tenderly,” wrote their eldest brother, Charles, many years later, but Daniel, along with his brothers, also jumped into the animated debates that would arise in the heady evenings of their childhood. The older brothers, and Suzie herself, studied well: Charles would become a prominent physician; Michel, a banker; François, a factory director. Suzie, too, would become a physician, specializing in work with tubercular patients. Daniel’s ambitions were comparatively unformed. Once he confided in Suzie, “Je veux rayonner.” I want to shine.
In photographs of the family, Henri is erect, mustachioed, bespectacled; Eve is next to him, with sad, kind eyes and straight hair pulled back in a bun; the older brothers stand with hips cocked assuredly in woolen suits; the sisters are sitting, hands folded, hair in fashionable bobs and headbands. The walls look velvet. Chandelier light falls, liquid, in lush Edwardian rooms. Daniel stands on the edge of things; Daniel looks right into the camera. There is warmth in his eyes. And distance.
And so: The Book of Life opens. A child toddles out into the world, with tenderness and gravity. He grows, well-armed for life. Or so it seems. He wants to shine.
At some point near Daniel’s adolescence, the Trocmé family seemed to have made some kind of collective decision for him: Daniel would follow in his father’s footsteps, to become an educator, and then one day to take over the directorship of École des Roches. What did the family see in Daniel, to make this choice for him? He had finished school solidly; after École des Roches, he’d gone on to study physics and math at the prestigious Paris lycées of Louis Le Grand and Henri IV, whose alumni included Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade, Victor Hugo, Molière, Émile Durkheim, and Edgar Degas; and where Daniel’s contemporaries included Simone Veil, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Georges Pompidou. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who dazzled with his “primacy of perception,” and Aimé Césaire, a poet founder of the Négritude movement, might have passed Daniel in the venerable hallways.
From the salon at École des Roches, everything was set up for a young Frenchman with a future. The velvet, the chandelier light. The good name. The solid tree, planted by the water. Father, mother, brothers, and sisters: They all wanted the good life for Daniel, saw themselves in his face. But then something happened. The Victrola skipped; the music shifted. Daniel, the delicious child, began to search.
WHO KNOWS WHAT WILL BE? Who knows, when the Book of Life is opened, what names will appear there, in the end? No one knows. Things can look just right, of course, only to prove all wrong.
Daniel was certainly poised, at birth, for a good life, and a right life. But as he moved out of childhood, it is clear from letters and from family recollections that he began to wrestle with himself and the terms of his oak-solid life. What would he do? Who would he be? Decisions had to be made.
I see him in my mind’s eye, already in young adulthood, walking down the waterlogged fields of the far stretches of the École des Roches, along the train tracks leading out from that velveteen haven to the world beyond. I see him on the spot where trees give way to silver-green fields, alone, slightly bent to the sound of light rain. I imagine him lost in his thoughts—the forceful voice of his father, and the soft appeals of his mother, a background music that almost never ceases. One foot, and then the next, he’s walking alone, wondering what will be. He hears a bird, maybe. A single bird cry once, then twice. He knows something is wrong, where he is, but he doesn’t know why. The train station is ahead. The rain comes down. He’s leaving, but he’s not sure where he’s going.
On Daniel’s twenty-first birthday—April 28, 1933—the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published its last article criticizing the Nazi Party in Germany; Chancellor Hitler was now officially, fully, on the rise to power. But what did that mean? All these years later, it seems crystal clear where 1933 was going. But what did that mean, then, to a young man of twenty-one? Someone with plans already made for him? What did it mean if he had curiosity and some talent and some means? What did it mean if he still didn’t know who he was?
That year, Daniel was in Paris, at the Sorbonne, studying for his teaching license, and living in the lively Latin Quarter. He had friends, according to his brother Charles, “from all the races,” and they would argue about the world. Politics were growing denser and stranger and angrier as one day followed the next. In the winter of 1933–1934, Daniel witnessed great riots in the city; an extreme right-wing group rose up against a leftist parliament. Absorbing the constant clamor of the crowds, Daniel watched as the orderliness of the grand boulevards gave way to chaos; he wrote home describing how iron grates were pulled up from around trees and strewn all over the streets, and the “sinister din” created when the grates were then crushed by passing trucks.
Daniel also wrote about the electric political environment of the city and the talks he’d attend for alumni of École des Roches: There was the great reformist writer on Islam, Father Henri Sanson, who spoke about “The Eternal Scandal,” and the journalist and sometime anti-Semite Wickham Steed asking, “Can England Remain Neutral?” He wrote his parents about his new friends who had names that sounded Jewish, and names that sounded Middle Eastern, and he told them—with some firmness—that they should understand that now it was his friendships that mattered most to him. And the conversations that blazed, day after day, among them all.
