Jacob and Sonia Barosin walked the streets of Lunel, France, in despair. Jacob had been ordered by Vichy authorities—the “free” government set up by the Nazis in the south after the fall of France—to report within two days to an internment camp to be “deported” to Poland. Suddenly the Barosins came upon Mrs. Délie Toureille and informed her of their desperate plight. Later that afternoon, the Barosins met with her husband Pierre-Charles Toureille, pastor of the town’s French Reformed Church. Offering his aid, Toureille wrote a letter and told Jacob to give it to a certain official at the internment camp. “You take him this letter from me,” he said, “and we will pray and see.”1

The appointed day arrived with sorrow and deep anxiety. Jacob packed a small bag while Sonia looked on with tears, both of them wondering if they were “already in the tentacles of the monster.”2 Arriving at the internment camp, Jacob finally reached the proper official and handed him Toureille’s letter. For the next several hours, he waited, not sure whether he would be discharged or sent to his death in southern Poland. Finally, the official informed Jacob he would be released, but he had only fifteen minutes to catch a five o’clock train, and the station was a half-hour walk away. Running as he had never run before, Jacob arrived at 4:59. The train began to move as he jumped safely on. He and Sonia went the next day to thank Toureille, whose eyes widened with every word Jacob spoke. It was a miracle, the pastor finally said: “God has hidden you in the shadow of his Hand.”3

Pierre Toureille was not the only Christian working during World War II to save Jews from Nazi brutality.4 After German tanks rolled through Paris in the spring of 1940 and Marshal Petain’s Vichy regime began the forcible incarceration of Jews later that year, many Christian groups organized to ameliorate the deplorable conditions in the internment camps. For the first few months, almost no one imagined what Hitler and his generals actually intended. By 1942, rumors of the “final solution” had become too frequent to ignore, and many Christians abandoned efforts at aiding the detainees and began working—mostly secretly—to rescue them.

Pastor Toureille worked closely with the World Council of Churches5 and the Protestant Federation of France, which appointed him in 1940 to be the chief chaplain for Protestant refugees and camp internees in Vichy France. His official duty as chaplain was to distribute money, food, clothes, and books to those already detained, but he also realized very quickly that such efforts would only postpone death, not prevent it. Toureille thus began a clandestine operation to keep Jews out of the Gestapo’s grasp. He led his church to provide jobs and education for many of the refugees, giving them a legitimate reason (at least in the beginning) to remain free. When the Nazis began tightening their grip, Toureille found hiding places for many Jews among the families of his congregation and helped scores of others escape over the border to Switzerland. In 1941, he also established the Christian Home for Children, most of whose students (unbeknownst to the Nazis) were Jewish children.

Toureille’s was dangerous work. Nazi authorities eventually grew suspicious of him, and from May to August 1943, he was watched, summoned, and interrogated by the Vichy police and the Gestapo seven times. He was threatened with arrest if he did not disclose his records, and his home was searched. Nevertheless, Toureille remained convinced a defensive Church was not what her Lord intended. He once wrote: “I often see boxing matches on television where the boxers lose because they only defend themselves without attacking. The same is true today for the Christian church. It is by going on the offensive that the Mission will save the world.”6

Though carried out in secrecy, the world finally recognized Pastor Toureille’s efforts. In 1974, the nation of Israel granted him the Yad Vashem Award to Righteous Gentiles and later planted a tree in his honor in Jerusalem’s Avenue of the Righteous. To be sure, the award was an acknowledgment of Pastor Toureille’s own extraordinary courage; but to those with discernment, it was also a vivid testimony—and that by unbelievers—to the power of Christ’s Church when led by such a man.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Tela Zasloff, A Rescuer’s Story: Pastor Pierre-Charles Toureille in Vichy France (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 185.
 
2  Ibid.
 
3  Ibid., 186.
 
4  See also Kairos Journal articles, “The Pulpit at Le Chambon” and “The End – A Beginning.”
 
5  The World Council of Churches (WWC) was organized in 1938, but World War II kept the group from being officially inaugurated until 1948. During the war the WWC was formally known as the World Council of Churches in Process of Formation.
 
6  Ibid., 211.
from Kairos Journal

posted by First Baptist Church of Perryville, Cecil County, MD