The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  In the British House of Commons, on September 8, Winston Churchill referred to the deportations from France during the course of a comprehensive survey of the war situation. The ‘brutal persecutions’ in which the Germans had indulged, he said, ‘in every land into which their armies have broken’, had recently been augmented by ‘the most bestial, the most squalid and the most senseless of all their offences, namely the mass deportation of Jews from France, with the pitiful horrors attendant upon the calculated and final scattering of families’. Churchill added: ‘This tragedy fills me with astonishment as well as with indignation, and it illustrates as nothing else can the utter degradation of the Nazi nature and theme, and the degradation of all who lend themselves to its unnatural and perverted passions.’8

  In the days following Churchill’s speech, The Times continued to report the deportation of Jews from France, and to stress the opposition of the French people to the collaboration of the Vichy government in these measures. On September 9, it published news of the dismissal by the Vichy authorities of General de St-Vincent, the Military Governor of Lyons, who had ‘refused to obey Vichy’s order’ on August 28 ‘to cooperate in the mass arrests of Jews in the unoccupied zone’. General de St-Vincent had, it appeared, refused to place his troops at the disposal of the authorities in order to round up Jews.

  The news item of September 9 also reported the Vichy order of August 28 for the arrest of all Roman Catholic priests who were sheltering Jews in the Unoccupied Zone. ‘Some arrests’, it added, had already been made. In reply to these arrests, Cardinal Gerlier issued a ‘defiant refusal’ to surrender those Jewish children whose parents had already been deported, and who were being ‘fed and sheltered’ in Roman Catholic homes.9 Two days later, a news item in The Times on September 11 reported ‘popular indignation’ in Lyons following the arrest and imprisonment of eight Jesuit priests who had refused to surrender ‘several hundred’ children for deportation; children whom they had kept hidden ‘in buildings belonging to the religious order’. The Times also reported that the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, had informed the French Ambassador to the Vatican ‘that the conduct of the Vichy government towards Jews and Foreign refugees was a gross infraction’ of the Vichy government’s own principles, and was ‘irreconcilable with the religious feelings which Marshal Pétain had so often invoked in his speeches’.10

  THE RESCUE EFFORTS made by individuals in France were remarkable. Near Paris, Germaine Le Henaff hid a number of Jewish children in the Château de la Guette children’s home, of which she was the director, giving them false, non-Jewish-sounding names, and enabling them to blend in with the 120 Christian children already in the home. She was the only person in the home who knew that the newcomers were Jewish.11

  A French farmer, Albert Masse, held out the hand of rescue to nine-year-old Karl Haussmann, who later recalled: ‘The French family who took me into their home in the Ardèche region of France were poor farmers who lived on a parcel of rocky land. They had at that time one cow that was used for ploughing and to pull the wagon. Also some goats and chickens and rabbits that were raised for food. These were the people who hid me from the German occupiers and saved me from the fate that befell my family.’

  Karl Haussmann was born in a small German town near Mannheim, and deported with his family to Gurs in October 1940. His parents and older brother had been deported from France to Auschwitz on 11 September 1942, and gassed. He had been fortunate to be taken out of Gurs and sent to a children’s home, then to the farmer. ‘I am the lone survivor of my family and probably the only survivor from the Jewish community from the town where I was born.’12

  When a Jewish family came to the farm of Pierre and Louise Hebras, at Romanet, near Limoges, and sought shelter, mother, son and two young daughters were found a hiding place on the farm itself, while the father, to reduce the risk of detection, was taken to the village and hidden in the attic under the farmhouse roof. The villagers kept the secret.13

  In the tiny village of La Caillaudière, in the Indre region, Juliette and Gaston Patoux saved a Jewish girl, Felice Zimmern, from deportation. ‘I was in a terrible condition when I arrived. I was very small, thin, and had sores all over my body, which, no doubt, was a result of malnutrition.’ Born in Germany on 18 October 1939, she too was taken with her parents and sister Beate to Gurs in October 1940. Her parents were then deported to Auschwitz and killed. Juliette and Gaston Patoux were farmers—a typical French peasant couple, and yet not typical. ‘They took care and protected me as if I was their own child. I lived with them for approximately three-and-a-half years, until I was five and a half. Through their loving care, I learned to think of them as my mother and father.’14

  Felice recalled: ‘When I asked Madame Patoux years later how I came to be placed in their home she answered: “Oh, I don’t know, someone came out of the forest and asked me if I wanted to take in a little Jewish girl; and I answered yes.” From the beginning, they treated me wonderfully. They made me feel as if I was their child. I slept in the same room with them as they diligently nursed me back to health.’

