by Douglas Boyd
Particularly at risk were up to 527 children hidden short- or long-term in convents and elsewhere by Odette Rodenstock and Moussa Abbadi. To keep in touch with them and bring letters from parents, Odette travelled day after day on gazogène-powered buses to visit foster-parents – all too often finding them at the end of their tether, not just because they were risking their lives but because the small child they had welcomed into their home would say nothing to them but, ‘I want my Mummy. I want my Mummy.’ Older children caused different problems. Unable to resist divulging a secret, a boy might tell a classmate, ‘My name isn’t really Rocher. It’s Reichmann, but you mustn’t tell anyone.’14
In August 1943, while the famous Parisian boys’ choir Les Petits Chanteurs à la Croix de Bois were singing in Berlin, the insanity of the Final Solution saw eighty-seven detainees transported westwards from Auschwitz through Poland and Germany to Alsace. Dr Josef Hirt, director of the Institute of Racial Anthropology at Strasbourg University, wanted freshly killed Jewish bodies undamaged by bullet wounds or ill treatment for his experiments. These unfortunates were thus to be gassed in a specially adapted gas chamber at Natzwiller. Although not a death camp designed for mass slaughter, Natzwiller and its twin camp in neighbouring Schirmeck took the lives of many thousands of prisoners through slave labour in a quarry of pink granite used for Nazi monuments. They died from overwork, ill treatment, malnutrition, exposure in the -30°C winter weather, random killings and ‘medical experiments’, including deliberate burning with mustard gas and injection with lethal diseases.
Among the prisoners were Norwegian Resistance workers, German criminals, communists, French résistants and homosexuals, among them 18-year-old Pierre Seel, who had unwisely reported being relieved of his watch during a nocturnal adventure in a Mulhouse park in 1939. The imprudence was to cost him dearly: his name was on a file inherited by the Gestapo after the German invasion. Arrested, tortured and sent to Natzwiller in 1940, he survived and was eventually released because his uniform was distinguished by a blue bar signifying ‘Catholic’, rather than the pink triangle of the homosexual prisoners, mistreated by other prisoners and guards alike. In his book15, he reports the death of his lover Jo-Jo, literally savaged to death after several Alsatian dogs were set on him for fun by the guards. A metal pail had been tied onto his head to amplify his screams so that all the assembled prisoners would hear.16
Natzwiller had witnessed one of the most daring escapes of the war on 4 August 1942 when Czech Major Josef Mautner and four equally desperate detainees, including a French air force officer and a Polish ex-Foreign Legion volunteer, decided to escape before they were starved or beaten to death. Dressing in stolen SS uniforms and driving a car with SS plates ‘liberated’ from the camp garage by a prisoner working there as a mechanic, they succeeded by sheer nerve. Kapo Alfons Christmann’s luck ran out when he was caught near the Swiss border a month later. Brought back to Natzwiller, he was tortured in the Appelplatz before the assembled prisoners – and slowly hanged on the gallows when the trap twice failed to open. Of the others, Mautner and an Austrian communist named Haas reached Britain via Spain and Portugal; Josef Cichosz survived to join the Free Polish Army; and Alsatian former air force officer Winterberger joined the Free French forces in Tunisia.
The prisoners from Auschwitz arriving in August 1943 found the Natzwiller camp commanded by Josef Kramer, subsequently promoted to run Bergen-Belsen. Hanged by the British after writing a no-punches-pulled record of his work in the Allgemeine-SS, he recounted his testing of Zyklon-B gas on the first batch from Auschwitz, to ensure the building was airtight. He ordered fifteen female prisoners to undress and go into the chamber. Force was needed to close the door on the screaming women, who had realised that this was not a disinfectant facility as they had been told. One naked woman fought back so desperately that she had to be shot outside. The doors closed, Kramer inserted the precise dose of crystals given to him by Dr Hirt into a special chute and activated them by pouring in water. He switched on the light inside to watch the women die through an armoured glass window, noting that they lost control of their bowels and fell to the floor after ceasing breathing in roughly thirty seconds. For this devotion to duty, he received a Christmas bonus.
Kramer’s bonus award of 8 December 1943. It reads: ‘Re Christmas Bonus. For faithful service, head office chief SS-Obergruppenführer and Waffen-SS General Pohl has authorised payment of a Christmas bonus to you. Please find enclosed a cheque for 500 Reichsmarks.’
