There are many unsung heroes of World War II, who risked their lives to save Jews and other persecuted people at great personal cost. Many, as noted by the great historian Sir Martin Gilbert, were religious. But many names are unknown, the rescuers not wanting to draw attention to what they saw as the only possible right thing to do.
One such unsung hero is Pastor Pierre Charles Toureille. He laboured to try and help refugees in France. Once the Nazis started to deport Jewish people as part of the devilish “Final Solution”, he went underground and secretly tried to help as many as possible escape their clutches.
Toureille’s life began with nothing unusual on the path of an ordinary church pastor, although some early influences may have played a role in his later heroics. His affection towards the Czech people and his faith inspired him to write a thesis on Jan Hus, the 15th Century Catholic priest burned at the stake for heresy, considered by some to be the first Protestant reformer. It was Hus’s courage and faith under persecution that seemed to most inspire Toureille.
Protestants in France were raised on stories about the persecution of their forebears, the Huguenots, by the French state. Together with an understanding of the Jews as God’s chosen people, this history would inspire great acts of heroism in people such as Andre Trocme, the pastor who led an entire village, Le Chambon, to hide Jews.
Not that some Catholics – such as Father Jacques, the friar who tried to save Jewish children immortalised in Louis Malle’s 1987 film Au revoir les enfants - and Orthodox – such as Mother Maria Skobtsova - did not also help the Jewish people in France. Both these heroes would perish in concentration camps as a result of their brave actions to help the Jews.
But Toureille’s life before these horrors was ordinary, pastoring Protestant churches in southern France as well as serving in the French army and raising his five children.
In the 1930s Toureille would take part in ecumenical Christian organisations where there was increasing alarm at events in Europe. He first met a young Dietrich Bonhoeffer at a conference in the early 1930s of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, according to the book A rescuer’s story: Pastor Pierre-Charles Toureille in Vichy France by Tela Zasloff.
The disturbing situation in Germany, and debates over pacifist vs violent methods to restrain evil, was frequently discussed in these ecumenical forums. Anti-Semitism was also explicitly condemned. “My father saw the German threat from the beginning,” Toureille’s son Marc told Zasloff, who remembers his dad advocating for military action. “He knew right away, when they were rounding up the Jews a few years later, that they wouldn’t come back, they were going to be killed. ‘All you have to do is read Mein Kampf,’ he told us.”
Toureille was first appointed as chaplain to serve the spiritual needs of Protestants within the growing refugee camp at Nimes in France. As the Nazis persecuted political opponents as well as Jews, they would flee to neighbouring countries, especially France, which would house 2.5m immigrants by 1936, and set up its the first refugee camp by January 1939.
War begins
Once war broke out and France fell to the Nazis, the collaborating Vichy regime would send foreign Jews to these camps, with one estimate that the camps in southern France had 40,000 Jews in a camp of 47,000 by early 1941.
At first it was merely the horrendous conditions in these camps that Toureille would contend with, as he asked the government and outside aid organisations for resources for the hungry people within – as well as for Bibles. His knowledge of various European languages would help his work, and his excellent memory meant that he did not have to write down incriminating details.
But the numbers of people were large and the task of feeding them difficult. He reported to his boss in 1940 that those in the camps would have just light coffee, watery soup, and 300g of bread and 20-30g of bony meat daily. There was just one blanket between three people, and some had no clothes at all. Typhus and TB would sweep the camps, and the death toll was high. He wrote letters and visited Swiss agencies to try to alert them to the desperate situation.
Despite the challenges, Toureille wrote to his boss: “I am very encouraged in my work with the refugees and I find among them great joy as their pastor and truly beautiful souls. I am grateful to you for having called me to this work. There is nothing else I would rather be doing now.”
Yet the pastor and his family did not fare much better than the inmates. His son Marc recalls “almost nothing to eat but rutabagas [turnips] three times a day” and his mother became very ill in the most difficult winter months of 1940. His children would also feel neglected by their dad. “We resented him for it and it was very difficult for our mother,” said Anne-Marie, the youngest, to Zasloff. “We always said he helped strangers and neglected his own children. Later I realised the strangers needed him more than we did. Without him many would have died; he did a lot of good, and I am proud of it.”
