Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  In March 1941, Boegner wrote a letter to the Chief Rabbi, Isaïe Schwartz, expressing solidarity between Protestants and Jews based on their shared reading of the ‘Old Testament, in which Jesus of Nazareth nourished his soul and his thinking’. He sent a second letter to Admiral Darlan, vice president of the Council at Vichy. To both he explained that while there had indeed been a problem in letting so many foreigners into France and granting them naturalisation so quickly, this should not be allowed to detract from ‘respect for the individual’ nor from justice, of which France had ‘never ceased to be a champion’. In his letter to Darlan, Boegner went further. The Jews, he said, were facing ‘cruel challenges and poignant injustices’. The internment camps were ‘a disgrace’. Later, his colleagues likened his protest to that of Zola, in ‘J’accuse’, at the time of Dreyfus. It was not much, but it was something, even if it went largely unheard.

  Shortly before the events of Vénissieux, Boegner wrote to Pétain to say that the way that the French were handing foreign Jews over to the Germans was disgusting the ‘hardiest of people’ and reducing witnesses to tears. In his diary he noted bleakly a recent exchange with Laval over the Jews. ‘Will you embark on manhunts?’ he had asked. To which Laval had replied: ‘We will search for them everywhere that they are hidden.’

  The Catholics, meanwhile, had pursued a separate path. Unlike the Protestants, their church was structured, hierarchical and authoritarian. Catholicism was regarded as a moral and natural order to which the Church held the key; good French Catholics were raised with the idea that the first virtue of a Christian was obedience, and that legitimate authority lay with the Pope and Rome. Since for many Catholics Jews were perceived as the killers of Christ, anti-Semitism often lay just below the surface, all the more so since the Pope had been at best ambivalent about the deportations, referring to the Statut des Juifs as only ‘unfortunate’. National unity, not politics, Catholics were told, was the way to face the war; any suggestion of independence or criticism smacked of Protestantism. The Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops in July 1941 had ended with a solemn declaration that France should display ‘sincere and total loyalty towards the established power’. Monseigneur DuBois de la Villeravel, Archbishop of Aix-en-France, had gone so far as to criticise Radio Vatican for reminding listeners that the Pontiff had referred to fascism as ‘barbarity’. All through 1940 and 1941, and well into the spring of 1942, the Catholic prelates, enjoying their new-found popularity at the heart of Pétain’s national revolution, had kept quiet. Their silence did much to lend credence to Pétain’s legitimacy.

  Not all Catholics, however, remained silent. Individual priests, dotted in parishes around the country, were marshalling their forces. Foremost among them was Père Chaillet, the Jesuit from the rescue of the children at Vénissieux. At the very end of 1941, small grey booklets had begun to circulate clandestinely in Lyons aimed at Christians ‘united by defeat’. Under the rubric ‘Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien’, they reminded their readers of the moral dangers posed by Nazism. It was the first real spiritual call to resistance. In his short introduction to the first cahier, which had the title France, prends garde de perdre ton âme – France, take care not to lose your soul – Chaillet wrote that it was important to halt the slow ‘asphyxiation of our consciences’. It was up to Christians, he continued, to be in the vanguard of the fight against racism, the cult of the Aryan superman and violence towards the ‘Übermenschen’. Five thousand copies were printed and were quickly distributed. Further cahiers on anti-Semitism, human rights, collaboration and faith, profound, learned and deeply researched essays, written with a real understanding of the forces they were up against, appeared in 1942. Since it was dangerous to print them, stocks of paper were hidden in a belfry in Lyons. What made them so radical was their premise that, for a true Christian, conscience was ultimately more important than obedience.

  Prefiguring much of Vatican II, 20 years later, the authors of the cahiers suggested that it was essential to include a sense of the spiritual in worldly affairs, rather than clinging to abstract theology, and to rediscover the Jewish roots of Christianity by returning to the words of the prophets. For Chaillet, Nazism was a ‘perverse’ ideology, and Hitler the negation of ‘the spiritual heart of our civilisation’. The cahiers were much in demand. From now until the end of the war, Chaillet regarded his role as forcing the French to know and understand what was happening to their country.

  And now, at last, in the wake of the round-ups in Paris, and the deportations of Jews from the internment camps of Gurs, Rivesaltes and Récédébou, the Catholic hierarchy stirred. In ones and twos, they spoke out. Not many of the senior prelates joined in, but the noise made by those who did was considerable.

  The Archbishop of Toulouse, Mgr Jules-Géraud Saliège, who was elderly, aphasic and partly paralysed but who possessed great clarity of spirit, now decided that the moment had come to take a stand. ‘Silences speak,’ he declared. ‘The silence of death. The silence of dignity . . . Silence which is itself an act.’ He had trouble writing, so he dictated 23 lines of a pastoral letter to his secretary in his hoarse, rather shaky voice. His words were plain and simple, but his parishioners were accustomed to his haiku-like episcopal utterances. ‘The Jews are men,’ he declared, ‘the Jews are women.’ It should not be permitted to behave towards them as if they were different. ‘They are members of the human race. They are our brothers like so many others. A Christian cannot forget this.’ Saliège sent his priests and his secretary off on their bicycles to deliver the letter with instructions that his words be read aloud from the pulpit the following Sunday.