In due bureaucratic form, a receipt for the money was requested. By then the other prisoners from Auschwitz had all been killed in small groups, Kramer sending the bodies to Professor Hirt for autopsy, after which the skulls were preserved in Hirt’s ‘racial anatomy’ collection.17 A number of such spurious anthropological institutions in France were subsidised by German money.
In Bastia prison on the island of Corsica, school teacher Jean Nicoli spent the night of 29/30 August writing letters in his cell. Betrayed by a rival Resistance group, he had been sentenced to death by an Italian military court for running a PCF cell stockpiling arms dropped by Allied aircraft from bases in Algeria. To protect the members of the cell not arrested, he and the other prisoners pretended they had been working for money: a figure of 1,640,000 francs was mentioned during the trial and reported in the press. Told that he was to be shot at 4 a.m., Nicoli’s only concern was to set the record straight after his death, so that his party comrades would know he had taken no money for himself. He was actually not shot but decapitated instead at the Carré des Fusillés of Bastia, four days short of his 45th birthday.18 Eight days later, the Corsican Resistance rose against the Axis occupation and freed itself with the help of Gaullist forces from North Africa.
On 8 September 1943 the Germans occupied the Italian zone. Two days later Hauptsturmführer Brunner arrived in Nice with a staff of fourteen, to find the Italians completing paperwork necessary to transfer hundreds of Jews by truck across the frontier to safety. The Italian Consulate in the Hotel Continental was raided by SS troops under his command, just after all its files had been removed to Rome. All Brunner could do was arrest the consul and staff, and forcibly deport them. Unaware that thousands of refugees were being spirited across the frontier by French and Italian volunteers, he installed himself in the Hôtel Excelsior by the main railway terminal, anticipating a cull of 2,000 people a day to despatch to Drancy for forwarding on to Auschwitz.
With the Wehrmacht refusing to help, Brunner at first showed more subtlety than in Salonika by publicising forged proof that the transported Sephardim were happily working in Poland and cynically exchanging the French currency of arrested Jews for zlotys which they ‘could spend on arrival in the east’. However, even the offer of 10,000 francs head-money to informants saw him unable to assemble more than 2,000 victims in all by mid-month, proving that without the active participation of the French police, the SS and Gestapo would never have amassed so many victims. Finally Brunner used torture to force the first refugees caught to reveal the whereabouts of their relatives and friends.
In September, too, Laval informed General de la Porte du Theil that the poor response to the STO now required him to make up the deficit by handing over all young men in the Chantiers. Refusing to accept this order, the general avoided immediate arrest by stating that he had left instructions for all conscripts to be released, should he fail to return from his visit to Vichy. Shortly afterwards, de Tournemire was forced to go underground to avoid arrest by the Germans, leaving his deputy to find subsidies to keep the movement going. Fobbed off by a succession of top civil servants, he was eventually granted a handout by Laval in the hope of thus gaining control of the Compagnons. Refusing to resign, de Tournemire joined the Alliance network of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and activated an undercover spin-off of the Compagnons called ‘Druids’, whose members protected STO runaways by finding false papers for them and helped downed Allied airmen escape France. Its biggest coup was described by Professor R.V
. Jones, scientific adviser to SIS, as ‘the most important single piece of intelligence in the war’, after Druids member Jannine Rousseau sent to London detailed information about the V-weapon launch ramps in the Pas-de-Calais.
With society crumbling, parents still had problems with their children. At the end of the summer term, Renée de Monbrison had been asked to remove her daughters from the Collège Cèvenole at Chambord. Having not surprisingly failed their exams because they had been unable to concentrate on lessons, they had fallen foul of the authoritarian headmistress, who made no allowances for the exceptional times. Pastor Trocmé’s daughter was a school-chum of Françoise, but he could not change the teacher’s mind, nor could the popular English teacher Miss Williamson. So Rénée brought the girls back with her to St-Roch and put Françoise’s name down for the collège in Moissac, where she immediately made friends with Andrée Giraud, whose family offered her a bedroom. In Chambord 16-year-old Françoise had been considered a child, but Shatta Simon needed every pair of hands and recruited her to guide refugee children from the train station to the Maison de Moissac, cautioning them not to speak loudly in their give-away accents in front of strangers. Twice she was stopped when carrying in her school satchel official stamps of bombed towns and places in North Africa – useful for forging ID cards, as they could not be checked. Afterwards, she despised herself for flirting with the German soldiers to distract their attention.19
By chance, on a bus, Renée discovered herself sitting next to the man who had brought back from Montauban the 150 blank ID cards. Shatta Simon’s brother Dr Djigo Hirsch had been an eminent Parisian radiologist until debarred from practising medicine. With the help of mayors and local gendarmes, he and his wife had managed to find homes for eighty boys and girls aged 18 to 20, mostly with false papers – although once in the country, where the local gendarmes gave warning of any search and there was time to hide in the woods, many had no need of identity papers, providing they kept out of sight of strangers. However, all of them needed regular deliveries of ration cards. To help him out, Renée took the risk of persuading her uncle’s estate steward to employ three of the older boys on the estate – with no idea that she was placing them in grave danger.
