“We have many children at the school at the top of the hill,” Pastor Durand told her. “They’re not from here. They’re refugees.” The road from the village careened steeply, ending in fields of greenery where there were half a dozen buildings, including classrooms and dormitories. From the corner of his eye he gauged Marianne’s reaction. The boarding school sheltered Jewish children, and the ministers André Trocme and Edouard Theis had arranged for thousands of Jewish children to be hidden with families in town and in the countryside, and Daniel Trocme, the principal of the school, accepted as many Jewish children as possible.

“I should give you some honey for the schoolchildren,” Marianne said. “They’d enjoy it.”

It took two hours to hike from the village to the farm, but the pastor didn’t seem to mind even though it meant he would be journeying back in the dark. Marianne had a newfound respect for him. He came into the house and shook hands with Monsieur Félix, then he slipped off his black coat, under which he had been carrying a rifle. He placed it on the table and winked at Marianne’s father. Monsieur Félix brightened then. The Germans had taken his rifle and he liked the look of this one.

The pastor knew the old man’s gun had been stolen. As it turned out, Monsieur Cazales had told the pastor about the blood on Marianne’s dress. From the hilltop that abutted their properties the neighbor could see for himself that the cows were gone. When he added these facts together, there was only one reason why this should be.

Marianne’s father now had a long scar down one side of his scalp, and he limped. When asked about it, the old man avoided complaining.

“Something may have happened.” Monsieur Félix shrugged.

“We refuse to bow to anyone,” the pastor said. “We never have and never will.”

Marianne’s father nodded in agreement. Fifty years earlier there had been a movement called le Réveil, the Awakening, a period in which Huguenots were asked to remember their mistreatment by the Catholic majority to remind them they must never let persecution happen again. They were pacifists who believed in the greater good, a philosophy they began to act upon in 1939, when they accepted Spanish war refugees into their community, taking them into their houses and barns. Later it was the sick children of workers, for the mountain air was thought to cure their ailments. Now it was the Jews. Monsieur Félix had never met a Jew, but that didn’t matter to him.

“We will hide anyone in need as we were forced to hide,” he told the pastor.