"Wilma, they"ve found Candace."
Her body had been left in a shed a quarter of a mile from the Derksens" house. Her hands and feet had been tied. She had frozen to death.
The Derksens suffered the same blow as Mike Reynolds. The city of Winnipeg reacted to Candace"s disappearance the same way that Fresno reacted to Kimber Reynolds"s murder. The Derksens grieved, just as Mike Reynolds grieved. But there the two tragedies start to diverge.
When the Derksens came home from the police station, their house began to fill with friends and relatives. They stayed all day. By ten at night, only the Derksens and a few close friends were left. They sat in the kitchen, eating cherry pie. The doorbell rang.
"I remember thinking that somebody probably left some gloves or something," Derksen said. She was sitting in the backyard of her home in Winnipeg in a garden chair as we talked. She spoke haltingly and slowly, as she remembered the longest day of her life. She opened the door. There was a stranger standing there. "He just said, "I"m a parent of a murdered child, too.""
The man was in his fifties, a generation older than the Derksens. His daughter had been killed in a doughnut shop a few years earlier. It had been a high-profile case in Winnipeg. A suspect named Thomas Sophonow had been arrested for the killing and tried three times. He had served four years in prison before he was exonerated by an appeals court. The man sat in their kitchen. They gave him a slice of cherry pie-and he began to talk.
"We all sat around the table and just stared at him," Wilma Derksen said. "I remember him going through all the trials-all three. He had this little black book-very much like a reporter does. He went through every detail. He even had the bills he"d paid. He lined them all up. He talked about Sophonow, the impossibility of the trials, his anger that there was no justice, the inability of the system to pin the crime on anybody. He wanted something clear. This whole process had destroyed him. It had destroyed his family. He couldn"t work anymore. His health. He went through the medications he was on-I thought he was going to have a heart attack right there. I don"t think he divorced his wife, but the way he spoke, it was kind of like that was over. He didn"t talk much about his daughter. It was just this huge absorption with getting justice. We could see it. He didn"t even have to tell us. We could feel it." His constant refrain was, I"m telling you this to let you know what lies ahead. Finally, well after midnight, the man stopped. He looked at his watch. He had finished his story. He got up and left.
"It was a horrifying day," Derksen said. "You can imagine, we were just nuts. I mean, we were-I mean, I don"t even know how to explain how-kind of numb. But yet having this experience sort of broke through that numbness, because it was so vivid. I had this feeling that this is important. I don"t know how to explain it. It"s kind of like, take notes, this is important to you. You know, you"re going through a hard time, but pay attention here."
The stranger presented his own fate as inevitable. I"m telling you this to let you know what lies ahead. But to the Derksens, what the man was saying was not a prediction but a warning. This is what could lie ahead. They could lose their health and their sanity and each other if they allowed their daughter"s murder to consume them.
"If he hadn"t come at that point, it might have been different," Derksen said. "The way I look at it in hindsight, he forced us to consider another option. We said to each other, "How do we get out of this?""
The Derksens went to sleep-or tried to. The next day was Candace"s funeral. Then the Derksens agreed to talk to the press. Virtually every news outlet in the province was there. Candace Derksen"s disappearance had gripped the city.
"How do you feel about whoever did this to Candace?" a reporter asked the Derksens.
"We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people"s lives," Cliff said.
Wilma went next. "Our main concern was to find Candace. We"ve found her." She continued, "I can"t say at this point I forgive this person," but the stress was on the phrase "at this point." "We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to."
Is Wilma Derksen more-or less-of a hero than Mike Reynolds? It is tempting to ask that question. But it is not right: Each acted out of the best of intentions and chose a deeply courageous path.
The difference between the two was that they felt differently about what could be accomplished through the use of power. The Derksens fought every instinct they had as parents to strike back because they were unsure of what that could accomplish. They were not convinced of the power of giants. They grew up in the Mennonite religious tradition. The Mennonites are pacifists and outsiders. Wilma"s family emigrated from Russia, where many Mennonites settled in the eighteenth century. During the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist years, the Mennonites were persecuted-viciously and repeatedly. Entire Mennonite villages were wiped out. Hundreds of adult men were shipped off to Siberia. Their farms were looted and burned to the ground-and entire communities were forced to flee to the United States and Canada. Derksen showed me a picture of her great-aunt, taken years ago in Russia. She said she remembered her grandmother talking about her sister while looking at that same picture and weeping. Her great-aunt had been a Sunday school teacher-a woman whom children flocked to-and during the Revolution, armed men had come for her and the children and ma.s.sacred them. Wilma talked about her grandfather waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares about what had happened in Russia, and then getting up in the morning and going to work. She remembered her father deciding not to sue someone who owed him a lot of money, choosing instead to walk away. "This is what I believe, and how we live," he would say.
