"The Plateau," by Maggie Paxson

 In 1941, Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and political commentator, escaped Europe and settled in New York. She was thirty-five. Two years later she wrote an essay, “We Refugees.” The essay concludes: “The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest members to be excluded and persecuted.” It is a line worth recalling, as the plight of asylum seekers continues to this day.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Book

“The Plateau,” Maggie Paxson

December 19, 2020

 

“I am a lapsed anthropologist who thought she could figure out something

about peace, but now my nights are haunted by faces of the living and the dead.”

                                                                                                                                                Maggie Paxson

                                                                                                                                                The Plateau, 2020

 

Over the years I have read many books on the Holocaust. While I am not Jewish and am far from an expert, I recall my father, who had fought in Italy with the 10^th Mountain Division, admonishing me that I should never forget what happened during the war. The German people were a civilized and cultured people, still they followed a leader into an abyss of evil, filled with hatred, contempt and corruption. Yet, in occupied countries, some remained good. Among them were people of the Plateau. 

 

In spending time in the Plateau Vivrais-Lignon, a remote, mountainous region in south central France and specifically in La Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Haute-Loire department, Ms. Paxson comes to understand its history and, over time, becomes accepted by its residents. She writes of how individuals and families saved hundreds of lives during World War II and of how the area today aids refugees who seek asylum – from countries like Chechnya and Syria and nations in Africa. La Chambon, with a population of just over 2,500, has a history of befriending the displaced. We learn that the Plateau region was settled in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries by Protestant Huguenots, who were persecuted by the French Catholic government.

 

The book has three main stories, running concurrently – of a young French schoolteacher named Daniel Trocmé. who arrived in the region in late 1942 to help his schoolteacher cousin, Andre Trocmé. We read about CADA (Centre d’Accueil de Demandeurs d’Asile), a welcome center for asylum seekers that was established in 1973 to help those fleeing Vietnam and Chile, and which today places asylum-seeking families in homes and their children in schools. And we are witness to the author’s personal odyssey, as she comes to understand “who does what to whom” – a mantra she uses, as an anthropologist, to interpret societies, like why have the people of the Plateau been so good in the face of so much evil. Toward the end, she quotes from her favorite childhood book, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who himself spent some time in the Plateau during the War and who died in July 1944: “You are humanity, and your face comes to my mind simply as man incarnate.”

 

The story of Daniel Trocmé is especially moving. With eighteen of his students, in December 1943, he is arrested by the Gestapo, hustled into a tarpaulin-covered truck: “Don’t worry,” he tells his fellow teacher Magda. “I’ll go with my students; try to explain things for them.” He asks her to write to his parents: “Tell them I am not afraid. This is my work. I love these students very much.” Those are the last words his parents will hear from him. Five months later, at age thirty-one, he would be dead, in the Nazi extermination camp, Majdanek, which is just outside Lublin, Poland.

 

There were times when Ms. Paxson’s personal interjections were annoying, but they display her quest for self-understanding. She is smitten by the story of Daniel and follows it all the way to Israel where he is remembered as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” She grows to love the families she meets.  She ends the book by speaking to all refugees: “…this book is my love letter to every one of you…”