Village of Scoundrels

by Margi Preus

  But not faster than a speeding bullet, Jules tried to say. Wanted to say. It would make them laugh, he thought. But the words wouldn’t come. They were there in his mind but couldn’t reach his mouth somehow.

  “Keep breathing, tiger,” Jean-Paul whispered as he washed the blood from the boy’s chest. “Your mama’s got a lamp burning in the window.” He thought of how the boy had come to him just when he’d needed him, somehow unbidden—like an angel, sort of. A strange, scoundrelly angel.

  Some of the Scouts peeled the paper wrapping off bandages and handed them to Philippe, who stood waiting while the wound was cleansed. “Think of what you’ve lived through already,” Philippe said to Jules. “Think of all the cold winter nights you’ve survived, trudging through the deep snow. You can make it. You are tough, tough as that billy goat of yours. What’s his name? What do you call him?”

  “Perdant,” Jean-Paul said, chuckling. The others glanced at the policeman, who was slumped against a wall, useless.

  Perdant looked up. The scoundrel had named a billy goat after him? That probably wasn’t a compliment.

  “How could you?” Céleste directed her ire at the policeman, who had his hands tucked into his armpits where he leaned on the wall. “Shooting a little boy like that?” She turned away from him and went to the window, where she stared out, trying to control her anger.

  “It was an accident,” Perdant said weakly. He was dizzy. He had to clench his teeth to keep them from chattering. But he’d been looking around. He had figured out a few things. Those Scouts, for instance. He had taken a good look at them, and it had begun to dawn on him who they really were. That Jean-Paul. He was one of the people Perdant suspected of forging papers. The redhead—Philippe, his name was. Wasn’t he supposed to be in jail? The girl—he didn’t know what she’d been doing here, but it had probably been illegal. There was that yellow suitcase full of contraband. And the multiple bootprints on the dusty floor—those hadn’t escaped his attention.

  But now these people were saving the life of the boy he had shot. And he was grateful. But he knew something they did not: The police were on their way. He didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.

  “Jules shared his meal with me one cold winter’s night,” Philippe was saying. “He said he was king of this château. Said he’d played here back when he was a kid.”

  From her place by the window, Céleste said, “As if he isn’t still a kid. Or should be.”

  Philippe glanced over his shoulder at her. “Jules told me he knew the secret of this place. And that he’d show me.”

  “What did that mean?” Jean-Paul said. “And give me one of those bandages.”

  Philippe handed him a bandage and watched as Jean-Paul expertly began to wrap the boy’s chest. “Jules,” he said softly. “Hey. What’s the secret?”

  Jules heard all this as if from a far distance. I do know its secret, he wanted to tell them. I know something important about this château. But the words didn’t reach his mouth.

  Philippe looked up at Perdant and said, “This boy is worth a dozen of you. If he dies . . .”

  Philippe didn’t finish his sentence, but Perdant knew what he’d wanted to say: “I’ll kill you.” It’s too late for that, Perdant thought. I am as good as dead. He already knew too much and had seen too much. Had put two and two together. His life was not worth much now.

  The question was: What should he do with what was left of it?

  »«

  Perdant became aware of a rumbling vibration under his feet: Cars. Motorcycles.

  “You should get out,” he said, “all of you—now!”

  Heads turned toward Perdant, and then toward the door, as the policeman pushed it open. The sound of car and motorcycle engines muscled its way into the chateau.

  Perdant stepped outside and walked down the steps. Glancing down, he noticed the dark bloodstain on the lighter gravel. He rubbed at it with his foot, then noticed that the trail stretched all the way down the gravel drive and onto the road he had walked with Jules.

  A jumble of cars and motorcycles roared through the open gate—why hadn’t he at least closed the gate? It would have given him another minute to think. But no, in they drove, tires crunching on the gravel, parking helter-skelter. Car doors flew open and policemen and gendarmes leaped out. Seeing the blood-soaked Perdant, they drew their guns and took cover.