Some religious movements have as their heroes great warriors or prophets. The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle"s ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compa.s.sion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated "Oh, my Lord, my G.o.d" seventy times over.8 "I was taught that there was an alternative way to deal with injustice," Derksen said. "I was taught it in school. We were taught the history of persecution. We had this picture of martyrdom that went right back to the sixteenth century. The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on." To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespa.s.s against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish. The Mennonites believe in the inverted-U curve.
Mike Reynolds had none of that understanding of limits. He believed, as a matter of principle, that the state and the law could deliver justice for his daughter"s death. At one point, Reynolds spoke of the infamous Jerry DeWayne Williams case, which involved a young man arrested for grabbing a slice of pizza from four children on the Redondo Beach pier just south of Los Angeles. Because Williams had five previous convictions, for everything from robbery to drug possession to violating parole, the pizza-slice theft counted as his third strike. He was sentenced to twenty-five years to life.9 Williams had a longer sentence than his cellmate, who was a murderer.
In retrospect, the Williams case was the beginning of the end for Mike Reynolds"s crusade. It highlighted everything that was wrong with Three Strikes. The law could not distinguish between pizza thieves and murderers. But Mike Reynolds never understood why the Williams case provoked so much public outrage. To him, Williams had violated a fundamental principle: he had repeatedly broken society"s rules and thereby forfeited his right to freedom. It was as simple as that. "Look," Reynolds told me, "those that are actually going down on third strikes, they got there the old-fashioned way-they earned it." What mattered to him was that the law made an example of repeat offenders. "Every time the media has done a story on some idiot that steals a slice of pizza and it was his third strike," he went on, "that does more to stop crime than anything else in the state."
The British acted from the same principle in the early days of the Troubles. People cannot be allowed to make bombs and harbor automatic weapons and shoot one another in broad daylight. No civil society can survive under those circ.u.mstances. General Freeland had every right to get tough with thugs and gunmen.
What Freeland did not understand, however, was the same thing that Reynolds did not understand: there comes a point where the best-intentioned application of power and authority begins to backfire. Searching the first house in the Lower Falls made sense. Ransacking the entire neighborhood only made things worse. By the mid-1970s, every Catholic household in Northern Ireland had been searched, on average, twice. In some neighborhoods, that number reached ten times or more. Between 1972 and 1977, one in four Catholic men in Northern Ireland between the ages of sixteen and forty-four were arrested at least once. Even if every one of those people had done something illegal, that level of severity cannot succeed.10 This final lesson about the limits of power is not easy to learn. It requires that those in positions of authority accept that what they thought of as their greatest advantage-the fact that they could search as many homes as they wanted and arrest as many people as they wanted and imprison people for as long as they wanted-has real constraints. Caroline Sacks faced a version of this when she realized that what she thought was an advantage actually put her at a disadvantage. But it is one thing to acknowledge the limitations of your own advantages if you are faced with the choice between a very good school and a very, very good school. It is quite another when you have held your daughter"s hand as she lay dying in a hospital bed. "Daddy can fix everything, and when this happened to our daughter, it was something I couldn"t fix," Reynolds said. What he promised his daughter was that he would stand up and say, Enough. He cannot be faulted for that. But the tragedy of Mike Reynolds was that in fulfilling that promise, he left California worse off than it had been before.
Over the years, many people have come to Fresno to speak to Reynolds about Three Strikes: the long drive up from Los Angeles into the flat fields of the Central Valley has become a kind of pilgrimage. It is Reynolds"s habit to take his visitors to the Daily Planet-the restaurant where his daughter ate before she was killed across the street. I heard about one of those visits before I made the same journey. Reynolds had gotten into an argument with the restaurant"s owner. She told him to stop bringing people around on tours. Reynolds was harming her business. "When will this be over?" she asked him. Reynolds was livid. "Sure, it"s hurt her business," he said, "but it"s wrecked our lives. I told her it will be over when my daughter comes back."
