India, June 19 -- What do the Holocaust, a global brand of bottled water, and the just-signed Iran-US peace deal have in common? The once-small town of Evian-les-Bains, located on the shores of Lake Geneva in France, has been the stage for all three. It hosted the Evian Conference of 1938, in which 32 nations participated, but only two - the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica - agreed to take in Jews who were being forcibly evicted from Nazi Germany by Adolf Hitler. The US refused to increase its quota of Jewish immigrants from 10,000 to 30,000, and the few other Western countries present also declined to increase their intake.

Evian was a small hamlet until the 1790s. Blessed with many natural springs and surrounded by Alpine forests and...