January 16, 1943 – Peter Feigl

PETER’S CHILDHOOD

Peter Feigl was born on March 1, 1929, in Berlin, Germany to parents who were Austrian citizens. He was born into a Jewish family, but one that was completely unobservant. As a result, he never really thought of himself as Jewish. In fact, when he was just eight years old, his father had him baptized into the Catholic Church in the hope that this would help Peter escape the rising tide of anti-Jewish Nazi persecution. It didn’t work.  Even though he had become a practicing Catholic, the Nazis still considered Peter to be Jewish. In their eyes, Judaism was a racial identity and a person could not change this through conversion. He was still in danger. 

As their peril from the Nazis steadily grew, Peter’s family moved to Belgium to try to find better circumstances. When the war broke out in the west, they moved on to the unoccupied zone of southern France, soon to be known as Vichy France. Even this move did not lead to safety. 

The Vichy government collaborated with the Germans to enact the same types of anti-Jewish policies already in force in Germany. By July 1942, this meant deportation for foreign Jews. Peter’s parents were able to get him into a Catholic summer camp, but it was a temporary hiding place at best. Just after he arrived at the camp, Peter’s parents were deported.  Peter spent the next several months bouncing from place to place, trying to avoid the police while also hoping to secure passage on a ship to America.  His hopes for leaving France fell through, but he found rescue from another source.

FINDING A SAFE PLACE

In January 1943, people who had been helping Peter were able to send him to Pastor André Trocmé in the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon. Peter wrote of his arrival on January 16. “I took leave, took the first streetcar at 6 a.m. and, at 7:20 a.m., I left aboard the Marseilles-Paris express… I arrived at Saint-Agrève at 11:49 p.m.  The train did not go beyond there. Mr. Trocmé came on his bicycle to meet me (still a young man and very nice). Now we still had to cover 15 kilometers through the snow and a moonlit night. We arrived at Les Grillons at 2:30 a.m. There we ate something warm and then I went to sleep in the annex (I saw only Mr. T.).” 

What Peter did not know at the time, and what his matter-of-fact diary entry could not reveal, was that he was in the care of one of the most successful rescuers of the Holocaust era. In fact, Le Chambon and the surrounding villages sheltered about 5,000 people from the Nazis. Peter was now one of them.

Read excerpts from Peter Feigl’s diary in Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust edited by Alexandra Zapruder.

View a photocopy of one of the pages from Peter’s diary.

Read more about Pastor André Trocmé and the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon.