Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  One of the children was six-year-old Rachel Kamienkar, a round-faced, bright little girl with short brown hair parted to one side. Rachel’s father had run a grocery shop in Antwerp in Belgium after fleeing Poland in 1926. She had two older half-brothers and a full brother, Louis, who was three and had curly blond hair and blue eyes, and to whom she was greatly attached. After first her father and then her mother were arrested, Louis had been taken by the Germans while playing in the park with a neighbour’s daughter. All three, her parents and her little brother, were deported. Rachel herself had fled with an aunt and her husband to France, from where they planned to cross into Switzerland. Rachel, to whom so many terrible things happened, has protected herself by remembering almost nothing. What she can remember is the day that she and her aunt and uncle walked many miles through the snow to the Swiss border, where they were turned back. At this point her uncle disappeared; where he went she did not know. She and her aunt made their way to Lyons, where they were living in a small flat on the day of the round-up. In Vénissieux, her aunt signed Glasberg’s letter and handed her over to L’Amitié Chrétienne.

  In the camp, it was beginning to grow light. By chance, the children happened to be in the brightly lit room that served as a canteen when their parents were herded out and on to the buses that were to take them to the station. Madeleine Barot and the others would long remember the expressions on the faces of the parents as, pressing their noses to the windows, they desperately looked back for a last glimpse of their children.

  Even as the train taking them to Drancy pulled out, Glasberg was still trying to extract people. He managed to rescue an elderly Russian woman, passing her off as Greek Orthodox, but he was unable to take two little girls, whose mother kept trying to give them to him, her arms outstretched imploringly, and neither he nor Madeleine could do anything to save a woman who was eight months pregnant. When the train gathered speed, one man tried to escape by jumping out of the window, but the train was halted and he was caught.

  That day, Saturday 29 August 1942, 545 Jews travelled from the local station of Saint-Priest to Drancy. Four hundred and seventy-five of them were put on the convoi to Auschwitz on 2 September; 58 followed on the 9th. There was only one known survivor. Rachel’s aunt perished. Rachel, for the moment, was safe; but having lost her mother and father and her much-loved little brother, and then her uncle, she was now without the one person who had been left to her. She was six, and alone.

  For the children in Vénissieux, a new drama was unfolding. Three buses had arrived, driven by volunteers, to take the children away. Those over 18 – technically the age at which the Germans considered them to be adults – were concealed under the seats. Rachel’s only other memory of that time is of these hidden children. They were taken to the headquarters of the Jewish scouts, the EIF, in an abandoned Carmelite convent and handed over into the care of Madeleine Dreyfus and the OSE.

  When the prefect Angeli learnt that his telegram had been intercepted by Glasberg, he immediately ordered that the children be returned; a train coming from Les Milles would pick them up and their coach would be joined on to their parents’ train. However, a social worker in Angeli’s office, overhearing the plans, hastened to the OSE offices to warn them. There was just time to scatter the children around Lyons, to convents, schools, hospitals and private houses. The older ones were put into scout uniforms and sent to join a pack leaving for a trip to the country. When the police arrived at the OSE office, the children had gone. Madeleine Dreyfus, pleading ignorance of their whereabouts, sent the officers to see Cardinal Gerlier.

  Chaillet, Glasberg and Garel happened to be with the cardinal when Angeli’s furious phone call ordering the children to be found was put through. For a moment, the cardinal seemed to hesitate. But then, pressed hard by his visitors, he told Angeli: ‘These children, you’re not going to get them.’ There was an anxious moment when he asked the three men for the addresses of the places where the children had gone, saying that Pétain had assured him that they would not be handed over to the Germans. Garel and Chaillet produced false addresses, but not before Chaillet declared that, in all conscience, L’Amitié Chrétienne would never hand over children entrusted into its care by their parents. Word got out. A leaflet with the words ‘Vous n’aurez pas les enfants’ was soon circulating around Lyons.

