The War Years and CIMADE

Evdokimov spent the Second World War as a stateless Russian in occupied France, displaced from Menton to Valence, writing a thesis on the problem of evil, nursing a dying wife, and working with CIMADE — the ecumenical relief committee that ran hostels in the internment camps, forged papers, and moved hunted Jews across the Swiss and Spanish frontiers. This file sets out what CIMADE was, what Evdokimov is reported to have done in it, and precisely where the record thins.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What CIMADE Was

The CIMADE — Comité inter-mouvements auprès des évacués — was founded in 1939, at the outbreak of war, by the French Protestant youth movements to assist the populations evacuated from Alsace and Lorraine (Musée protestant, “The Cimade”; Wikipedia, “Cimade”). Its scope widened fast and radically. From 1940 it worked inside the French internment camps of the southern zone — Gurs, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet and others — where the Vichy authorities held foreign Jews, Spanish Republicans and other undesirables; from April 1942 the Vichy authorities permitted CIMADE to open its own residential centres, among them the Coteau Fleuri near Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the Mas du Diable near Tarascon, a house at Vabre in the Tarn, and the Foyer Marie-Durand in Marseille (Musée protestant, “The Cimade”). These “hostels” were legal on paper and were used, in practice, to get people out of the camps and keep them out.

After the German occupation of the southern zone in November 1942, CIMADE, in the words of the Protestant Museum’s account, “fully joined the Resistance, making fake IDs for Jews threatened with deportation and accompanying them to Switzerland” and to Spain (Musée protestant, “The Cimade”; Wikipedia, “Cimade”). Its general secretary Madeleine Barot, and workers such as Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné, ran escape routes over the Haute-Savoie border. This is the organization within which Evdokimov’s wartime service is recorded.

Two features of CIMADE matter for understanding Evdokimov’s presence in it. First, it was Protestant in origin but consciously ecumenical — the “inter-mouvements” of its name — and it drew Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox into a single work; Evdokimov’s lifelong ecumenism (see The Ecumenical Vocation and Vatican II) was not learned at conferences but in this kind of collaboration. Second, its work was overwhelmingly with the stateless: the people in the camps were, in the main, foreigners without papers. Evdokimov was himself a stateless foreigner who had refused naturalization (OFPRA, “Paul Evdokimov, theologian”). He was helping people whose legal condition was his own.

What Evdokimov Did

The biographical notices agree on the substance. During the war, alongside caring for his wife Natasha, who was dying of cancer, and pursuing his doctoral research on evil in Dostoevsky, “he assisted refugees and Jews through CIMADE” (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”). Andrew Louth’s account, followed by the standard reference notices, states that Evdokimov “became involved in the French Resistance via the Cimade refugee aid group,” and that this work continued after the war’s end (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, 161, as cited in Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov”). OFPRA’s notice, framing him as one of France’s notable refugees, records that “after World War II, Evdokimov dedicated himself to refugee assistance work with CIMADE,” managing reception facilities and a student residence (OFPRA, “Paul Evdokimov, theologian”).

[Disputed: the chronology and extent of Evdokimov's Resistance work. The sources do not line up cleanly. (a) *Omnes* places the assistance to refugees and Jews through CIMADE **during** the war, alongside the thesis and his wife's illness. (b) The account derived from Louth places his involvement with CIMADE and the Resistance in the period around and after the family's return to Paris at the end of the war, noting that "this work continued after the end of the war" — a formulation that at least implies wartime beginnings, but whose placement in the narrative is ambiguous. (c) OFPRA emphasizes the **postwar** refugee work and does not describe wartime clandestine activity. The collection therefore reports as established that Evdokimov worked with CIMADE and that this work included help to refugees and to Jews; it reports the wartime dating as well attested but not beyond dispute; and it does not attempt to specify operations, routes, numbers of people helped, or a formal Resistance affiliation, none of which the accessible sources supply.]

What can be said with confidence is contextual and still substantial. Evdokimov was, from 1940, a stateless Russian in a France that interned and then deported such people. He was living in the Drôme, in the southern zone, in the region where CIMADE’s rescue network was densest — Valence lies between Lyon and the Vivarais plateau of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the most famous rescue centre in France. He was working for an organization that from November 1942 was, as an institution, forging identity papers for Jews and guiding them to the Swiss border. To have been “involved with CIMADE” in the Drôme in 1943 was not a nominal thing.

The Refusal to Dramatize

Evdokimov himself did not make a story of it. There is no memoir of the war years in his corpus, no chapter of reminiscence, no self-description as a résistant. His war appears in his books only obliquely — in the seriousness with which he takes evil, in the refusal of any easy theodicy, and above all in the theme that dominates his later writing: that the Christian’s place is not apart from the world’s suffering but inside it, and that hospitality is a sacramental act. When he later wrote of the layman’s “priesthood” exercised in the ordinary, he had in mind, among other things, this.

The comparison that presses itself is with Mother Maria Skobtsova and the community of the rue de Lourmel, arrested in February 1943 for precisely this kind of work; Mother Maria died at Ravensbrück in March 1945 and Fr. Dimitri Klépinine at Dora in February 1944, and both were glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2004 (see St. Maria of Paris). Evdokimov was not arrested and did not die. This guide draws the comparison to locate him in a milieu — the Russian Paris that turned its charitable networks into rescue networks — and not to claim for him what belongs to them.

Aftermath

The end of the war brought the death of Natasha Brunel from cancer and the family’s return to Paris (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov”; Omnes, dating her death to 1945). Evdokimov emerged from the occupation a widower with two teenage children, a doctorate, no permanent post, and a set of practical skills — running a house full of frightened strangers — that he would use for the next twenty-three years. That work is the subject of the next file.

References

Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK / Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015, 161. (Evdokimov’s involvement with the French Resistance via CIMADE, continuing after the war.)
Musée protestant. “The Cimade.” (Foundation in 1939 by the French Protestant youth movements for the evacuees of Alsace-Lorraine; work in the Vichy internment camps; the April 1942 residential centres at Coteau Fleuri near Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Mas du Diable near Tarascon, Vabre, and the Foyer Marie-Durand in Marseille; after November 1942, full entry into the Resistance, false papers for Jews, and escorted escapes to Switzerland and Spain.)
Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (OFPRA). “Paul Evdokimov, theologian,” Famous Refugees image gallery. (Postwar refugee assistance with CIMADE; management of reception facilities and a student residence; refusal of French nationality.)
Omnes. “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon.” (Assistance to refugees and Jews through CIMADE during the war, alongside care for his dying wife and doctoral research; his wife’s death in 1945.)
Wikipedia. “Cimade.” (Institutional history, camp work, and Resistance activity.)
Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov.” (The move to Valence under the Italian occupation of Menton; Brunel’s death at the end of the war; the return to Paris; involvement with the Resistance via CIMADE, citing Louth.)
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.” (The rescue network of the Vivarais plateau, in whose region Evdokimov was living.)