Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Within the camps – now spoken of throughout France as ‘les camps de la honte’, the camps of shame – parents had to be persuaded to part with their children. The remaining Spanish republican families categorically refused to let their children leave; but the Jews, noted Andrée, accepted ‘with great dignity and stoicism’.

  In the summer of 1941, Ella was still hoping to get herself and Hanne to the US, or at least to Switzerland, where she had another sister and a cousin. An uncle who had got out of Dachau and emigrated in 1939 had raised enough money from friends and relations for their many permits and exit papers; but the days passed and no news of a possible departure came. Worrying constantly about Hanne, particularly now that TB, from which her husband had died, was spreading around the camp, she instantly agreed to the OSE’s suggestion that Hanne should be one of the first children to leave Gurs. Hanne herself protested, not wanting her mother to find herself alone when her aunts left for Cuba. But Ella was adamant. She had been infuriated when a snide and gossipy neighbour had been heard to say that she believed Hanne to be pregnant, knowing full well that the girl’s bloated stomach was due only to malnutrition. Max and Hanne had become inseparable and Hanne found it hard to leave him behind in Gurs. But as they agreed, the war could not last much longer, and they would soon all be together again.

  Hanne Hirsch and Max Liebmann before the War

  On 1 September 1941, Hanne and six other teenagers left Gurs. Like the three Parisian boys, Simon and Jacques Liwerant and Jacques Stulmacher, they knew only that they were bound for safety in the mountains. In Toulouse, where they stopped for lunch in a kosher restaurant in the old Jewish quarter, Hanne ate her first proper meal in almost a year. Later she would remember feeling disappointed that it included carrots, of which there had been far too many in Gurs. All seven teenagers left their mothers behind them. Hanne’s parting from Ella was extremely painful.

  The camp at Rivesaltes, some 400 kilometres to the east of Gurs, was a gentler place; at least at first. Originally built on a deserted field of abandoned vines on the plain between Narbonne and Perpignan, it had served as one of the main internment centres for the Spanish republican refugees before opening its gates to France’s ‘undesirables’ in 1939. Originally there was no barbed wire, and no watchtower; the Canigou mountain peak rose like a Japanese volcano in the distance. Here the huts were built of cement, with brick roofs and a door at each end; there were small windows that shed a little light. On bright sunny days you could see the sea, glittering very blue to the west.

  By the time another young Jewish boy, Rudy Appel, arrived in Rivesaltes in the winter of 1941, much had changed. The huts stretched as far as the eye could see across the sandy, treeless plain of stony red earth, over which blew constant strong winds, hot and full of dust in summer, sharp and biting in winter. Rivesaltes had 20,000 inmates, 5,000 of whom were under 15. On the model of the other camps, Rivesaltes had now been divided up into îlots, groups of huts separated from each other by barbed wire, on either side of which gathered men and women with swollen yellow faces, their muscles so shrunken that their bones stood out sharply. At night, searchlights bathed the camp in a ghostly yellow light. A suffocating stench rose from the latrines and a recent epidemic of gastroenteritis had killed 24 new babies. The straw for the mattresses had not been changed in six months; they were worn flat and were full of fleas. Blankets hung from the ceiling to give families a little privacy. Visitors to the camp reported seeing small children without shoes wandering between the huts, their feet bound up in cotton rags; it made them think of slums of an earlier age.

  Rudy, the younger son of a distinguished judge in Mannheim, was 13, the same age as Simon, when in November 1938 Kristallnacht destroyed his home and took his father away. The Nazis who broke up the furniture, stole his mother’s jewellery, and threw their books into the street below to be burnt on piles with other Jewish books, also arrested the judge and sent him to Dachau. For a while, however, the family felt almost fortunate. Good friends, luck and money rescued the judge and got him and Rudy’s older brother to Philadelphia. After Rudy, as a Jewish child, was forced to leave school, his mother found a passeur to take him to Holland. Before he left Mannheim, she taught him to sew on a button, saying that he would have to learn to look after himself for a while. She stayed behind.