  Felice Zimmern added: ‘M. Patoux put together a doll’s carriage, which was customized for me; it had very small wheels to match the carriage to my height. My charming little carriage had a bonnet on top to protect it against the weather and a little skirt around the sides. They also provided me with a lovely little doll, which I cherished and called my “ya-ya”. On my fifth birthday they made me feel very special. They stood me up on a chair in front of them and gave me a present of a bouquet of flowers as the family clapped and cheered.’15

  Rescue had constant dangers: ‘Because of me, the Patoux were always afraid of being caught by the Nazis and were always ready to run. To prepare for that eventuality, Madame Patoux always slept in her slip.’ But the villagers connived in the life-saving deception: ‘The people of the village treated me as the Patoux child. I went to church with the Patoux. No one gave me away, and I did not know I was Jewish.’

  At the end of the war, Felice Zimmern, then just five and a half years old, was reunited with her sister, who had been in hiding elsewhere. A Jewish organization placed them in Jewish orphanages in France, to get them back into Jewish surroundings. ‘The separation from the Patoux was very painful for me as they were my “Mémé” and “Pépé”.’16

  In Poitiers, an employee in the town hall gave the Hoffnung family—refugees from Metz, near the German border—false identity cards, deliberately leaving out the Jewish stamp. Later, a non-Jewish classmate of the young Martha Hoffnung warned the family of an imminent round-up, and insisted that the Hoffnungs go to her parents’ home for safety. Then the family was taken to the border between German-occupied and Vichy France. ‘Other townsfolk watched Martha and her mother push Martha’s grandmother across the border on a bicycle without denouncing them.’17

  In Solignac, a French Jewish girl, Inès Dreyfus (later Vromen), and her mother were helped by several non-Jews in turn. Inès later recalled the days after her father’s arrest on 1 September 1943, when, at the railway station in Roanne, ‘my mother, in desperation, bought train tickets for Limoges. We spent a terrible night on the train, switched train in Limoges, arrived at Solignac early morning. Mme Schenherr was going to early Mass. I met her on the road, and she simply said: “Your parents have been arrested, haven’t they? You were right to come to me.”’ (My mother and grandmother, exhausted, were trudging behind with the suitcases.) The Schenherrs were living in two rooms—the husband always in bed—on the second floor, no running water, you had to get it from the pump. After a couple of days we found a room to sleep, in the village of Solignac, but spent the day at their place, cooking and washing together, and trying to get enough food for eight people, running to remote farms, gathering wood, apples, chestnuts.’

  Inès Vromen recalled that a priest from Alsace, Robert Bengel, ‘had our papers forged so that our name would be Diener instead of Dreyfus’. He then registered Inès with a Catholi
c correspondence course so that she could continue with her studies: ‘I was fourteen at the time. He always kept in touch with us, even when we had left Solignac, which we did between Christmas 1943 and New Year: we had to leave, we were endangering the Schenherrs.’

  Inès Vromen and her mother moved to the village of Panazol in the Haute-Vienne. A farmer, Monsieur Faye, who was also the mayor of the village, rented them an abandoned farm on his estate, ‘and issued for us new “clean” identity papers (much safer than ours)’.18

  In Montauban, near Toulouse, as the mass deportation of Jews from throughout France was being carried out, a French Catholic woman, Marie-Rose Gineste, rode her bicycle many miles, carrying with her a clandestine pastoral letter from the Bishop of Montauban, Pierre-Marie Théas, denouncing ‘the uprooting of men and women, treated as wild animals’, and calling on Catholics to protect Jews. She began her ride on Friday, 28 August 1942, and, cycling for two days from dawn to dusk, ensured that the letter could be read out in more than forty parishes during the Sunday morning service.

