A Rescuer's Story

How French Protestant networks worked to rescue Jews and other refugees from the Nazis. This is the story of Pierre Toureille, a French Protestant pastor whose efforts resulted in the rescue of hundreds of refugees, most of them Jewish. Inspired by his Huguenot heritage, Pastor Toureille participated in international Protestant church efforts to combat Nazism during the 1930s and headed a major refugee aid organization in Vichy France during World War II. After the war, Pastor Toureille was honored by the Jewish organization Yad Vashem as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations." In telling Toureille's story, Tela Zasloff depicts the wide-ranging network of Protestant pastors and lay people in southern French villages who participated in an aggressive rescue effort. She delves into their motivations, including their heritage as members of a religious minority. Toureille's rescue work under the Vichy regime, partly official and then increasingly clandestine as the war progressed, was a crucial part of the French non-violent "spiritual resistance" against Nazism.

Pierre-Charles Toureille, 1900-1976, A Resume; To Be A Huguenot; Pierre Toureille - The Early Years And The Ecumenical Movement Of The Thirties;The War Years; The War - 1939-1940; The War: 1941; The War - 1942; The War -1943-1945 And After.