TV REVIEW : ‘Weapons’: A Moral Adventure

Western Europe’s conscience will long be haunted by the question of its general subservience to, or worse, complicity in the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. Of the few pockets of noncompliance, two are famous: the Free French resistance and England’s dogged refusal to bend under the relentless Luftwaffe. One is not, but it is perhaps the most extraordinary display of moral choice in this century.

The people of the farm town of Le Chambon sur-Lignon, in mountainous southern France, collectively decided to undermine the Nazi-sponsored Vichy government’s quiet but insidious assistance in the Holocaust, giving refuge to thousands of Jews from 1940 to 1944.

Though filmmaker Pierre Sauvage was born there, he did not learn of this nor of his Jewish identity until he was 18. His film, “Weapons of the Spirit,” is as much about a man uncovering his origins as it is a portrait of what Sauvage terms “a conspiracy of goodness.” It airs tonight at 8 on Channel 50, at 9 on Channel 28, at 9:35 on Channel 15 and at 10 on Channel 24.

Rather than a simple case of Christian kindliness toward refugees, the Chambonnais’ extraordinary gesture occurred in the shadow of both the Vichy police and the occupying Nazi army. As narrator and interviewer of living witnesses (some of whom died shortly after filming), Sauvage uncovers, detective-style, what seems to be a mystery.

Why, for example, were the town and inhabitants of Oradour, which sheltered no Jews, annihilated, and Le Chambon spared? Why did Vichy officials, aware of the village’s resistance, do nothing? Why did Nazi occupiers virtually ignore the amazing sight around them of Jewish youth at school and at play?

Above all, what inspired such courage in this place, surrounded by a nation of cowards? Sauvage finds his answer in Le Chambon’s history as a center of Protestant Huguenot life, often under the boot of an oppressive French Catholic church. These Christians knew religious persecution, and thought nothing of aiding others suffering an even worse fate.

This second nature makes for some awfully brief interviews with the stoic, hardy, quiet Chambonnais, but Sauvage fills the gap with a huge display of evocative archive photos and one jaw-dropping tale after another.

A follow-up interview with Sauvage by Bill Moyers reveals more about the filmmaker than the events, but it acts as a fine closure to a great moral adventure.