On the morning of 18 October Djigo and his wife were arrested in the village of St-Michel near Auvillar. Their small son was safely in Moissac when the Germans arrived, but Madame Hirsch, who had few illusions of their eventual fate, took advantage of the diversion caused by Djigo running away and getting seriously shot in the arm to thrust her baby into the arms of a neighbour’s daughter, so that the infant should not be taken away with them. Also rounded up was a girl with false papers living in their house and Djigo’s assistant.
Hurrying down to the village with Françoise, Renée arrived in time to watch from a distance as Djigo was thrown into a truck, bleeding heavily from his wound and his face unrecognisable from blows of rifle buts. Seeing the house full of Germans in uniform and plain clothes making a thorough search that lasted until 5 p.m., they ran back to Château St-Roch and telephoned Shatta in Moissac to sound the alarm. She immediately called EIF’s founder, Robert Gamzon, with the message, ‘Djigo is very ill. He has been taken by ambulance to hospital in Toulouse.’ In the simple code they used, because the Milice monitored phone calls, ill meant ‘arrested’ and ambulance meant ‘taken away’. Hospital meant ‘by the Germans’; had it been by French police, she would have said clinic.20
Gamzon cycled to Moissac, arriving at dusk. Nothing could be done to help those arrested, but he and Shatta agreed that the urgent priority was to check whether the Germans had found Djigo’s filing system. If so, the eighty children were as good as dead, for it contained their true names and whereabouts, together with their ration cards. Gamzon set off on his second long bicycle ride of the day with a helper named Roger, who, once they were on the road to St-Michel, told him that he had not wanted to alarm Shatta further by telling her about Djigo’s wound. His other, more vital, piece of information was that neighbours had heard Djigo mutter ‘Tidy the cagibi’, as he was hauled bleeding onto the truck. It had to be a clue. Cagibi could mean a box room or storage place. But where? Surely not in his house, since the Germans had spent eight hours searching it.
At St-Michel the mayor was terrified Djigo would betray him under torture, and refused to let them break the seals the Germans had placed on the Hirsch home after threatening to shoot the neighbour entrusted with the key if there was any sign of entry when they returned. The only good omen was that none of the children accommodated nearby had so far been picked up. After dusk, Gamzon pretended to set off back to Moissac, but rendezvoused with Roger and two other boys outside Djigo’s house by imitating owl calls to identify each other. Breaking in without leaving any sign was not easy. Once inside, careful to show no lights and make no noise, they found clothes and food for the eighty children thrown all over the floor, the contents of every drawer emptied on top. After two hours of fruitless searching, one of the boys lifted a heavy old door in the attic and found the box of files Djigo had hidden on hearing the Germans arrive. Gamzon and Robert cycled back to Moissac through the curfew to give Shatta the news that the children were safe – for the moment.
On 21 October Klaus Barbie was cheated of several victims. Arrested with Jean Moulin was Raymond Aubrac, whose wife Lucie had been so angered by the anti-Semitic exhibition in Lyon. With extraordinary courage and initiative, she devised a plan to rescue him, based on a huge gamble: that his false identity as ‘Claude Ermulin’ had not been broken under torture.
