Icon: My Journey Home

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, my father would occasionally bring home from the synagogue on Friday nights a person or couple who had survived the Holocaust.

In the warm South African summer of 1945-6, I saw a number on a dinner guest’s arm. When I asked him about it, he looked at my mother and she gave a barely perceptible shake of her head, so a child’s question went unanswered. My parents were then, and remained thereafter, quite remarkably silent about the catastrophe. Curiosity was partially satisfied when I began to sing in the choir of the Vredehoek Synagogue, and on the single time I can recall him rolling up his shirtsleeves, I saw a similar number on the arm of the Cantor, Jakob Lichterman, a Polish refugee whose fine lyric tenor voice and sweet temperament remain pleasant memories. I didn’t find out much more until my freshman year at the University of Cape Town, a time of wonderful intellectual opportunity both inside and outside the classrooms. It left me, then as a student, and later as a professor in the United States, with the clear understanding that lecture halls are just a fraction of where learning occurs.

I spent much of that year in the basement of UCT’s Jagger Library, reading the newspaper stories of the events from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Agreement in the year of my birth, 1938, to the surrender of German armed forces to Field Marshal Montgomery at Luneberg Heath in May, 1945. Some of my formal academic work was neglected, in favor of an education about the numbers on victims’ arms. Almost a decade after graduation, I introduced a course on race as a factor in international relations at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’d had good preparation: the son of fugitive European Jews, raised in apartheid South Africa.

In 1946, a young American couple from Chicago, Howard and Elsie Schomer, accepted an invitation from Pastor Andre Trocme to help with postwar reconstruction in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French village on the plateau west of Lyon. They took their infant daughter Karine along with them, and stayed there for ten years. The story of Le Chambon is now well known. During the years of the Second World War this largely Huguenot village offered refuge, and therefore life, to about five thousand Jews escaping from the predations of the Nazis. In what Philip Hallie in his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, called “a conspiracy of goodness,” the heroic rescue was presided over by Pastor Trocme and his wife Magda, and the center of it all revolved around the Protestant church, the temple.

It is a sacred place for Jews, too, and indeed for all humanity. The story has also been told in the film Weapons Of The Spirit, made by family friend Pierre Sauvage, once one of the rescued children, and by a more recent book, We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews In France During The Holocaust, by my friend, Patrick Gerard Henry, Emeritus Professor of French at Whitman College, Oregon.

Howard Schomer worked as one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. South Africa and the Soviet Union abstained. In later years he would serve as President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and in 1965 walked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march on the bridge at Selma, Alabama. I first encountered my future father-in-law when I saw the documentary footage of the march.