At the end of our interview, Reynolds said he wanted to show me where his daughter was murdered. I couldn"t say yes. It was too much. So Reynolds reached across the table and placed his hand on my arm.
"Do you carry a wallet?" he said. He handed me a pa.s.sport-size photo of his daughter. "That was taken a month before Kimber was murdered. Maybe set that in there and think about that when you open your wallet. Sometimes you need to put a face with something like this." Mike Reynolds would always be grieving. "That kid had everything to live for. To have something like this happen, to have somebody kill her in cold blood like that-that"s bulls.h.i.t. It"s just gotta be stopped."
In 2007, the Derksens got a call from the police. "I put them off for two months," Wilma Derksen said. What could it possibly be about? It had been twenty years since Candace"s disappearance. They had tried to move on. What good could come from opening old wounds? Finally they responded. The police came. They said, "We"ve found the person who killed Candace."
The shed where Candace"s body was found had been stored all those years in a police warehouse, and DNA from the scene had now been matched to a man named Mark Grant. He had been living not far from the Derksens. He had a history of s.e.xual offenses and had spent most of his adult life behind bars. In January of 2011, Grant was brought to trial.
Derksen says that she was terrified. She didn"t know how she would react. Her daughter"s memory had been settled in her mind, and now everything was being dredged up. She sat in the courtroom. Grant was puffed up, pasty-looking. His hair was white. He looked unwell and diminished. "His anger toward us, his hostility, were so weird," she said. "I didn"t know why he was angry with us, when we should have been angry with him. It probably wasn"t until the very end of the preliminary hearing that I finally looked at him, you know, and said to myself, You"re the person who killed Candace. I remember the two of us looking at each other and just the unbelief of it: Who are you? How could you? How can you be like this?
"The worst moment for me was when-I"m going to cry-was when I..." She stopped and apologized for her tears. "I realized that he had hog-tied Candace and what that meant. s.e.xuality takes on different forms, and I hadn"t realized..." She stopped again. "I"m a naive Mennonite. And to realize that his pleasure came out of tying Candace up and watching her suffer, that he gained pleasure out of torturing her...I don"t know if it makes any sense. To me, that"s even worse than l.u.s.t or rape, you know? It"s inhuman. I can understand s.e.xual desire gone awry. But this is. .h.i.tler. This is horrible. This is the worst."
It was one thing to forgive in the abstract. When Candace was killed, they didn"t know her murderer: he was someone without a name or a face. But now they knew.
"How can you forgive somebody like that?" she went on. "My story was now much more complicated. I had to fight my way through all those feelings of oh, why doesn"t he just die? Why doesn"t somebody just kill him? That"s not healthy. It"s revenge. And in some way it would be torturing him, too, keeping his destiny in my hands.
"One day I sort of lost it a little bit in church. I was with a group of friends and I just railed against the s.e.xual insanity of it. And then the next morning, one of them called me and said, "Let"s have breakfast." Then she goes, "No, we can"t talk here. We"ve got to go to my apartment." So I went to her apartment. And then she talked about her addiction to p.o.r.n and s.e.xual bondage and S and M. She had been in that world. So she understood it. She told me all about it. And then I remembered I loved her. We had worked in the ministry together. This whole dysfunction, this whole side to her, had been hidden from me."
Derksen had been talking for a long time, and the emotion had begun to take its toll. She was talking slowly and softly now. "She was very worried," Derksen went on. "She was so scared. She had seen my anger. And now would I stay locked in that anger and direct it to her? Would I reject her?" To forgive her friend, she realized, she had to forgive Grant. She could not carve out exceptions for the sake of her moral convenience.
"I fought against it," she went on. "I was reluctant. I"m not a saint. I"m not always forgiving. It"s the last thing you want to do. It could have been so much easier to say"-she made a fist-"because I would have had many more people on my side. I probably would have been a huge advocate by now. I could have had a huge organization behind me."
Wilma Derksen could have been Mike Reynolds. She could have started her own version of Three Strikes. She chose not to. "It would have been easier in the beginning," she continued. "But then it would have gotten harder. I think I would have lost Cliff, I think I would have lost my children. In some ways I would be doing to others what he did to Candace."
A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive-and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.
1 In practical terms, Three Strikes meant something like this: First offense (burglary). Before: 2 years. Now: 2 years. Second offense (burglary). Before: 4.5 years. Now: 9 years. Third offense (receiving stolen property). Before: 2 years. Now: 25 years to life. Other states and governments around the world would go on to pa.s.s a Three Strikes law of their own. But none went as far as California"s version.