Toureille was officially meant to be taking care of the Protestants within the camps and would present his work as such to the authorities, but in reality he was helping the desperate Jewish people too.
The people helping refugees were forced to be creative. One method that Toureille and others used was to set up ‘MACE’, supposedly for Christian children but a large proportion were Jewish. Toureille’s own children would spend several years there.
Helping vs the Holocaust
In 1942 the Vichy regime started to deport Jewish people and place them in Nazi hands, which many people at the time recognised to be a death sentence. Some Protestant and Catholic leaders – not all - would protest, but to no avail.
So the mission for the righteous Christians changed from openly trying to help, to undercover rescue, as all official routes for emigration were blocked. From 1942, as Jews in France were rounded up and deported, Toureille and his team would forge visas to give passage via Switzerland to Mexico or Cambodia - or search for places where Jewish people could hide. They witnessed the Jewish people who were working with them “slowly disappear, one by one” one pastor told Zasloff. Toureille was told to try to empty the refugee camps, as they were sitting ducks for the Nazis. They became increasingly aware of their terrible fate as rumours of the gassing and mass murder spread, although many found the stories too awful to be believed.
The team would be inspired by their faith to take action. Toureille wrote: “Let us remember that we do not fight alone. Battling with us is the living God who has a horror of war and infinite pity that extends to the fields of battle, God whose love will disarm all hatred.”
Details of some of the people helped were obtained by Yad Vashem, the official vehicle for Holocaust remembrance. Because rescuers would be sent to concentration camps if they were caught, like Dutch Christian hero Corrie Ten Boom, and many of the people they served perished at Nazi hands, such as her sister - those who had the courage to help Jewish people are remembered as “The Righteous among the Nations”. “[Toureille] provided Robert Papst with a forged identification card in the name of Parlier and hired him as a member of his office staff in Lunel,” reveals the Yad Vashem archive. “In the course of 1943-1944, Gestapo agents visited the office to investigate the activities of the clergyman and his staff. Papst’s forged papers spared him from arrest, but Pastor Toureille was interrogated seven times and tortured by the Gestapo on suspicion of aiding Jews.”
Anne-Marie remembers her father searching for places where Jews could escape and even hiding a Jewish man behind a piano. This period seems to have been difficult for the pastor, with Toureille writing to a family in a letter intercepted by the authorities: “I no longer know what family life is: my five children no longer know me … I have sacrificed my health and I have compromised my reputation. I have drawn upon myself, even among those whom I want to help, much misunderstanding and hatred, even among my own associates.”
His activities were noticed by the local police. A report ordered active surveillance due to his support for Jews and “anti-government” activities, and his premises were searched many times.
“The Sperbers were another Jewish couple whose lives were saved by virtue of Toureille’s assistance,” says Yad Vashem. “Toureille attested falsely that they were Protestants and helped them find refuge in an abandoned house in the Alps in the département of Isère. In June 1943, when the Sperbers had a son, the pastor helped them cope with their desperate financial circumstances by regularly providing small sums of money and provisions.”
The end of the war brought joy to all, but the preceding years had taken their toll. Toureille would leave France first for the Czech nation and then the USA, and he showed signs of depression, according to Zasloff.
For the children who suffered the absence of their father, there would eventually be understanding. “At times I hated him for failing me, for his absence and his infrequent but harsh discipline – as if by this strictness he could make up for lost time,” Marc told Zosloff. “I am now older and hopefully wiser. I can try to imagine the life he had to lead in order to save so many lives. If we suffered from it, so be it. It was well worth it.”
On November 6, 1973, Yad Vashem recognized Toureille as Righteous Among the Nations, nearly three years before his death. Pastor Adolf Freudenberg told the World Council of Churches, as Zasloff reports: “[Toureille] always took the greatest interest in the smallest details of the often complicated situations that his parishioners presented to him. Gifted with rich and numerous talents, such as an extraordinary memory and several languages, M. Toureille, in consecrating himself with zeal and devotion to his task, has accomplished a remarkable work of charity and of Christian witness.”
Heather Tomlinson is a freelance Christian writer. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com or via X (twitter) @heathertomli
