Movie Reviews : Poignant, Powerful ‘Weapons of the Spirit’

In films today, the weapons of death and destruction are often before us. The weapons of the spirit--quieter instruments of mercy, reverence, compassion--we see much more rarely. Yet, these are what Pierre Sauvage celebrates in his inspiring documentary “Weapons of the Spirit” (Fine Arts), a chronicle of the French mountain village of Le Chambon and its extraordinary mass effort during the Nazi occupation.

Sauvage’s story, told with a restraint that may make you weep, is one antidote to the blackness permeating such Holocaust documentaries as “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Shoah.” Against these now familiar portraits of widespread cowardice or complicity, Sauvage poses the ennobling example of the Chamboniers, who saved his life, the lives of his parents and of 5,000 other Jewish refugees, at least one for every inhabitant of the village.

What Le Chambon did is remarkable in itself. For the entire war, they refused to collaborate with the Nazis or their puppets, becoming, along with other mountain villages, a safe harbor for refugees. Simple mountain people, deeply Christian, many descended from France’s persecuted Huguenot minority, they continuously risked death or prison to rescue people they barely knew. They shared their meager food, helped supply phony papers (forged locally and secreted in local beehives), welcomed the children into their schools and openly defied the Gestapo.

It was the pacifist pastor Andre Trocme, who later died in a concentration camp, who led Le Chambon’s quiet revolt and who coined the phrase of the movie’s title, telling his parishioners, as France collapsed: “The responsibility of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences . . . through the weapons of the spirit.” Trocme’s flock never forgot this admonition. Not one Jewish refugee was betrayed there to the Gestapo, not by Trocme’s Protestants, not by the town’s Catholic minority, not by the Vichy representative, not even by the wounded German soldiers billeted at a local hotel--who probably knew, or suspected, everything. This was, for Sauvage, a vast “conspiracy of goodness” in which the unshakable faith of Le Chambon’s shepherd gradually infiltrated everyone else as well.

Sauvage, a beneficiary of that goodness (another was Albert Camus, who wrote “The Plague” at a nearby farm) has obviously made this film as a partial recompense. Shot in a calm, unsentimental, elegiac style, it suggests the work of a director he admired as a critic, John Ford, in its celebration of the community, its revelation of the nobility of the commonplace, its idealism and even its sad irony: the way Le Chambon was later somewhat forgotten, even by those it saved.

Yet “Weapons of the Spirit” (Times-rated: Family) is one document--Philip Hallie’s book on Le Chambon, “Lest Innocent Blood be Shed,” is another--which ensures the town’s remembrance: and that of these fine, brave, truly admirable people, who, though they would disclaim the role, are part of our universal conscience. Watching their extraordinary faces, we may come to realize, that, if we were all more like them, there would be no Holocausts.