Then, in 1934, Daniel took his first job. It was in Beirut, at the American University. In the 1930s, Beirut was a still-great cosmopolitan metropolis, recently of the Ottoman Empire, now under the French mandate, with a brilliant mixture of migrants living together as Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Bahá’ís. Traveling whenever he could, through Lebanon, up into the mountains toward Syria, then visiting the family of a close friend, Chafik, at his family home in Cairo—Daniel was actively wondering if he’d chosen the right field in life. He wrote home that maybe, after all, he ought to have studied modern history instead of the sciences. He was excited, in letters, that the poet Rabindranath Tagore would be coming to Beirut to speak—that same Tagore who only a few years earlier had saved Gandhi from one of his fasts-to-the-death. Beirut was so small as a place, but so magnificent in its traffic across languages, religions, arts, and ideas. The doors were opening for Daniel, it seemed. The doors to all of it.
Daniel’s parents chafed at what they saw in their son’s progress. Their message: Daniel needed to keep studying, if he was to earn his proper teaching qualifications. He was already twenty-three; what was he doing with his life? Daniel wrote back that, yes, maybe it was a kind of adolescent crisis he was having, “fed by contestation and dreams.” His parents fretted about these new political obsessions and the far-flung travel that seemed aimless, if not pointless. Already, he was venturing out of the cozy fold of country and class and profession. This much was clear.
Mostly, though, I think, his parents worried about their son’s relationship to religion—about his relationship to Christianity, specifically; and to God. Daniel, now in the sun, now in the land of the orange blossoms, wrote to them:
The loosest frameworks are still too narrow for me. I want to be absolutely free to say and to do, what I think and what I wish. And that seems almost impossible in most of the classic bourgeois careers. . . . I have not finished evolving, certainly. Nevertheless, the trip this year to Lebanon was long enough for me to judge with a completely new eye, our European society, our French society. . . . I see [that society] with a certain recoil, now . . . and from time to time with the eyes of the Oriental, who understand it poorly. I see the French administration of Syria. If I told you some things, you wouldn’t believe them to be true, the extent to which they are monstrous. . . . Don’t believe that I am so much of the extreme left. But I am detaching myself from western civilization. If you will, for me, it represents not the Civilization, but a civilization, which I place not only in space next to others, but also in time. . . . I see that [Christianity] contains the beautiful and the true, but also the false and the ugly. So, in conclusion, I want to continue to travel, to see new things, and to liberate myself.
Who knows what will be when the Book of Life is opened? But how could Daniel not dream there, in his new city on the dazzling sea, in the biblical land of Canaan, just up the coast from Palestine itself, the sight of cedars on craggy soils, the perfume of orange blossoms, the ancient questions lingering there, still? In the single photograph of Daniel that exists from that time, he is on a boat, turned toward the camera and away from the sea, his cheeks brushed dark, his glasses reflecting a brilliant sun, obscuring the sight of his eyes. How could he not contest, and dream?
From Beirut, Daniel returned to Europe and found himself in Paris again, finalizing his teaching qualifications. Then, in 1937, he got a job at the Lycée Chateaubriand in Rome. The Eternal City was astir, everyone rushing toward the left or the right as Mussolini’s power grew. Daniel met a woman in Rome—though never naming her in letters—and it’s clear his family didn’t approve of her. He wrote to them not to worry, that she was like a “pretty little box, hermetically sealed, where you can never see inside.” But he clearly thought of her again and again. They would break up and reconcile, then break up again, and he would rush long distances to see her when he could—wondering out loud if his parents’ fears, advice, and admonitions hadn’t somehow undermined his discussions with her about their future: “Am I being demanding and perceptive, or just prideful and pretentious?”
He didn’t know. Nothing felt right. The pressures of the world were mounting, and everywhere, everyone was looking for answers. What did it mean to be part of a community? Part of a religion? Part of the order as it stood?
“Money,” he wrote home, “makes people mean.” And that was a nice way to put it. Europe was reeling, full of seekers of the left, of the right, of the kind who wrote poems and saved Gandhi from his starvation protests. It was full of raised fists and marching, and more and more filled with great black swastikas splattered on flags, and ever newer forms of the sinister din.
In 1937, Daniel traveled to Potsdam and sat in on lectures on National Socialism; he wondered out loud if, in the future, he would be a bourgeois or an extremist. The left pulled at him, the right, the nation. Religion called, and pacifism, secularism, history, poetry . . . even the pretty little boxes that hid their insides from men. Daniel now wrote home: “I live in this moment very intensively, and a little on all points of view: socially, sentimentally, intellectually. If to live intensively is the cause of happiness, well, then I’m very happy. If happiness consists, on the contrary, in a calm and simple life, then I am the most unhappy of men.”