  The French resistance ensured that the text reached London, from where it was relayed back to France over the BBC’s Ici Londres daily broadcasts, which were listened to on tens of thousands of hidden radios. The impact was immediate. ‘Historians now see it as marking a turning point in the Catholic Church’s earlier passive attitude towards the Vichy regime,’ Mordecai Paldiel told the journalist Philip Jacobson, who went on to recount how, as the deportation of Jews continued, Marie-Rose Gineste accepted the mission of finding safe houses for Jewish fugitives in the Montauban diocese. Dr Paldiel noted that she was also responsible for pilfering food ration cards from the authorities (sometimes aided by sympathetic officials for use by underground Jewish organizations).

  ‘Like all those who resisted the Germans,’ notes Philip Jacobson, who had just interviewed her for the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Mrs Gineste was in constant danger of being denounced by an informer and interrogated under torture, but her profound faith never wavered.’19

  At the Convent of Aubazine, near Brive in the Corrèze region, the Mother Superior, Sister Marie-Gonzague Bredoux, provided Sabbath candles—taken from the convent chapel—and set aside special Passover dishes, for the twelve Jewish girls between the ages of six and twelve, and one pregnant Jewish woman, under her care.20

  In Paris itself, Mother Maria—Elizabeth Skobtsova, a Russian Orthodox nun—made use of her small convent to hide Jews who were on their way to more secure hiding places. This was only a small portion of her multifaceted rescue operation. Working closely with a fellow Russian émigré, the Russian Orthodox priest Father Klepinin, she collected food and clothing for Jews who were interned in the housing complex at Drancy, in a Paris suburb, where Jews were brought from all over France before deportation. She connived with the French garbage collectors to smuggle several children out of Drancy in garbage bins. She also supervised the production of false documents, and established contact with other groups to facilitate rescue. Father Klepinin issued false baptism certificates for those seeking new identities as non-Jews.

  On 8 February 1943 Mother Maria and Father Klepinin were arrested by the Gestapo. Maria readily admitted to the charge of helping Jews elude the round-ups. She was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died from exhaustion on 31 March 1945, a few days before the camp was liberated. Father Klepinin had perished earlier, in February 1944, in the Dora-Mittelbau slave labour camp.21

  Like Mother Maria, Sofka Skipwith was also an émigré from Russia. Married to an Englishman, she had lived between the wars in both England and France. During the war she was interned as an enemy civilian in the spa town of Vittel, in one of the resort hotels. Some 250 Polish Jews, brought from Warsaw early in 1943, were also interned there, in much harsher conditions, although they held passports and visas for various Latin American countries: among them were the Jewish poet Yitzhak Katzenelson and his son Zwi.

  On one occasion Sofka Skipwith was asked to help save a baby boy whose parents had just been taken away in the first deportation of Vittel Jews, on 18 April 1944. ‘We had been told’, recalled Madeleine White, her friend and fellow internee, ‘where we should take the baby and we cut the barbed wire the day before as usual. It was a place away from the hotels, quiet, among bushes and trees and we knew the time schedule of the sentinels. Sofka had fetched the baby at the last minute from the hospital asleep in a cardboard box, which had contained food sent by the Red Cross. I never knew whether it was a boy or a girl. At the appointed place we saw a woman hiding behind a tree; she gave a signal. I crawled under the wires (because I was smaller than Sofka) and over the space in between the three rows of barbed wire, pushing the box in front of me. I pushed it towards the waiting hands. After the war Sofka received news through the Red Cross that the baby had safely arrived and was being brought up in a kibbutz.’

  Madeleine White recalled other cases where Sofka Skipwith was active in rescue work. One concerned a child of ten who was ‘smuggled out and hidden in Paris until the liberation; her upkeep was paid for; her father managed to jump from the train in which he was being taken with the others to Drancy and later joined her.’ Another was a baby only weeks old, ‘taken out through the barbed wire and entrusted to a person outside. Later the child reached Israel. (For these exits through barbed wire Sofka had a pair of wire cutters hidden in her mattress.)’ Then there was Felix Eisenstadt, who was officially sent by the Germans to the American hospital in Paris to be operated on. ‘With the help of a French doctor we knew in Paris, he was hidden after the operation and awaited the liberation in hiding.’22

