Over the nearly four years running from December 1940 to September 1944, the inhabitants of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the surrounding area collaborated together in a conspiracy of goodness. Risking everything, this modest-sized village had essentially doubled itself, giving sanctuary to some five thousand people—more than two-thirds of them Jewish—fleeing the Vichy authorities and Nazi regime.
The Chambonnais provided shelter, food, protection, and escape in their homes, in hotels and businesses, in the outbuildings of farms, in schools and other public buildings, and anywhere else they could fit the desperate and imperiled. The villagers also worked to forge identification and ration cards and to sometimes help ferry refugees into neutral Switzerland. The charity of the Chambonnais was indiscriminate. One child refugee said, "Nobody asked who was Jewish and who was not. Nobody asked where you were from. Nobody asked who your father was or if you could pay. They just accepted each of us."
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