2 Kennedy goes on to argue that if you examine actual criminal motivations, what you discover is that the calculation of risk and benefits is a "radically subjective" process. Kennedy writes: "What matters in deterrence is what matters to offenders and potential offenders. It is benefits and costs as they understand them and define them." As the criminologists Anthony Doob and Cheryl Marie Webster recently concluded in a ma.s.sive a.n.a.lysis of every major punishment study: "A reasonable a.s.sessment of the research to date-with a particular focus on studies conducted in the past decade-is that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society....No consistent body of literature has developed over the last twenty-five to thirty years indicating that harsh sanctions deter." What they were saying is that most countries in the developed world are in the middle part of the curve. Locking up criminals past their criminal peak and threatening younger offenders with something that younger offenders simply don"t care about doesn"t buy you all that much.
3 Clear first described his ideas some years ago in a research paper ent.i.tled "Backfire: When Incarceration Increases Crime." It presented ten arguments for why putting a very large number of people behind bars might have the opposite of its intended effect. At first, Clear couldn"t get anyone to publish it. He tried the major academic journals in his field and failed at all of them. No one believed him, except the corrections community. Clear says, "One of the little-known facts of my world is that corrections professionals, for the most part, don"t think that what they are doing is going to make things better. They try to run humane prisons, do the best they can. But they watch what"s going on, and they"re right there. They know-they say things like "My guards are mistreating people" or "They aren"t going to leave the prison feeling better" or "We don"t give them anything they need." This is a real embitterment experience for them. So my paper was making the rounds, people were handing it to one another, and some guy at the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Research Consortium asked if he could publish it. I said sure. He published it. And for a long time, if you Googled me, that was the first thing that came up."
4 In its simplest formation, Clear"s thesis is as follows: "Cycling a large number of young men from a particular place through imprisonment, and then returning them to that place, is not healthy for the people who live in that place."
5 For example, under the law, prosecutors can choose whether to ask for Three Strikes penalties in sentencing criminals. Some cities, like San Francisco, use it sparely. In some counties in California"s Central Valley-near where Mike Reynolds was from-prosecutors have used it as many as twenty-five times more often. If Three Strikes really prevents crime, then there should be a connection between how often a county uses Three Strikes and how quickly its crime falls. There isn"t. If Three Strikes really acts as a deterrent, then crime rates should drop faster for those offenses that qualify for the law"s penalties than for those that don"t-right? So did they? They didn"t.
6 In the 1980s, California spent 10 percent of its budget on higher education and 3 percent on prisons. After two decades of Three Strikes, the state was spending more than 10 percent of its budget on prisons-$50,000 a year for every man and woman behind bars-while education spending had fallen below 8 percent.
7 In November 2012, 68.6 percent of Californian voters voted in favor of Proposition 36, which stated that in order to receive a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence, a repeat offender"s third felony must be of a "serious or violent" nature. Proposition 36 also allows offenders previously sentenced under Three Strikes and currently serving a life sentence to appeal for resentencing if the third conviction was not serious.
8 In the book Amish Grace, there is a story of a young Amish mother whose five-year-old son was struck and critically injured by a speeding car. The Amish, like the Mennonites, are heirs to the tradition of Dirk Willems. They suffered alongside the Mennonites in the early years of their faith. In the Mennonite and Amish tradition, there are countless stories like this one: As the investigating officer placed the driver of the car in the police cruiser to take him for an alcohol test, the mother of the injured child approached the squad car to speak with the officer. With her young daughter tugging at her dress, the mother said, "Please take care of the boy." a.s.suming she meant her critically ill son, the officer replied, "The ambulance people and doctor will do the best they can. The rest is up to G.o.d." The mother pointed to the suspect in the back of the police car. "I mean the driver. We forgive him."
9 Williams was released a few years later after a judge reduced his sentence, and his case became the rallying cry for the antiaThree Strikes movement.
10 By the mid-1990s, the IRA was organizing daily bus trips to the prison outside Belfast, as if it were an amus.e.m.e.nt park. "Almost everyone in the Catholic ghettos has a father, brother, uncle, or cousin who has been in prison," the political scientist John Soule wrote at the height of the Troubles. "Young people in this atmosphere come to learn that prison is a badge of honor rather than a disgrace."
