A GOOD PLACE TO HIDE

The plateau of Vivarais Lignon is a community of about 10 villages in the Department of Haute-Loire, France. Before the Second World War broke out it acquired a remarkable pastor, André Trocmé. He was charismatic, strongwilled, autocratic and difficult. He was also a dedicated pacifist who felt morally obliged to offer as much resistance as he could humanly muster short of violence, which meant breaking laws, defying orders, being obstructive, challenging and confronting the Vichy and later the Germans.

Oskar Rosowsky, who cranked out some 5,000 sets of fake identity papers in the space of three years, was an 18-year-old Jewish printer from Nice who heard that there was sanctuary for Jews to be had in the Chambon area. He moved there to set up an incredible forgery business. Of his 5,000 sets of false identity papers, about 3,500 were for Jews, with the rest handed out to Resistance figures and to French civilians fleeing forced labour. So far as is known, nobody was ever arrested or deported on the basis of Rosowsky's forged papers. What is remarkable about this story is the unalloyed kindness, solidarity, and hospitality of the entire population of the plateau. Nobody asked any questions. Nobody demanded money. Farmers fed refugee families for free with food which was in short supply and which they might otherwise have sold at a profit. People lied, covered up, procrastinated, concealed, all at great personal risk, and all done to protect total strangers. Informers were almost non-existent. Peter Grose is a former journalist (he was The Australian's first London correspondent) and literary agent (he began Curtis Brown in Australia and then ran its UK operation). He is the former publisher at Secker & Warburg. He has published two previous books with Allen & Unwin: An Awkward Truth and A Very Rude Awakening.