  From his first school in Driebergen, Rudy, who was good at his studies and had always come top in Mannheim, was sent to a higher gymnasium in Rotterdam, spending his nights in an orphanage with Dutch children. He was not unhappy, and he felt safe, but he was uneasy about having so little control over his own life, others seeming to make every decision for him. His mother had managed to get herself out of Germany and into Belgium but was having trouble finding a safe passage on to Holland. She wrote to him twice a week, letters full of tenderness and instructions about how to behave, and she included in them a coupon réponse, a chit for a stamp, so that he could reply. Rudy was in Rotterdam the day that the Allies bombed the docks.

  He sheltered in the basement of his school, listening to the noise of the explosions and smelling the acrid smoke from the burning machinery. Not long afterwards, he heard from his mother that he was to join her in Belgium. He had not seen her in two years. His father had sent word that they were to make their way to Marseilles and try to board a boat for the US, and another passeur was found to take them into France. The first journey passed without trouble. But crossing the demarcation line into unoccupied France near Limoges, pulling behind them the elderly Belgian woman who was travelling with them, they were stopped by the Vichy police. Rudy and his mother were taken to Rivesaltes. They were placed in separate îlots, and talked to each other across the barbed wire.

  The camp was just entering its worst phase: rats, lice, epidemics, hungers; and all the symptoms of famine. They had not been there long when, on one of the blue-cold days of winter, a general disinfection was ordered. ‘Skeletons covered in flabby and wrinkled skin stumbled out naked into the cold sun,’ wrote Friedel Reiter, a young Swiss nurse, after the war, ‘trembling, many hardly able to walk.’

  Almost the worst thing about Rivesaltes, it would later be said, was the group of very small children, separated from their parents. Having arrived filthy and feral, they were liable to bite anyone who approached them. They seemed to have lost the ability to laugh or to play, and spent their days snivelling and whimpering. They had huge ballooning stomachs and suffered from eye infections. Those strong enough formed angry, rebellious packs. One little Polish girl, whose father had vanished and whose mother was thought to have gone insane, was described by a Quaker visitor as charming everyone with her blue eyes and curly brown hair. But her moods swung violently between ‘serenity’ and rage, when she stormed around for no apparent reason. Secours Suisse got permission to move the smallest of the children to a nursery in a deserted chateau near Perpignan. One camp worker, Mary Elms, abandoned all legality and smuggled some of the older ones out in her car. Every day now, German mothers came to her and said: ‘Nehmen Sie mein Kind weg’ – take my child away.

  HICEM and the OSE were continuing to do all they could to further emigration, and when Rudy and his mother got word that the judge had made some progress with visas for Cuba, Rudy was moved to Les Milles, the internment camp near Marseilles, which acted as a transit centre for potential candidates for emigration. Les Milles had been a brick factory before the war. While he was there, orders came that workers were being recruited for Germany. In the courtyard, as names were read out, he realised that although his surname began with an ‘A’, he had somehow been passed over. He then noticed that a blind veteran of the Great War had also been rejected. As he would say, many years later, ‘It was as if someone tapped me on the shoulder.’ He slipped across the courtyard and joined the other group whose names had been called. It was the correct thing to do. Though he did not know it at the time, it saved his life.

  Soon afterwards, Rudy was returned to Rivesaltes: the visas had not come through and
it now looked highly improbable that they ever would. His mother had been spirited out of the camp into a prison hospital in Perpignan by a doctor from Mannheim, a prisoner like themselves, who had told the authorities that she was very ill. The OSE and Secours Suisse were frantically doing all they could to remove children from the camp. Rudy had just turned 17, but he looked younger, a serious, sturdy boy, short in height, with a watchful expression and thick dark hair; Friedel Reiter managed to get the age on his papers altered to 15. Rudy thus became another of the adolescents, like Hanne, to leave internment for the safety of the mountains. Seven hundred and eighty children had now been rescued from the camps.