  Perdant waved a hand at them, dismissing their concern. “There’s no danger!” he shouted. “Put your guns away.”

  While the others put away their weapons, the senior police officer approached Perdant. “You’re hurt!” he said.

  “You should see the other fellow,” Perdant said, making a weak joke. “I’m fine,” he added, although he felt like he might vomit.

  “Where is the other fellow?” the police captain asked.

  Perdant indicated the trail of blood leading away, and the policeman directed a few gendarmes to follow the blood trail, then others to search around the outside of the château. Perdant stood helplessly watching. He felt as transparent as the spiderwebs that draped over the fields, as ephemeral as the dew that made them shimmer in the early-morning sun.

  “What about in there?” the police officer said, nodding at the château. “Anyone in there?”

  »«

  Inside the chateau, Jules was thinking of sunlight, the peculiar flickering sunlight of the forest, filtered through gently swaying pine boughs. He knew how to get from here to there, to that light. He’d done it before, and he wanted to tell his friends the way. He could hear the others talking, and he tried to bring the words from his mind to his mouth. But they wouldn’t come.

  He felt the calm, steady hands of Jean-Paul bandaging his chest and heard Jean-Paul quietly telling the others to “go the back way. All of you.”

  He heard the scrape of feet on the floor, the quiet jangle of buckles as rucksacks were hoisted onto shoulders, a suitcase being snapped shut. Words were spoken in hoarse whispers, and a strange calm pervaded the room.

  “That’s not going to work,” Céleste said, her voice drifting over from near the window. “There are gendarmes prowling everywhere. They’re surrounding the château.”

  Jules wanted to say the words that clung to his mind but wouldn’t make the journey to his throat. What he knew about the château.

  “We have false papers now,” one of the Scouts was saying. “Maybe we can talk our way out of it.”

  “You have your real papers, too. Unless you want to burn them?”

  “But we have to have our real papers for when we get to Switzerland! If we only have French identities, they will send us back to France.”

  “And, anyway, Perdant knows who you are,” Céleste reminded them.

  Go to the cellar, and find the wall that looks like a wall but is really a door. I can show you how it opens, Jules wanted to say, but it seemed he needed chest muscles to talk—even his feeble whisper sent ripples of bright pain through the agony that consumed him. The hidden door in the cellar leads to a passage that turns into a tunnel. In the tunnel we will have to go one by one, feeling along with our hands, and follow it farther and farther, then up and up until the tunnel opens into a cave, a cave deep in the forest. But first, we only have to go down the stairs, Jules wanted to say, tasting the words on his tongue, the stairs just there, around that corner.

  “Maybe there’s somewhere we can hide,” one of the boys was saying, but Jules knew there was not a closet or even a door to hide behind. No, there was only one way out, and he was the only one who knew it. His friends had saved his life. Now he needed to save theirs. He pried open his eyes and then his mouth, took a breath, and, despite the pain, managed a raspy croak that got the room’s attention. In the silence that followed, he pushed out the words, “I know a way out.”

  »«

  With a dozen policemen behind him, Perdant once again stood in front of the château doors. Worn bare of paint and touched by the first rays of morning sun, the gray wood gle
amed like silver. Like the gates to heaven, he imagined.

  Then the police captain pushed open the doors and the policemen poured into the château and began their hunt. They raced down the corridors, poked into rooms, disappearing into the shadowy darkness. Perdant stayed in the foyer. He felt the emptiness of the place—felt it all the way to the core of his being. A cool breeze whistled through the rooms and through him, carrying away the last shreds of his former self.

  The abandoned rooms, the dim, unfurnished recesses, the gaping hole in the roof through which sunlight now streamed, the hollow echo of the policemen’s voices calling to one another. He knew there was no one to find.

  Were they ever here at all, or had he dreamed them? No, they’d been here, infusing the place with light, filling the space with their energy and passion and something that he now recognized as hope. Where were they now?

  Somehow they had gotten out.