  By now, the 89 children were disappearing, into schools and private families, into villages and isolated communities. Three of them – Rachel; a serious-looking 12-year-old boy called Manfred Furst, whose little brother Oscar was saved with him, and Lea Wajsfelner, whose thirteenth birthday fell two days after the deportations from Vénissieux – were on their way into the mountains to join Simon, the two Jacques, Rudy and Hanne. L’Amitié Chrétienne, Angeli wrote angrily to his superiors, had ‘thwarted the will of the government’.

  As a punishment, Chaillet was put under house arrest and sent to spend two months in a psychiatric hospital at Privas, returning secretly from time to time to Lyons. Glasberg lay low until the arrival of the Germans a few months later, when, hearing that he was wanted by the Gestapo, he moved to Théas in the Tarn, where under the name of Elie Corvin he became the parish priest of Montauban, using his prefectory as a meeting place for the Resistance and bicyling around his parish delivering anti-German leaflets. As for the others, Madeleine Barot, and Madeleine Dreyfus and Georges Garel – who shared a birthday and joked that they were twins – they immediately started planning their next move. It was becoming perilous, as a Protestant or a Catholic, to help Jews; for the Jewish helpers it would soon be lethal. All were now conscious that the days of legitimacy, of working in accordance with Vichy rules, were finally over, and that what lay ahead was an increasingly dangerous time of clandestinity. In this, some of the churches, which had long slumbered amid the general sense of attentisme and acquiescence, were to play a critical part.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A national disgrace

  Between 8 October 1940 and 16 September 1941, Vichy’s Journal Officiel published 26 laws, 24 decrees, 6 by-laws and one regulation on the Jews. By the spring of 1942, however, no religious authority in France, neither Catholic nor Protestant, had publicly condemned the anti-Semitic legislation nor spoken out against the inhuman treatment of the Jews. They had watched men, women and children rounded up and led away to internment camps, where they had fallen ill and starved, and they had said nothing. The speed of the defeat of France, so it is argued, had so stunned the higher clergy that they had somehow accepted that it was divine punishment for the godlessness and decadence of the Third Republic. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities took the same line; both, initially at least, supported Pétain.

  The Catholic Church had been loudest in its praise for the Maréchal’s New Order, seeing in its moral crusade a more pious France, in which God would be returned to the classroom and mothers to their babies. For over 150 years, ever since the separation of church and state, the Catholics had been dreaming of rechristianising France. Abortion, according to a widely circulated pamphlet, ‘kills the child, kills the mother, kills France’. For the first two years of German occupation, Pétain, perceived as a republican in politics and a humanitarian in war, continued to attract almost universal adoration. Many of France’s senior prelates were elderly, and longed to become once more important and influential in French life. Should I ‘refuse to support this noble enterprise’, asked 81-year-old Cardinal Baudrillart, ‘in which Germany is taking the lead?’

  In the upsurge of religious fervour that swept France with the German conquest, churches were again packed; crucifixes were hung on school walls. The memory of the impotence and incompetence of the Third Republic became fertile ground in which Vichy could take root. Its moral message, its acceptance of authority, its suppression of agitation and Napoleonic centralism, its rejection of laissez-faire capitalism, all found willing listeners.

  This, however, was about to change. The French had been prepared to see non-French-speaking foreigners
interned and even blamed for eating too much scarce food. But the spectacle of small children taken from their mothers, then put crying into cattle trucks, was too much. In their monthly bulletins to Vichy, prefects reported strong protests about this ‘national disgrace’. Criticising the Jews was acceptable: this degree of bullying and brutality was not. Some of the churches – though not Vichy – paid heed.

  Marc Boegner was a tall, balding, distinguished-looking man in his early sixties, with a pince-nez and a floppy, full white moustache. A pastor and the president of the Protestant Reformed Church, he is an interesting and remarkable figure in the history of French efforts to save the Jews, and has only recently received proper recognition. It was Boegner, it later turned out, who had proposed to Père Chaillet the plan to save the children in Vénissieux. He had been to Vichy early in July to remind Laval that the Germans had not as yet demanded the deportation of Jewish children under 16. Laval had told him that Vichy had been given quotas, which they could not meet unless they included children. Could some be saved? Boegner had asked. Not one, replied Laval, ‘must remain in France’. Boegner had summoned Madeleine Barot and ordered her to leave at once for Lyons with her team of Cimade workers. His progress from Pétain admirer to outspoken critic of Vichy illustrates the mood of Protestantism in wartime France.

