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| meadow. It was not a gory vision of blood; just bodies on the
grass, with the sun setting behind the mountains in the distance.
At this point, however, my will to live took over. Still clutching in my left hand the Greek New Testament which I had grabbed from the table as we saw the convoy approach, I stepped forward and said, with a loud voice and in German, "I am the pastor of this town and I protest in the name of Christ the slaying of four men, four women, and four children, all of whom are innocent." The effect of my brief speech on the German soldiers was totally unexpected. For suddenly one soldier, a man in his late forties, took his gun and slung it over his shoulder, declaring in the direction of his Lieutenant, "Wir schiessen auf keinen pfarrer" - "We do not shoot a minister." The other soldiers on the road followed his example. There suddenly was no more firing squad. These battle-hardened men, after five years of war in all possible corners of Europe, perhaps deeply indoctrinated by the Nazis with hatred for anything non-German, were refusing to obey an order from their officer. They refused to shoot the minister or the men, women, and children lined up in the meadow with him. It seemed miraculous. The Lieutenant could then have shot me dead with his Luger. But he could have missed, appearing a fool in front of his men. Or he could have reiterated his order to his men to fire on us; but he did not dare. Maybe he was shaken, like his men, by an appeal to the traditional values they had learned long before Nazi indoctrination. I do not know. At any rate, he took the decision to show to his men that I was not a pastor, that I was of the Résistance, and that I deserved to be taken out and shot, and the others with me. Of this I was not afraid: My papers were in perfect order. One of my first acts, upon arriving at Lasalle, had been to ask Aimé Soulier, also a member of the town council, for a good and regular set of identity and ration cards. Maurice Pierre Séguy was, according to these now highly official papers (we called them false true cards, to distinguish them from the true false cards which we fabricated) pastor of the Reformed Church of Lasalle. My function was mentioned, prominently, on the identity card. My birth date of 1924 exempted me, still, from the STO service. I seemed to be, though rather young, the person described by the card, which he handed back to me. Yet in doing so he noticed that I was wearing a khaki button-down uniform shirt, which gave me something of a vague military aspect. seizing on this detail, he turned to me with fierce determination and said, "Where did you get this uniform shirt: You must be a member of the Maquis." There was no way in which I could get around the truth, which I told calmly, "I got it from a gendarme." (Indeed, one of the gendarmes of Lasalle, Jean Merell, had been gunned down a few weeks earlier by a man whose papers he had tried to inspect. His widow had sold some of his clothing and I had bought the uniform shirt for a good price.) "Yes, you are one of them," the Lieutenant shouted, "All the gendarmes
are in the Maquis, all of them. You are a traitor. I'll have
you shot immediately!" |
