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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
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Relief Work as Pilgrimage - "Mademoiselle Miss Elsie" in Southern France, 1945-1948 (Hardcover)
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Relief Work as Pilgrimage - "Mademoiselle Miss Elsie" in Southern France, 1945-1948 (Hardcover)
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In 1945, Elsie C. Bechtel left her Ohio home for the tiny French
commune of Lavercantiere, where for nearly three years she cared
for children displaced by the ravages of war. Bechtel's diary,
photographs, and letters home to her family provide the central
texts of this study. From 1945 to 1948, she recorded her encounters
with French society and her immersion in the spare beauty of rural
France. From her daily work came passionate musings on the
emotional world of human interactions and evocative observations of
the American, Spanish, and French co-workers and children with whom
she lived. As a volunteer with the Mennonite Central Committee
(MCC), Bechtel was part of the war relief efforts of pacifist
Quakers and Anabaptists. In France between 1939 and 1948, MCC
programs distributed clothing, shared food, and sheltered refugee
children. The work began in the far southwest of France but, by the
time Bechtel completed her service in 1948, had moved to the Alsace
region, where French Mennonites clustered. Bechtel's writings
emerged from a religious context that included much travel, but
little reflection on the significance of that travel. Yet,
religiously motivated travel-an old tradition in southwest
France-shaped Bechtel's life. The authors consider her experiences
in terms of religious pilgrimage and reflect on their own
pilgrimage to Lavercantiere in 2006 for a reunion with some of the
people marked by the broader effort that Bechtel joined. To
understand Bechtel's experiences and prose, the authors examined
archival sources on MCC's work in France, gathered oral and written
narratives of participants, and researched other war relief efforts
in Spain and France in the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on these
various contexts, the authors establish the complexity, but also
the significance, of pilgrimage and humanitarian service as
intercultural exchanges.
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