  For the whole of the Ancien Régime, the Protestants had been an isolated minority within France. The decades of fighting that followed the Saint-Barthélemy massacres of August 1572 were halted by the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which allowed certain freedoms to ‘reformed churches’, while confirming Catholicism as the official religion of France. Its revocation in 1685 by Louis XIV, ‘this most Christian king’, opened the way to fresh persecution, the destruction of temples – the name they gave to their churches – and the flight of thousands of Protestants to Holland and England. By the time they were allowed back, a century later, with an edict of ‘tolerance’, fewer than half a million were thought to have remained in France. The long years in the wilderness became known as ‘le Désert’, after the story of the flight of the Israelites from Egypt.

  Dechristianisation during the French Revolution did not spare the Protestants, who, like the Catholics, saw their priests imprisoned and their temples destroyed. But with Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801, Catholicism lost its place as the state religion and the ‘reformed and Lutheran churches’ were recognised and granted legal status. From the 1820s, new temples, vast, severe, their benches in dark wood, free of ornaments or statues, spread, and with them came bible societies, charitable institutions, schools, and campaigns against alcoholism, prostitution and pornography. Austerity of spirit and of behaviour prevailed: no genuflections, no sacred images, no confession; prayers and Bible readings every morning and evening; no adultery, no theatres, dancing or luxury. In their temples, men and women were separated, the sermons were lengthy, and the psalms were sung. The Protestants played little part in the revolution of 1830, mistrusting the conservative, clerical, counter-revolutionary world of Charles X; but they greeted Louis Philippe, who had spent many years among Protestants, and married three of his children to Lutherans, with relief.

  By inclination, however, most Protestants were republicans. They were also Dreyfusards, both because they understood about persecution and because many of their religious traditions were close to those of Judaism. By now, they regarded themselves as a ‘lay religion’, having long since abolished the cult of the saints, along with five of the seven sacraments, leaving only baptism and communion. To be comprehensible to all, the services were held not in Latin, but in French. The word of God, through the Gospels, was to be received directly, with no mediation between God and ordinary men.

  The beginning of the twentieth century saw the ‘Reveil’, a movement that came from England and Switzerland, and which dwelt on the corruption of man and the expression of God’s word through the scriptures. These revivalists were dynamic evangelists and promoters of good works. ‘Orthodox’ followers, sharing a more-or-less messianic belief in the coming of a redeemer, soon broke away from the ‘liberals’, who themselves splintered into various factions, some of whom declared that they did not even believe in the resurrection of Christ.

  In 1827 came an attempt at harmony, with a first national synod and the adoption of a ‘declaration of faith’, and the acceptance of a number of agreed ‘grands faits Chrétiens’, to be shared by all. Protestants of all persuasions remained committed philanthropists, promoters of schools and charitable establishments. Catholics complained that they were ‘êtres tristes’, sad beings, as opposed to their own happy, light-hearted ‘esprit Français’. Nîmes, the capital of Protestantism, was sometimes referred to as ‘la ville des bâillements perpetuels’, the city of perpetual yawns. When Protestants entered a room, said the Catholics, it was as if a block of ice came in with them; and who knew what hidden vices and sedition they harboured.

  Socialism being regarded as close to the Gospels, the Christian Socialist movement of the 1880s brought with it ever closer commitment to a fairer society. Bible societies, youth movements, cooperatives and mutual banks were established, inspired by the Sermon on the Mount, St Paul’s teachings and even Marx’s Das Kapital. Though never numerically large, the Christian Socialists had a disproportionately strong influence. By the 1930s, most of them were pacifists, but there were splits here too, between those who saw themselves as conscientious objectors to all wars, and those who tolerated a small amount of violence to achieve a just society. Among the most prominent of these Christian Socialists was André Philip, elected a socialist deputy in the Front Populaire. Philip had been one of the 80 deputies and senators in the National Assembly who had voted against Pétain.