  Just where they were going, however, and what they were leaving behind, was not yet clear to anyone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Deportation fever

  In the summer of 1942, something fundamental changed in France. It changed for the foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone of France, who would now be hunted down like animals, becoming the only Jews in Europe – other than those in Bulgaria – to be turned over to the Germans by a sovereign state. It changed for Jewish children, no longer under even nominal protection from Eichmann’s men. It changed for the French Jews, who, after two years of self-delusion, began at last to perceive that the measures against foreign Jews would apply to them as well, though it would be a while before they were hunted with the same ferocity. Finally, it changed for a considerable number of ordinary French men and women, who, shaken out of their lethargy and complacency, took stock of what was happening in their country and decided they wanted no part in it.

  On 27 June, a letter from a local official had reached the CGQJ in Vichy; it pointed out that something needed to be done to improve conditions in the internment camps before winter set in. The reply was brief and sinister: ‘May I remind you that an operation is taking place which makes [any such action] at present absolutely unnecessary.’ In Vichy, the German responsible for Jewish Affairs was overheard asking Laval whether he intended to apply to the Jews in Vichy France ‘the same measures we are using in occupied France’. To which Laval apparently replied: ‘The only Jews we have are your Jews. We will send them back to you any time you say.’

  Events were indeed moving fast. On 29 June, Theo Dannecker, leader of the Judenferat, the ‘Jew unit’ in the German Security Service, the SD, in Paris, set out on a tour of inspection of the southern internment camps, in order to ascertain for himself the number of ‘deportables’. There had been steady departures of trains for Auschwitz from the occupied zone: it was time to move south, into Vichy France. Disappointed to find that the numbers of Jews fell considerably below his earlier estimate of 40,000, he argued that the date for naturalisation should be put back, and that anyone who had entered France after 1 January 1936 could now be considered ‘foreign’. On Himmler’s orders, 90 per cent were to be fit, healthy men and women aged between 16 and 40; the other 10 per cent – the sick, children, the elderly – would be ‘tolerated’. Laval was heard to refer to them as the ‘déchets’, the dregs.

  On 4 July, Vichy formally accepted that it would hand over 10,000 foreign Jews to the Germans for deportation. Bousquet told prefects to cancel all exit permits from the camps, as the plan was ‘to rid your region totally of foreign Jews’. Henri Cado, a senior policeman, sent out instructions to say that the internees were to take with them nothing that belonged to the state – not even blankets. Orders went out to silence the newspapers; no one dared disobey. But not everyone in Vichy was totally discreet. It did not remain secret for long that Fourcade, acting chief of police, had been heard to say that trains bound for Auschwitz carrying foreign Jews had been arranged for 6, 8, 10 and 12 August. Deportation ‘fever’ had begun.

  Rumours were spreading round Gurs and Rivesaltes. There was talk of being taken to a Jewish settlement in Galicia, of factory work in Germany, even mention of a programme of extermination in Poland, though it was generally agreed that this was far-fetched. ‘This is like Germany,’ the inmates told each other. ‘This is how it started.’

  The Nîmes Committee had somehow continued to cling to the hope that the Vichy south would remain safe from German demands. Just the same, the US chargé d’affaires, S. Pinkney Tuck, now called on Laval to warn that the US, and the civilised world as a whole, was ‘shocked’ by what appeared to be taking place. Tracy Strong, the general secretary of the YMCA, asked General Gampet, Pétain’s secretary for military affairs, about the rumours. Gampet told him he had heard nothing. That same day, Strong called on Pétain but came away with the impression ‘that the matter failed to register with the Marshal’. The Quakers, who by the summer of 1942 were providing on average three ounces of extra food daily to 84,000 children in France, felt that their contribution entitled them to some kind of hearing, but their delegate, Lindsey Noble, who spoke to Laval, was treated to a lecture on the troublesome foreign Jews and told that at least this new German initiative would give France ‘an opportunity to get rid of them’.

  On 3 August, Donald Lowrie, in his position as president of the Nîmes Committee, arrived in Vichy. He was made to wait. It was three days before he was told that he might see Pétain. Later, he described the meeting in some detail. He was shown, he said, into a crowded office in the Hôtel du Parc – Pétain’s headquarters – where the tables were covered in bric-a-brac, though Pétain’s own desk seemed ‘orderly’. The Maréchal was not as tall as he appeared in photographs, but he was erect and physically well preserved, even though his skin seemed ‘bloodless, almost waxen in colour’. It was soon clear to Lowrie that the men who surrounded Pétain – and particularly Laval and General Jardelle, Pétain’s secretary, a man he described as a ‘fortyish, alert, well fed, smooth’ watchdog – were taking considerable pains to keep him in ignorance of their plans. General Jardelle was present at the meeting and did much of the talking.

  Lowrie began by remarking that the foreign welfare organisations were having trouble believing that the Maréchal was aware that plans were going ahead to deport 10,000 foreign Jews – surely this was not something he would tolerate? Pétain reacted with ‘a gesture of helplessness’, and said: ‘You know our situation with regard to the Germans.’ When Lowrie asked that a period of grace be permitted during which the foreign organisations would try to expedite emigration and persuade the United States to accept child refugees, the Maréchal said that he would consult Laval and give an answer in ‘a week or ten days’. Told that the matter was extremely urgent, he agreed to discuss it later that same day. Warned by Lowrie of the repercussions the deportations might have on deliveries of foreign food, Pétain simply waved his hand ‘as though he deprecated this . . . and rose, terminating the interview’. Lowrie’s conclusion was stark. Pétain, he thought, ‘had not really grasped’ what was going on, and Laval was acting independently.

  In any case, it was all too late. A gigantic net was already descending over Vichy’s internment camps. For the welfare organisations, it was a terrible moment of reckoning, their worst fears realised. They had done everything they could to make life inside the camps more bearable, and in so doing had fallen into a trap: the camps had become ‘reservoirs’ for deportation.

  Before dawn, while it was still completely dark, police from the Garde Mobile surrounded the camps. In the preceding days, visits had been banned, including those from priests, and the women and the elderly who had been given permission to reside nearby had been brought back in. The camps had been sealed. Throughout the countryside, convents, boarding schools, presbyteries and hostels were searched and the forests patrolled for Jews; those found were arrested. Infirmaries were raided and elderly and sick men and women herded out in their pyjamas.

  Frantic messages to the various homes and centres to which some 10,000 Jews had legally been moved were in time to save some, who now scattered into the countryside and hid. Police surrounded other places and took everyone inside away. In Nice, Jews were picked up on the beach. In Marseilles they were pulled off buses and trams. Vis
as to leave France were cancelled, even for those for whom all formalities had been completed and who were about to board ships to safety.

  In the two and a half years of German occupation, HICEM had managed to get just 6,449 Jews out.

  As it grew light in Gurs, the Jews with names beginning with the first 13 letters of the alphabet, A to M, were told to pack their cases. The others watched in silence as the frail, ragged inmates dragged their bags and their suitcases held together with string towards a designated hut. Informed about the list of possible exemptions – children, pregnant women, veterans, spouses of Jews, war widows, wives of prisoners of war – the young women from the OSE and Cimade bartered and begged, exploiting every loophole, obtaining the release of some, failing with others, always conscious that for every person whose name they removed from the list, another would have to be found to take their place. As with prisoners awaiting execution, those about to be deported were given a better meal. Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné noted that the selected became instantly unrecognisable, plunged in misery and apprehension. A Dr Bachrach, who had worked as a doctor inside the camp, was pulled back at the last moment, but ‘in that space of time, he had become an old man’. None of the young social workers would ever forget the farewell notes they were given to post. Since there were no envelopes in the camp, they were obliged to read them to find the right names and addresses.

  There were agonising scenes as people tried to kill themselves, swallowing anything they could get hold of. Others wept and struggled. Going from hut to hut to prepare the infirm and the elderly, Jeanne heard stories of cut wrists and poison. ‘We lived somewhere outside life,’ she wrote, ‘In a bath of death.’ When at last the first group was ready, it set off for the station, the infirm on crutches, the bedridden on stretchers.