Film Maker Exposes a ‘Conspiracy’ of Good

The final triumph of the spirit of Le Chambon is that Pierre Sauvage’s heartening documentary, “Weapons of the Spirit,” is at last getting some genuine commercial play dates.

The film, which opened Wednesday at the Fine Arts Theatre and was enthusiastically reviewed Wednesday in these pages by Michael Wilmington, has been around for at least a couple of years. It received strong reviews at the AFI Film Festival here in 1987.

But documentaries are as welcome as power failures in movie houses, even when a documentary has an astonishing and encouraging story to tell. Good news is no news, sometimes. Now at last, “Weapons of the Spirit” has found homes in New York and Los Angeles, and will play San Francisco, Boston and Chicago in the near future. It has been a long seven years in the making and marketing.

To double back briefly, Pierre Sauvage, now 45, was born in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. But he was almost 18, living then in New York but going off to Paris to study, before he knew that he was Jewish, or that his refugee parents and his infant self had been sheltered and saved from Nazi persecution by the remarkable and undemonstrative villagers of Le Chambon.

In all, an estimated 5,000 Jews paused in Le Chambon and moved on to safety. The Sauvage family stayed until 1948 and, when Pierre was 4, emigrated to New York.

Sauvage dropped out of the Sorbonne and worked for a time with Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise, returned to New York as a story editor for Otto Preminger, and then moved to Los Angeles and made documentaries for KCET.

He made one quick visit to Le Chambon during his Paris days, but it was not, he has said, until his first son was born nine years ago and Sauvage became more deeply conscious of his Jewish heritage that he decided the story of Le Chambon had to be told.

It was curiously difficult to do. His parents were themselves not sure he should tell the story, feeling, Sauvage thinks, that the past was an unnecessary burden, to be left behind not relived. The villagers were not particularly anxious to stir the memories, either, partly because they saw what they did as natural and inevitable rather than brave and uncommon.

He found many faces from the wartime days. Georgette Barraud, who had run a boardinghouse where many Jews stayed, told Sauvage, “It happened so naturally, we can’t understand the fuss.”

The town was predominantly fundamentalist Protestant, descendants of the Huguenots who had known their own persecution in the 16th and 17th centuries. That legacy of having been a harassed minority, combined with strong contemporary feelings against the collaborationist Vichy government of Marshal Petain, almost certainly contributed to Le Chambon’s instinctive willingness to help the refugees.

But the principal motivation was something deeper and more universal. Sauvage has called it “a conspiracy of goodness.” Magda Trocme, widow of the village’s wartime pastor, Andre Trocme, told Sauvage, “If we’d had an organization, we would have failed.”

The community’s Catholics also became part of the movement to save the Jews. One of them, Marguerite Roussel, told Sauvage, “We never analyzed what we were doing. It happened by itself.”

The schoolmaster, Roger Darcissac, who denied to authorities that there were Jewish students in his classes, said, “It was the human thing to do, or something like that.”

Just so: an instinct of goodness, rising as an inevitable (or not so inevitable) response to the presence of evil. It was, in so many ways, incroyable . Wounded German soldiers were billeted at a hotel in the town but, if they knew what was going on--and they could hardly not have known, kept silent.

A precocious teen-ager forged papers that let the Jews move on safely. Other Jews were fighting with the local Resistance. The historical stills and some rare footage Sauvage found from the war days look then and now at some of the unheroic-seeming but heroic shelterers. The glimpses also underscore the almost eerie contrasts between the collaborationists and the protectors, the side-by-side existence of good and evil.

Sauvage has founded Friends of Le Chambon, which has as its theme “exploring necessary lessons of hope beneath unavoidable lessons of despair.” It is dedicated to spreading the message of Le Chambon, which is in the largest sense that the world is never entirely without goodness and courage even in its darkest hours.

Not for the first time, truth is as compelling and exciting as fiction.