Two days after the arrests, a smartly dressed young woman calling herself Ghislaine de Barbantine asked to see Barbie at the École de Santé. He was smartly dressed, she afterwards recalled, in a light summer suit and pink shirt, and had a woman with him, as usual. Lucie’s first attempt to see her husband failed, but she returned on 21 October and succeeded in meeting Barbie again by dint of bribes to French staff working for the Gestapo. When he asked what she wanted, Lucie cried hysterically that she was ashamed to be carrying a child by ‘Ermulin’ and wanted to tell him what she thought of him. As she had astutely deduced, the idea of a wronged woman tongue-lashing a detainee so appealed to Barbie’s perverted sense of humour that he sent for prisoner ‘Ermulin’. Apparently unaffected by his pitiful state after four months in Montluc prison, Lucie raved at him that whatever was happening served him right as far as she was concerned, but she needed a name for her child and expected him ‘to do the decent thing’.
‘Ermulin’ was hardly in a condition to marry anyone. The whole point of the dangerous pantomime was to have him brought to the medical school for the confrontation. As the closed van was returning him and Barbie’s victims of the day to Montluc prison after interrogation, two car loads of résistants closed in; automatic fire from silenced weapons killed the men in the driver’s cab and mowed down the guards who jumped out, save one, who escaped.
By risking her own life, Lucie Aubrac had saved that of her husband.21
NOTES
1. The full story of Faytout’s group is told by survivor P. Mignon in his book De Castillon à Sachsenhausen (Bordeaux: Publications Résistance Unie en Gironde, 1990.
2. The story of the Bouchou family’s involvement in Faytout’s group comes from interviews with Cathérine Bouchou conducted by the author.
3. Mignon, De Castillon à Sachsenhausen.
4. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 2, p. 58.
5. Martin manuscript.
6. A. Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed (New York /Oxford: Berg 1992), p. 82.
7. Marshall, All the King’s Men, p. 292.
8. Ibid., p. 298.
9. Ibid., p. 253.
10. M.R.D. Foot, SOE in France (London: HMSO, 1966), p. 302.
11. Facsimile in Laval, Unpublished Diary, Appendix V.
12. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 2, p. 43.
13. Webster, Pétain’s Crimes, pp. 232–5.
14. See www.lamaisondesevres.otg/cel/cel5.html.
16. Ibid., pp. 42–3.
17. Documents at Natzwiller camp.
18. Krivopissko (ed.), La Vie à en mourir, pp. 226–30.
19. From interview with the author.
20. De Monbrison, Memoirs.
21. Paris, Unhealed Wounds, pp. 98–9.
19
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Foreseeing the likelihood of a permanent German presence in Moissac, Shatta and Bouli decided in October 1943 to spirit away more than 180 children living in the colonie and find them safer homes under false names. Brothers and sister were forbidden to tell each other their new identities, so that one could not be forced to betray the other. Where possible, initials were kept the same, to account for tags sewn into favourite clothing. Some were sent hundreds of kilometres as ‘child refugees from the bombing of northern towns and cities’, with staff at their new schools sometimes brought into the secret and sometimes not.
At a convent school in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, between Montauban and Toulouse, 12-year-old Suzette, whose name was now Marie-Suzanne Floret, found it hard not to giggle when seated at the same lunch table as her older brother Daniel, now called Denis Forestier. Yet despite the company of three other girls from Moissac, the strain of her double life was such that she fell ill and had to be smuggled back to Moissac Hospital, where Dr Moles cared for her. Terrified of giving herself away, Suzette stayed mute throughout her stay. In addition to delivering fictitious sickness certificates to young men who would otherwise have been liable for the STO, Dr Moles also used his travel Ausweis and permit for petrol to transport wounded résistants in his little car.
More resilient children met up under their new identities pretending they had never met before, and then ‘made friends’. But life was never easy for 11-year-old Édith L. and five other girls boarding at the collège (middle school) of Ste-Foy-la-Grande on the banks of the Dordogne. At weekends the local children went home and gorged on whatever food was available, but the Moissac girls stayed in the school pensionnat, scavenging dustbins for rotten vegetables they ate out of sight in the toilets. Headmistress Madame Pécastaing had begged the mayor throughout the previous winter for kindling to light the classroom stoves and a new flagpole to replace one broken in a storm, so that each Monday the children could sing La Marseillaise beside it, not Maréchal, nous voila! Also, because the school’s bicycle had been stolen when the premises were occupied by the French army in June 1940, suppliers could no longer deliver food and other necessaries, so she had been borrowing the cleaning lady’s bike to do the school shopping, but this was no longer serviceable. Since her licence to use a gazogène car had been withdrawn, ‘Please Mr Mayor …’1