Chapter Nine.
Andre Trocme
"We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews."
When France fell in June of 1940, the German Army allowed the French to set up a government in the city of Vichy. It was headed by the French World War One hero Marshal Philippe Petain, who was granted the full powers of a dictator. Petain cooperated actively with the Germans. He stripped Jews of their rights. He pushed them out of professions. Revoking laws against anti-Semitism, he rounded up French Jews and put them into internment camps and took a dozen other authoritarian steps, large and small, including inst.i.tuting the requirement that every morning French schoolchildren honor the French flag with a full fascist salute-right arm outstretched, palm down. On the scale of the adjustments necessary under German occupation, saluting the flag each morning was a small matter. Most people complied. But not those living in the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
Le Chambon is one of a dozen villages on the Vivarais Plateau, a mountainous region not far from the Italian and Swiss borders in south-central France. The winters are snowy and harsh. The area is remote, and the closest large towns are well down the mountain, miles away. The region is heavily agricultural, with farms tucked away in and around piney woods. For several centuries, Le Chambon had been home to a variety of dissident Protestant sects, chief among them the Huguenots. The local Huguenot pastor was a man named Andre Trocme. He was a pacifist. On the Sunday after France fell to the Germans, Trocme preached a sermon at the Protestant temple of Le Chambon. "Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty," he said. "Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate."
Giving the straight-armed fascist salute to the Vichy regime was, to Trocme"s mind, a very good example of "obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel." He and his co-pastor, edouard Theis, had started a school in Le Chambon several years earlier called the College Cevenol. They decided that there would be no flagpole and no fascist salutes at Cevenol.
Vichy"s next step was to require all French teachers to sign loyalty oaths to the state. Trocme, Theis, and the entire staff of Cevenol refused. Petain asked for a portrait of himself to be placed in every French school. Trocme and Theis rolled their eyes. On the one-year anniversary of the Vichy regime, Petain ordered towns across the country to ring their church bells at noon on August 1. Trocme told the church custodian, a woman named Amelie, not to bother. Two summer residents of the town came and complained. "The bell does not belong to the marshal, but to G.o.d," Amelie told them flatly. "It is rung for G.o.d-otherwise it is not rung."
Throughout the winter and spring of 1940, conditions for Jews across Europe grew progressively worse. A woman appeared at the Trocmes" door. She was terrified and trembling from the cold. She was Jewish, she said. Her life was in danger. She had heard Le Chambon was a welcoming place. "And I said, "Come in,"" Andre Trocme"s wife, Magda, remembered years later. "And so it started."
Soon more and more Jewish refugees began showing up in Le Chambon. Trocme took the train to Ma.r.s.eille to meet with a Quaker named Burns Chalmers. The Quakers provided humanitarian aid for the internment centers that had been set up in southern France. The camps were appalling places, overrun with rats, lice, and disease; at one camp alone, eleven hundred Jews died between 1940 and 1944. Many of those who survived were eventually shipped east and murdered in n.a.z.i concentration camps. The Quakers could get people-especially children-out of the camps. But they had nowhere to send them. Trocme volunteered Le Chambon. The trickle of Jews coming up the mountain suddenly became a flood.
In the summer of 1942, Georges Lamirand, the Vichy minister in charge of youth affairs, paid a state visit to Le Chambon. Petain wanted him to set up youth camps around France patterned after the Hitler Youth camps in Germany.
Lamirand swept up the mountain with his entourage, resplendent in his marine-blue uniform. His agenda called for a banquet, then a march to the town"s stadium for a meeting with the local youth, then a formal reception. But the banquet did not go well. The food was barely adequate. Trocme"s daughter "accidentally" spilled soup down the back of Lamirand"s uniform. During the parade, the streets were deserted. At the stadium, nothing was arranged: the children milled around, jostling and gawking. At the reception, a townsperson got up and read from the New Testament Book of Romans, chapter 13, verse 8: "Owe no one anything except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law."