  He imagined them by now moving among the pines, their feet silent on the forest floor, Jules carried along in someone’s arms as sunlight dappled the path ahead, showing them the way.

  EPILOGUE

  THE REAL PEOPLE WHO INSPIRED THIS STORY

  This story is based on the true story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and nearby villages in south central France, where the pastors, teachers, villagers, and a number of teenagers helped shelter and sometimes smuggle to safety possibly thousands of war refugees along with Jewish children and teens rescued from French concentration camps.

  PIERRE PITON

  The character of Philippe was inspired by Pierre Piton, who came to Le Chambon at the age of seventeen. He enrolled at the unique private high school, L’Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole (see this page), but soon got involved in clandestine work, which left him little time to study. He was first put to work bringing refugees to farms around the plateau, and often used his sled to transport their things and then himself back to the village.

  Pierre then became a passeur, a people smuggler. Wearing his Scout uniform, he helped refugees get over the border to Switzerland. The “rules” as they are stated in this story, the route, and the circumstances of Philippe’s arrest and release are based on Pierre’s experiences. After his release from prison he returned to Le Chambon and continued to be involved in resistance work, although not as a passeur. Or at least not very often.

  Little is known about what happened to him after the war, except that he kept moving—all the way to Africa, where he helped local people set up businesses.

  LEFT TO RIGHT: NELLY TROCMÉ, MARCO DARCISSAC, AND CATHERINE CAMBESSÉDÈS

  Céleste was inspired by Catherine Cambessédès Colburn, who carried a number of messages for the maquis. She and her family were from Paris but always spent their summers in Le Chambon and were there on June 22, 1940, when France capitulated to Nazi Germany. Catherine still vividly recalls the declaration that Pastor André Trocmé (Pastor Autin) and Pastor Edouard Theis pronounced the next day, a Sunday.

  Catherine’s father returned to Paris after the vacation, but her mother and three of her siblings stayed in Le Chambon for two years, and Catherine attended L’Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, the private high school. “I bloomed and blossomed with that system,” she says, remembering her experience there. It was very different from typical French schools that were heavy on discipline and “used ridicule to achieve results.”

  Although she says she was quite afraid and therefore “not very good at it,” she began to carry messages, contraband, and money for the maquis. The adventures of the character Céleste—traveling by train and bus to deliver a message, having to swallow the message, and experiencing a bombing—are based on Catherine’s recollections of her experiences, as is the nighttime tandem bicycle ride and sleeping in a grotto full of maquisards. Céleste’s experience with the suitcase almost being carried away on a flatcar is also based on Catherine’s own recollections.

  After the war Catherine studied at the Sorbonne in Paris but secured a scholarship to Mills College in California. She met her husband in California, where she raised a family, taught French at Stanford University, and then private lessons until recently.

  OSCAR ROSOWSKY, WEARING THE JACKET IN WHICH PAPERS COULD BE HIDDEN

  Due to a Vichy law preventing Jews from studying or working in law, medicine, and many other professions, Oscar Rosowsky (Jean-Paul) was not allowed to attend medical school. Instead, he got a job as an office equipment repairman in Nice. This gave him access to the local prefect’s office, its typewriter, and the prefect’s official stamp. He was seventeen when he forged a letter requesting the release of his mother from the Rivesaltes internment camp. It worked, and mother and son reunited in Nice. They heard the Le Chambon plateau was a safe place and decided to go there. By this time Oscar had changed his name to Jean-Claude Pluntz, and later to Jean-Claude Plunne.

  On the plateau, Oscar and his mother lived apart—it was safer that way. Oscar lived for a time at Beau Soleil, a boardinghouse for high school students. There he became friends with the other residents who had some experience forging identity cards and other official papers. Together they set up a full-time forgery operation.

  They realized the operation should be moved from their boardinghouse, and Oscar found a suitable place at the farm of Henri and Emma Héritier. There the young forger was able to turn out up to fifty documents a week. When raids were imminent, his forgery materials were hidden in a couple of unoccupied beehives.

