Magda Trocmé papers

The Magda Trocmé papers comprise a letter and a framed photograph. The letter was written by Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig in 1944 in New York after the liberation of France, describes how much Elizabeth misses the Trocmé family, and tells them about her experiences as a recent refugee to the United States. The framed photograph depicts Magda Trocmé's children, Nelly and Jean Pierre, and their dog Fido at the door of the Rectory in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Magda Trocmé described this door as "one that let through many refugees and was never closed." Magda Trocmé (1901-1996) was born Magda Grilli di Cortona in Florence, Italy. Her father was an engineer and former colonel in the Italian cavalry, and her paternal grandfather was a refugee from Czarist Russia. While a convent student, she rejected the Church and embraced Protestantism. She attended the old School of Social Work in New York on scholarship. In 1925 in New York, she met André Pascal Trocmé (1901-1971), a Protestant from northern France who was studying at the Union Theological Seminary. They were married in 1926 and had two children, Nelly and Jean Pierre. André Trocmé was assigned to be pastor of the French Reformed Church in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. He founded l'école nouvelle Cévenole, the first secondary school in the area, in 1938, and Magda taught Italian there. In its first years l'école Cévenole provided schooling and positions for refugee children and academics who settled in the region. Magda also provided immediate assistance to the many refugees who appeared at the door of the pastor's residence seeking aid, and she sheltered several refugees in her own home over the course of the war years. The Trocmés’ rescue efforts have been credited with saving some 5,000 refugees, about 3,500 of them Jewish, many of them children. After the war the Trocmés moved to Versailles, where they worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a non-denominational pacifist organization headquartered in New York, and then to Geneva. Magda retired to Paris following her husband’s death in 1971.