Then a group of students walked up to Lamirand, and in front of the entire town presented him with a letter. It had been drafted with Trocme"s help. Earlier that summer, the Vichy police had rounded up twelve thousand Jews in Paris at the request of the n.a.z.is. Those arrested were held in horrendous conditions at the Velodrome d"Hiver south of Paris before being sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Le Chambon, the children made it clear, wanted no part in any of this. "Mr. Minister," the letter began: We have learned of the frightening scenes which took place three weeks ago in Paris, where the French police, on orders of the occupying power, arrested in their homes all the Jewish families in Paris to hold them in the Vel d"Hiv. The fathers were torn from their families and sent to Germany. The children torn from their mothers, who underwent the same fate as their husbands....We are afraid that the measures of deportation of the Jews will soon be applied in the southern zone.
We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. But, we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching.
If our comrades, whose only fault is to be born in another religion, received the order to let themselves be deported, or even examined, they would disobey the order received, and we would try to hide them as best we could.
We have Jews. You"re not getting them.
Why didn"t the n.a.z.is come to Le Chambon and make an example of the residents? The enrollment at the school started by Trocme and Theis rose from 18 pupils on the eve of the war to 350 by 1944. It didn"t take any great powers of deduction to figure out who those extra 332 children were. Nor did the town make any great secret of what it was doing. We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. One aid worker described coming up on the train from Lyon several times a month with a dozen or so Jewish children in tow. She would leave them at the Hotel May by the train station and then walk around town until she found homes for them all. In France, under the laws of Vichy, transporting and hiding Jewish refugees was plainly illegal. At other points during the war, the n.a.z.is had demonstrated that they were not inclined to be conciliatory on the question of Jews. At one point, the Vichy police came and set up shop in Le Chambon for three weeks, searching the town and the surrounding countryside for Jewish refugees. All they could come up with were two arrests-one of whom they later released. Why didn"t they just line up the whole town and ship them to Auschwitz?
Philip Hallie, who wrote the definitive history of Le Chambon, argues that the town was protected at the end of the war by Major Julius Schmehling, a senior Gestapo official in the region. There were also many sympathetic people in the local Vichy police. Sometimes Andre Trocme would get a call in the middle of the night, warning him that a raid was coming the next day. Other times a local police contingent would arrive, following up on a tip about hidden refugees, and treat themselves to a long cup of coffee at the local cafe first, to give everyone in town ample warning of their intentions. The Germans had enough on their plate, particularly by 1943, when the war on the Eastern Front began to go sour for them. They might not have wanted to pick a fight with a group of disputatious and disagreeable mountain folk.
But the best answer is the one that David and Goliath has tried to make plain-that wiping out a town or a people or a movement is never as simple as it looks. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem-nor the weak as weak. The Huguenots of Le Chambon were descendants of France"s original Protestant population, and the truth is that people had tried-and failed-to wipe them out before. The Huguenots broke away from the Catholic Church during the Reformation, which made them outlaws in the eyes of the French state. One king after another tried to make them reunite with the Catholic Church. The Huguenot movement was banned. There were public roundups and ma.s.sacres. Thousands of Huguenot men were sent to the gallows. Women were imprisoned for life. Children were put in Catholic foster homes in order to rid them of their faith. The reign of terror lasted more than a century. In the late seventeenth century, two hundred thousand Huguenots fled France for other countries in Europe and North America. Those few who remained were forced underground. They worshiped in secrecy, in remote forests. They retreated to high mountain villages on the Vivarais Plateau. They formed a seminary in Switzerland and smuggled clergy across the border. They learned the arts of evasion and disguise. They stayed and learned-as the Londoners did during the Blitz-that they were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.1 "The people in our village knew already what persecutions were," Magda Trocme said. "They talked often about their ancestors. Many years went by and they forgot, but when the Germans came, they remembered and were able to understand the persecution of the Jews better perhaps than people in other villages, for they had already had a kind of preparation." When the first refugee appeared at her door, Magda Trocme said it never occurred to her to say no. "I did not know that it would be dangerous. n.o.body thought of that." I did not know that it would be dangerous? n.o.body thought of that? In the rest of France, all people thought about was how dangerous life was. But the people of Le Chambon were past that. When the first Jewish refugees arrived, the townsfolk drew up false papers for them-not a difficult thing to do if your community has spent a century hiding its true beliefs from the government. They hid the Jews in the places they had been hiding refugees for generations and smuggled them across the border to Switzerland along the same trails they had used for three hundred years. Magda Trocme went on: "Sometimes people ask me, "How did you make a decision?" There was no decision to make. The issue was, Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!"
In attempting to wipe out the Huguenots, the French created instead a pocket in their own country that was all but impossible to wipe out.
As Andre Trocme once said, "How could the n.a.z.is ever get to the end of the resources of such a people?"
Andre Trocme was born in 1901. He was tall and solidly built and had a long nose and sharp blue eyes. He worked tirelessly, lumbering from one end of Le Chambon to the other. His daughter, Nelly, writes that "a sense of duty exuded from his pores." He called himself a pacifist, but there was nothing pacifist about him. He and his wife, Magda, were famous for their shouting matches. He was often described as un violent vaincu par Dieu-a violent man conquered by G.o.d. "A curse on him who begins in gentleness," he wrote in his journal. "He shall finish in insipidity and cowardice, and shall never set foot in the great liberating current of Christianity."
Six months after the visit from Minister Lamirand, Trocme and edouard Theis were arrested and imprisoned in an internment camp (where, according to Hallie, "personal possessions were taken from them, and noses were measured to ascertain whether or not they were Jewish"). After a month, the two were told they would be released-but only on the condition that they pledged to "obey without question orders given me by governmental authorities for the safety of France, and for the good of the National Revolution of Marshal Petain." Trocme and Theis refused. The director of the camp came up to them in disbelief. Most of the people in the camp would end up dead in a gas chamber. In exchange for signing their names on a piece of paper, to a bit of patriotic boilerplate, the two men were getting a free ticket home.
"What is this?" the camp director shouted at them. "This oath has nothing in it contrary to your conscience! The marshal wishes only the good of France!"
"On at least one point we disagree with the marshal," Trocme replied. "He delivers the Jews to the Germans....When we get home we shall certainly continue to be opposed, and we shall certainly continue to disobey orders from the government. How could we sign this now?"
Finally the prison officials gave up and sent them home.
Later in the war, when the Gestapo stepped up their scrutiny of Le Chambon, Trocme and Theis were forced to flee. Theis joined up with the underground and spent the remainder of the war ferrying Jews across the Alps to the safety of Switzerland. ("It was not reasonable," he explained to Hallie of his decision. "But you know, I had to do it, anyway.") Trocme moved from town to town, carrying false papers. Despite his precautions, he was arrested in a police roundup at the Lyon railway station. He was thrown into turmoil-not just at the prospect of discovery but also and more crucially at the question of what to do about his false papers. Hallie writes: His ident.i.ty card gave his name as Beguet, and they would ask him if this was indeed true. Then he would have to lie in order to hide his ident.i.ty. But he was not able to lie; lying, especially to save his own skin, was "sliding toward those compromises that G.o.d had not called upon me to make," he wrote in his autobiographical notes on this incident. Saving the lives of others-and even saving his own life-with false ident.i.ty cards was one thing, but standing before another human being and speaking lies to him only for the sake of self-preservation was something different.
Is there really a moral difference between giving yourself a false name on your ident.i.ty card and stating that false name to a police officer? Perhaps not. Trocme, at the time, was traveling with one of his young sons. He was still actively engaged in the business of hiding refugees. He had plenty of extenuating circ.u.mstances, in other words, to justify a white lie.
But that is not the point. Trocme was disagreeable in the same magnificent sense as Jay Freireich and Wyatt Walker and Fred Shuttlesworth. And the beauty of the disagreeable is that they do not make calculations like the rest of us. Walker and Shuttlesworth had nothing to lose. If your house has been bombed and the Klan has surrounded your car and pummeled you with their fists, how can things get any worse? Jay Freireich was told to stop what he was doing and warned that he was risking his career. He was heckled and abandoned by his peers. He held dying children in his arms and jabbed a thick needle into their shinbones. But he had been through worse. The Huguenots who put their own self-interest first had long ago converted to some other faith or given up or moved away. What was left was stubbornness and defiance.
The arresting officer, it turned out, never asked for Trocme"s papers. Trocme talked the police into taking him back to the railway station, where he met up with his son and slipped out a side door. But had the police asked him if he was Beguet, he had already decided to tell the truth: "I am not Monsieur Beguet. I am Pastor Andre Trocme." He didn"t care. If you are Goliath, how on earth do you defeat someone who thinks like that? You could kill him, of course. But that is simply a variant of the same approach that backfired so spectacularly for the British in Northern Ireland and for the Three Strikes campaign in California. The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission. You could kill Andre Trocme. But in all likelihood, all that would mean is that another Andre Trocme would rise in his place.