  By 1938, when Boegner was named president of the Reformed Church in France, bringing together the various reformed churches, the Methodists and the free thinkers, consensus of a kind had settled around a belief in the sovereign authority of the scriptures, and around good works. For all of them, the emphasis was on the individual, on his reading and interpretation of the Bible and his personal relationship with God – which would prove crucial in the last two years of German occupation.

  From their pulpits up and down France, pastors proclaimed their personal messages of salvation and enjoined their parishioners to practise their own version of moral behaviour, without strict adherence to a hierarchical church. Some pastors were extremely liberal, others rigidly orthodox, with what was known as ‘la haute bourgeoisie Protestante’ inclined somewhat to the right. André Philip belonged to this high-minded, intellectual and prosperous group. Cimade, working first with the refugees from Alsace-Lorraine, and then in the internment camps, was a natural expression of the liberal branch of Protestantism, and it was very conscious, from the first, of the need to remain faithful to the duties and responsibilities of Christians. As Madeleine Barot and the other young Protestants saw it, the persecution of the Jews was not unlike the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the seventeenth century, and racism was nothing other than a denial of the spiritual faith of France, to be fought by non-violent means.

  Much of theological underpinning of this spirit lay in what became known as ‘les thèses de Pomeyrol’, so called after a gathering of Protestant intellectuals at Saint-Etienne-du-Gres in the Bouche-du-Rhône in September 1941. To it came Madeleine Barot and Suzanne de Dietrich from Cimade, and also Pastor Visser’t Hooft, the Dutch general secretary of the new World Council of Churches in Geneva, who was closely in touch with the Protestant churches in other countries under German occupation. In Germany itself, 24 of the leaders of the Confessing Church, a movement of pastors who followed theologian Karl Barth – who had been expelled from his chair at the university in Bonn for refusing to swear allegiance to Hitler – were already in concentration camps. The thèses dealt with relations between church and state, with respect for civil liberties, and with anti-Semitism and collaboration. Christians, they concluded, owed obedience to the state, but such obedience was ordered
by and subordinate to ‘absolute obedience to God alone’.

  For the group of Protestants and theologians gathered at Pomeyrol, Johan Maarten’s book, The Village on the Hill, had become something of a cult since its publication in 1940. It told the story of a young pastor, Stefan Grund, a member of the Confessing Church, who refused to proclaim that Hitler was the creator of an eternal and indestructible Reich. The day came when a Nazi was elected mayor of his village and succeeded in driving the pastor from his church. Grund took to holding his meetings outside, in the open air, telling his parishioners that the Nazi doctrines were anti-Christ and that true Christianity was disappearing from Germany. One morning, he was arrested by secret servicemen and led away; the villagers, singing psalms, tried, but failed, to save him. It was a message the Protestants of Pomeyrol took to heart.

  Before the meeting ended, a resolution was passed: it had become a ‘spiritual necessity’, it said, to resist ‘all idolatrous and totalitarian influence’. The resolution was taken to the Reformed Synod in May – not long before the round-ups of Jews in Paris in July. Though it was increasingly apparent that the time of ‘attentisme’, waiting and watching, was over, it was also very hard, in the France of Vichy and of occupation, to distinguish between refusal and endurance, saying nothing and saying no. It was only with hindsight that these moral thickets would become clear.

  Though it had taken a while for Boegner – a man imbued with respect for the state and its institutions, to whom the moral discipline of the national revolution was appealing – to see his way clearly, his relatively recently published diaries show that he had been much concerned about the fate of the Jews from soon after the arrival of the Germans. His entries in 1940, on 28 and 30 October, 5 and 8 November and 9, 21 and 22 December, reveal that he was already in touch privately with influential contacts in Vichy. At this stage, the Jewish leaders themselves remained confused and largely silent and disbelieving, most of them hoping that by being more French than the French, they could somehow escape notice. Belief either that anti-Semitism was a mistake committed by bureaucrats or that it had been forced on Vichy by the Germans only helped to disguise the reality of what was taking place.