What Would We Have Done? Lessons From the French Resistance.

Vicki Chelf, Artist, Writer, & Producer

The other day I visited the small Resistance Museum in Aubin that was the catalyst for WOR. Because everything is in French, and French is not my first language, I learn something new each time I visit.

I had previously misunderstood the history of the building. I thought the museum was in the former home of a photographer who had been part of the French Resistance and was murdered by the Nazis. I was wrong.

The photographer was actually a leader of the local Milice, the notoriously brutal French paramilitary organization that collaborated with the Nazis. He was murdered in his own home, shot through an upstairs window. After his death, his daughter became a leader in the Milice. Following the war, she was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. She was eventually pardoned on the condition that she leave the Aveyron and never return.

I found myself thinking about how easy it is to look backward through the clear lens of history and know what was right and what was wrong. Most of us would like to believe that, had we lived through that time, we would have been on the right side.

But would we?

The people living through the Occupation did not know how their stories would end. They faced hunger, fear, propaganda, rumors and conflicting information. They had families to protect.

What would you have been willing to do to save your spouse or child?

What if cooperating with a brutal regime meant putting food on the table? What if denouncing a neighbor meant keeping your own family safe? What if you knew that neighbor was hiding a child—but that child was someone you had never met?

What would you have done?

These are uncomfortable questions because wrongdoing is easy to condemn when we are safely outside the circumstances that produced it. Courage is much harder when doing what you believe is right could mean imprisonment, torture or death.

This is one of the things that strikes me most about the women in WOR. Again and again, their biographies describe how difficult it was to know what was true. Rumors and propaganda were everywhere. People could not always know whom to trust.

We are living in a world where atrocities are still happening. Wars continue. Poverty persists. Biodiversity is collapsing. Our soil, water and air are being damaged by human greed. And once again, we are surrounded by an extraordinary amount of information—and misinformation.

It can be difficult to know what is true. It can be difficult to know whom to trust. It can be difficult to know what side is right.

But history does give us one important warning.

The Nazi regime began by defining certain groups of people as less worthy of dignity, belonging and protection: Jews, Roma and Sinti, Slavic peoples, people with disabilities, political opponents, gay and bisexual men, Jehovah's Witnesses, Black people and Afro-Germans, and others considered undesirable.

Dehumanization is a warning sign.

When a political party, government, religion or ideology tells us that an entire group of human beings is inherently dangerous, inferior, unworthy or less deserving of rights because of who they are, we should pay attention.

We don't have to agree about politics, religion or social issues to recognize that.

We cannot know exactly what we would have done in France in 1943.

But we can ask ourselves a more important question:

What will we do now?

By Vicki Chelf