When Trocme was ten years old, his family drove one day to their house in the country. He was in the backseat with his two brothers and a cousin. His parents were in the front. His father grew angry at a car driving too slowly in front of them and pulled out to pa.s.s. "Paul, Paul, not so fast. There"s going to be an accident!" his mother cried out. The car spun out of control. The young Andre pushed himself away from the wreckage. His father and brothers and cousin were fine. His mother was not. He saw her lying lifeless thirty feet away. Confronting a n.a.z.i officer paled in comparison with seeing your mother"s body by the side of the road. As Trocme wrote to his deceased mother, many years later: If I have sinned so much, if I have been, since then, so solitary, if my soul has taken such a swirling and solitary movement, if I have doubted everything, if I have been a fatalist, and have been a pessimistic child who awaits death every day, and who almost seeks it out, if I have opened myself slowly and late to happiness, and if I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly, it is because you left me that June 24th upon that road.
But if I have believed in eternal realities...if I have thrust myself toward them, it is also because I was alone, because you were no longer there to be my G.o.d, to fill my heart with your abundant and dominating life.
It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
The eldest son of Magda and Andre Trocme was Jean-Pierre. He was a sensitive and gifted adolescent. Andre Trocme was devoted to him. One evening near the end of the war, the family went to see a recital of Villon"s poem "The Ballad of the Hanged Men." The next night, they came home from dinner and found Jean-Pierre hanging from a noose in the bathroom. Trocme stumbled into the woods, crying out, "Jean-Pierre! Jean-Pierre!" Later, he wrote: Even today I carry a death within myself, the death of my son, and I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.
But surely he must have paused when he wrote those words, because everything that had happened in Le Chambon suggested that there was more to the story than that. Then he wrote: They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing.
1 The historian Christine van der Zanden calls the area the Plateau of Hospitality. The region had a long history of taking in refugees. In 1790, the French a.s.sembly declared that all Catholic clergy, under penalty of imprisonment, had to pledge an oath to the state, making the church subordinate to the government. Those who refused to sign the pledge fled for their lives. Where did many of them go? To the Vivarais Plateau, a community already well practiced in the arts of defiance. The number of dissenters grew. During the First World War, the people of the plateau took in refugees. During the Spanish Civil War, they took in people fleeing the fascist army of General Franco. They took in socialists and communists from Austria and Germany in the early days of the n.a.z.i terror.
Acknowledgments.
David and Goliath has benefited greatly from the wisdom and generosity of many others: my parents; my agent, Tina Bennett; my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder; Geoff Shandler and Pamela Marshall and the whole team at Little, Brown; Helen Conford at Penguin in England; and too many of my friends to count. Among them: Charles Randolph, Sarah Lyall, Jacob Weisberg, the Lyntons, Terry Martin, Tali Farhadian, Emily Hunt, and Robert McCrum. Special thanks to my fact checkers, Jane Kim and Carey Dunne, and my theological consultant, Jim Loepp Thiessen of the Gathering Church in Kitchener, Ontario. And Bill Phillips, as always. You are the maestro.
Notes.
Introduction: Goliath The scholarly literature on the battle between David and Goliath is extensive. Here is one source: John A. Beck, "David and Goliath, a Story of Place: The Narrative-Geographical Shaping of 1 Samuel 17," Westminster Theological Journal 68 (2006): 321a30.
Claudius Quadrigarius"s account of single combat is from Ross Cowan, For the Glory of Rome (Greenhill Books, 2007), 140. No one in ancient times would have doubted David"s tactical advantage once it was known that he was an expert in slinging. Here is the Roman military historian Vegetius (Military Matters, Book I): Recruits are to be taught the art of throwing stones both with the hand and sling. The inhabitants of the Balearic Islands are said to have been the inventors of slings, and to have managed them with surprising dexterity, owing to the manner of bringing up their children. The children were not allowed to have their food by their mothers till they had first struck it with their sling. Soldiers, notwithstanding their defensive armor, are often more annoyed by the round stones from the sling than by all the arrows of the enemy. Stones kill without mangling the body, and the contusion is mortal without loss of blood. It is universally known the ancients employed slingers in all their engagements. There is the greater reason for instructing all troops, without exception, in this exercise, as the sling cannot be reckoned any enc.u.mbrance, and often is of the greatest service, especially when they are obliged to engage in stony places, to defend a mountain or an eminence, or to repulse an enemy at the attack of a castle or city.