  Another of those whom Sofka Skipwith helped to survive was a Polish Jew, Hillel Seidman, who, Madeleine White recalled, ‘never slept two nights running in the same room between the second deportation and the liberation of Vittel camp in September 1944. Sofka, myself and others did what we could to save him and his friends.’23

  Sofka Skipwith also managed to smuggle out of Vittel an appeal for help to the British Foreign Office, with a list of Jewish internees. She wrote the list in tiny handwriting on flimsy cigarette paper, so that if the courier were caught he could swallow the list. As a result of her efforts the British government made ninety Palestine certificates available for Jews at Vittel, and asked the Swiss government to forward them. One of the Jews on her list was Katzenelson. Unfortunately, when the certificates arrived on 15 July 1944, the Jews had gone. The second and final deportation had been on May 16, back to Poland, and to Auschwitz.24

  In a letter to Yad Vashem when her case for an award was being considered (it was finally granted, as a result of the persistence of a British Jewish scholar, Dr Oppenheim, after her death), Sofka Skipwith wrote: ‘Sadly my efforts in the internment camp of Vittel did not succeed in saving Jewish lives, but I feel proud to be among those who attempted.’25

  A NUMBER OF French villages acted collectively to take in Jewish children and to shield them from deportation. The story of these villages is a high point in the narrative of rescue. Following the round-up of Jews in Paris on 16 July 1942, more than forty children were given sanctuary in the village of Chavagnes-en-Paillers, in the northern Vendée. One of them, Odette Meyers, later recalled: ‘Although we kept our Eastern European Jewish names, we were passed off as children of Catholic prisoners of war, sent to the nuns’ school. We learned to say our prayers and not to pay attention to the many German soldiers in the priests’ seminary across the street. We were treated well and we had as normal a Catholic childhood as children separated from their Jewish parents could have. After the war, we were fetched back to Paris.’ She added: ‘It did not occur to us that we had not been the only Jewish children to be saved by local families.’26

  The most remarkable of all the village rescues took place in and around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in south central France. Le Chambon is part of a group of villages, mostly Protestant, on the Vivarais-Lignon plateau. Most of the inhabitants were the descendants of Huguenots who had known long periods of
persecution and massacre at the hands of the King of France and his compatriots; but devout Roman Catholics, and those whose Christian belief was minimal, shared with the Protestant majority in the acts of rescue. The three thousand inhabitants of Le Chambon, like those of the surrounding villages, were asked by two Protestant pastors, André Trocmé and Edouard Théis, to offer shelter to Jews even at the risk of their own lives. In those villages, whose own population together did not exceed five thousand, as many as three and a half thousand Jews were given sanctuary at different times, and survived the war.

  An active and outspoken pacifist, Pastor Trocmé had been posted in 1934 to the remote region by his church, the Eglise Reformée de France, which hoped thereby to restrict his influence. A year before the outbreak of war he had founded the first secondary school on the plateau, based on principles of tolerance and internationalism, and had brought in Théis to be the headmaster.

  Trocmé’s wife Magda, of mixed Italian and Russian parentage, whom he had met while studying theology in New York in 1926, gave immediate help to any refugees who came to their door, and then put them in contact with those in the village, and in other villages on the plateau, who could give them shelter.27

  Several homes were set up on the Vivarais-Lignon plateau under the auspices of different Christian relief organizations for Jewish children, including four institutions run by Secours Suisse aux Enfants (Swiss Children’s Aid). Other children were placed in private homes and boarding houses in the villages, and on farms in the surrounding countryside.

  Built in 1938 to accommodate fourteen local children, the College of Cévenol saw its student body expanding hugely with the arrival of 220 Jewish refugees fleeing from the internment camps to the south. The children, like their parents and other adults, were welcomed without hesitation. They were housed on farms or in hotels and were hidden in the countryside whenever the Germans came through. ‘As soon as the soldiers left, we would go into the forest and sing a song,’ recalled August Bohny, who ran a boarding house for Jewish students. ‘When they heard that song, the Jews knew it was safe to come home.’ Whenever possible, the refugees were sent by means of a well-organized underground network to safety in Switzerland or Spain.