  Frenchmen at the time carried a half dozen documents, including an identity card, a military booklet, a certificate of demobilization, a work certificate, and ration cards for food, clothing, and other items, as well as the extra documents Oscar dubbed “plausibility papers.” He was delighted to get his own “plausibility paper” when a policeman stopped him one night and gave him a ticket for riding his bicycle without a light.

  Still hoping to become a doctor, Oscar forged himself a medical student ID and began taking classes at the university. One day, German police emptied the classrooms and searched students. Unfortunately, Oscar was carrying forged documents in the secret pockets built into his jacket. Although he almost escaped down a back stairway, as in Jean-Paul’s story, Oscar was searched but ultimately saved thanks to a tin of throat lozenges. He kept the little box his whole life.

  After the war, Oscar completed medical school and became a doctor. He lived in Paris, where he also served as president of the General Medical Council of France.

  HANNE AND MAX IN SWITZERLAND IN THE FALL OF 1944

  When they were teenagers, Hanne Hirsch and Max Liebmann (Henni and Max) were deported from Germany to Gurs, a French concentration camp. There they met and fell in love. Hanne was rescued from the camp by the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) and brought to Le Chambon when she was seventeen years old. She, along with seven others who’d also come from Gurs, lived at La Guespy (the Wasps’ Nest). In August 1942, her mother, who was still being held in the camp, became ill and sent for her. By the time Hanne arrived, her mother was about to be deported, along with a thousand other detainees. Hanne walked nineteen kilometers to the freight yard and slept on the street overnight for a chance to see her. A gendarme who helped Hanne told her, “What goes on here tears my heart out.” Hanne was able to spend about an hour with her mother before the train left. The last vestige Hanne saw of her was a little white handkerchief waving through the slats of the boxcar door.

  From there, Hanne, who was traveling without false papers, took a train to see Max, who had been released from Gurs not long before and was staying at a Jewish Boy Scout camp. Hanne barely missed the ID check on the train, having fallen asleep on a pile of canvas mailbags in the mail car.

  The camp had so far been tolerated, but its situation was becoming more tenuous. Hanne told Max, “If you’re not safe here, come to Le Chambon.”

  After Hanne returned to Le Chambon, there were raids. Hanne hid in the woods with other young people from La Guespy and L’Abric, another house sheltering children. Because the raids continued
for three weeks, the children and young people were taken to farms where they would be safer. Hanne stayed at two different farms. At the first one, she and the other girl sheltered there had to hide in a specially rigged woodpile when the gendarmes came searching. At the second farm, the two girls hid in an upstairs armoire (a freestanding closet) while a gendarme talked to the farmer on the first floor. From her hiding place, Hanne could hear the conversation downstairs.

  “Are you hiding any Jews?” the gendarme asked.

  “I’m not hiding anybody,” the farmer said. “And I don’t know what Jews look like.”

  The gendarme went on his way.

  Max was still staying at the Scout Camp when they were warned there would be raids. When the leaders of the camp failed to provide safe haven for Max and a few others, Max and another young man made their way to Le Chambon as per Hanne’s suggestion.

  There Max ran into Hanne by chance. When he whistled at her, she ignored him until her friend made her turn around.

  Max, age twenty-one, was sheltered in a hayloft at a farm for about three weeks before he was supplied with false papers obtained for him by Mireille Philip (see this page), and in September 1942, he made for the border, hiking over the high mountains into Switzerland. Somewhere in the mountains, he buried his false identification card as he’d been requested to do—this was to protect the rescue operation in Le Chambon—fully knowing that without an ID, he could not go back to France.

  Then, on the way down the mountain, he was caught by Swiss border police and taken to a mountain hostel where thirty others were also being detained. The next morning, the guard told them they would all have to go back to France.

  As the detainees headed back up the mountain toward the border, one of the guards following behind shouted instructions at them. “Do not come back to Switzerland!” he yelled, then continued telling them what they should not do. Max realized that what the man was saying not to do was exactly what he should do to get safely into Switzerland.