Soon, of course, everything would change. The war itself would come to France. Because of his pericarditis, Daniel was exempt from military service. He was still teaching in Rome in May 1940, when the Germans rolled into Verneuil-sur-Avre. Clearly sobered, Daniel wrote home that he was sure, chers parents, that they must now be part of the Resistance. The Germans immediately took over the École des Roches, turning the orderly complex into the hub of a concentration camp, Frontstalag 200A. Barracks went up in the fields beyond the school; barbed wire was braided along the periphery; a watchtower perched above.
In what appeared to be a kind of last mad dash, Daniel tried to get out of Europe. He sped south on the train to Toulouse, then borrowed his brother François’s car and raced toward Marseille, where he hoped to catch a ship to North Africa. But the last ship out left without Daniel. And without thousands upon thousands of others, all hoping for that last chance to escape a narrowing continent.
With his parents remaining in Verneuil, Daniel then headed to Maslacq, where École des Roches had set up a second campus for the time of the war. He went back to work there, but he was unhappy, arguing with other staff members, some of whom would eventually become part of the Vichy regime. “I’m suffocating here,” he wrote, “and I don’t know at all if I’ll stay another year.” He started desperately looking for something else. There was a job in Barcelona, a city still roiling in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. There was also the possibility of finally getting his doctorate, back in Paris. And the possibility, which he couldn’t yet bear to finally toss out, of fully conceding to his parents’ wishes to make his whole life career at Roches—forever leaving behind his own dreams and contestations.
Then, in the summer of 1942, Daniel got a letter. His cousin, Pastor André Trocmé, invited him to a village in the French backwoods to help with a far-reaching rescue effort. André needed help quite urgently. He’d been traveling back and forth to French-run concentration camps in Gurs and Rivesaltes, helping to identify and then do paperwork for children to come to the Plateau in safety. André couldn’t pay a salary, but he needed someone who could run a home for young children in the outskirts of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. The children in residence at the home were from many different countries, and they desperately needed help. This would be practical work, yes, but it would also have some academic sides to it.
André’s work in the rescue effort was already gaining some attention. It was a risky business, for sure. Daniel’s parents weren’t thrilled at the prospect of him going. They sent François to see Daniel and plead their case to him in person.
There was a chapel on the grounds of the École des Roches of Daniel’s childhood. It was spare and white-walled, made of plaster and wood. How many hours had Daniel spent there as a boy, alone in his thoughts, reading the simple words over the altar: Faire Christ Roi, Make Christ King. Maybe Daniel was like me, and his thoughts would have lingered anxiously on the paintings that stood out against the bare white walls: one of the Parable of the Prodigal Son—“This thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”; and a second of the Parable of the Vine—“Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away”; and a third, of the Parable of the Lost Coin—“Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost.” A son; a vine; a coin. What would Daniel have dreamed of there? Of prodigality? Lostness? Of what it might mean to bear no fruit?
Daniel opened the book of his own life and he thought and thought. Surely, he thought about André over in that backwoods—a place that was no Paris, no Beirut, no Barcelona, and where there was no woman, like a pretty box. Maybe he thought about how money makes you mean. And maybe he thought about the left and the right and the fists he had seen raised up, all over Europe. Maybe Daniel reread a last letter his mother sent him. Maybe he put that letter in a pocket for safekeeping.
Daniel made up his mind.
He picked up a pen to write to his parents. It was September 11, 1942. In the world outside, it was the day a train called Convoy 31 left the Drancy camp just north of Paris, with a thousand souls heading for Auschwitz-Birkenau. And, in the world outside, it was nearly one year since 33,400 Jews had been gathered in the streets of Kiev and led to the ragged ravine at the edge of the city, where they were shot and killed, falling to unseen depths.
And in the world outside, it was the eve of Rosh Hashanah and those ten Days of Awe, when the shofar sounds: “Awake, sleepers from your sleep, and slumberers arise from your slumber! Search your deeds, repent, and remember your Creator!”
I hold a copy of Daniel’s letter in my hands. It reads:
As of this morning, the die is cast. . . . Le Chambon represents for me, first of all, an education. . . . Then a kind of contribution to the reconstruction of the world. . . . On the other hand, Le Chambon represents for me an affirmative response to a vocation, a rather intimate call, almost religious, or even completely religious in some respects. I will honestly be myself there, the future will tell me if I am equal to the task or not—and, what’s more, will only tell me—because it’s not a question here of success in the eyes of the world. Worldly wisdom directed me to the doctorate, or at least to Barcelona, or in any event to public teaching. Le Chambon means adventure. . . . I have chosen adventure not because it’s an adventure, but so that I would not be ashamed of myself.
I, too, want to be part of the reconstruction of the world. I, too, wish not to be ashamed of myself.
And so, I go.