  The local prefect got wind of the letter – apparently from a priest who deplored Saliège’s radical tone – and protested strongly, telling the mayors of his département that they were to prevent it being read. With great reluctance, Saliège agreed to temper some of his more critical words. Several priests, hearing about the Prefect’s ban, hurried to the archbishopric to ask what they should do. ‘Read it out!’ shouted Saliège from his bed. On Sunday 23 August, most of his priests obeyed. Those who did not were sharply rebuked. It was not for this that they had been ordained, Saliège told them, ordering them to read the letter out on the following Sunday. It was also published as a tract, causing Vichy to denounce its language as ‘incontinent’. When Maurice Sarrault, the editor of the local Dépêche du Midi, was instructed by a Vichy official to print a rebuttal, he refused. ‘I want to be able to look the Archbishop of Toulouse in the face,’ he said.

  In nearby Montauban, Mgr Pierre-Marie Théas also went on the attack. Describing ‘dislocated’ families, men and women treated as if they were an ‘evil flock’ and dispatched to an unknown destination ‘with the likelihood of extreme danger’, he announced that, for a Christian, ‘all men, Aryan or non Aryan, are brothers, because created by the same God’. The current anti-Semitic legislation, he continued, was an ‘insult to human dignity, a violation of the most sacred rights of the person and of the family’. This pastoral letter, too, was read from the pulpit during morning service. A social worker in Montauban, Marie Rose Gineste, typed up many copies, and, deciding that it was too chancy to trust to the post, delivered them herself, covering hundreds of kilometres every day on her bicycle. As she travelled around, she recruited other couriers, who got on to their own bicycles to spread the message.

  Next it was the turn of Mgr Delay, Bishop of Marseilles; after him came a broadside from Mgr Gerlier, who had trained as a lawyer before finding his vocation and who declared that it was not with hatred and intolerance that Pétain’s national revolution could be built; and then one from the Archbishop of Albi, Mgr Moussaron. By the end of the summer of 1942, 35 Catholic bishops and archbishops had spoken out. Even if not every prelate and priest joined in – and no senior figure at all in the occupied zone – what made these pastoral letters so important was that they were issued by men who had once been strong supporters of Pétain and Vichy. The Jews, long perceived as the probl
em, were now the victims. Chaillet printed in full in the cahiers the pastoral letters of Gerlier, Saliège, Delay and Théas, and Boegner’s various contributions. ‘We must proclaim to the ignorant and indifferent world,’ he wrote, ‘our disgust and our indignation.’

  While French Catholics were absorbing this sudden change of direction, Boegner went public with a declaration of his own. On the first Sunday in September 1942, 4,000 Protestants gathered outside a farmhouse not far from Nîmes, shrine to the early Protestant martyrs, for the yearly Assemblée du Désert. It was here that not long before, André Chamson, the celebrated Protestant essayist and archivist, had spoken of the need always to resist, to remain ‘faithful to oneself, even in defeat, even in chains’. Standing under the chestnut trees, they listened to Boegner take as the theme for his sermon ‘Be faithful unto death and I will give you the crown of life’ from Revelations; his words included many references to the duties of Christians and Good Samaritans to help the persecuted. There was no longer much point, Boegner declared, in continuing to press Vichy to behave differently. That moment had passed. The question now was quite simple: how could the Jews be saved? Afterwards, he gathered around him the 67 Protestant pastors who had come to hear him speak. He described to them in detail the deportation of the foreign Jews, the police with guns, children torn from their parents, the elderly dragging their cases, and urged them all to do everything they could to save those who remained in France. Later, the pastors would say that this was the moment at which biblical teachings became reality.

  Boegner’s next step was to return to Laval and Bousquet, to whom he protested strongly about the deportations; then he went on to Geneva and Berne. Here he tried to persuade the Swiss to accept Jews sent by charitable organisations like the OSE and Cimade. A deal, of sorts, was brokered.

  For both Catholics and Protestants, the late summer of 1942 was a critical turning point. As Donald Lowrie wrote to his superiors in New York, on 17 September, ‘Public resentment appears to be growing. The markets and the queues buzz with horror stories about the deportations and the disgrace thus brought upon France . . . For the first time since the Armistice, deep public feeling has united all the decent elements in France on a question of moral rather than political nature.’ The challenge now was how to harness it.

  Dr Joseph Weill, creator of the OSE’s peripatetic team of doctors and social workers, had always known that there would come a moment when there would be no way to save the Jews from deportation other than by going underground. Even while he and his colleagues on the Nîmes Committee were negotiating with Vichy for improvements to the internment camps, he was preparing for the catastrophe he was certain would soon arrive.

  In the wake of what became known as ‘la nuit de Vénissieux’, as trains with the words ‘Colonies de Vacances de Rivesaltes’ stencilled in chalk on their sides began bringing Jewish children – some of them babies – to Drancy on the pretext of family reunification; as terrified Jews scattered in panic across the countryside to evade capture, and as Bousquet called on prefects to ‘pursue and intensify operations . . . using all police and gendarmes available’, Weill acted. As a Jew who had grown up in a family of celebrated rabbis in tsarist Russia, he knew all about anti-Semitism and pogroms; and he had spent the last ten years watching the steady rise of the Nazis.

  His first move was to make contact with Georges Garel, the electrical engineer who had helped the OSE at Vénissieux. Garel’s real name was Grigori Garfinkel, and he had been born in Poland in 1909. The two men met in a hotel near the Perrache station in Lyons. Weill told Garel that he was looking for a new face, someone without political baggage, unknown to Vichy or to the Germans, to set up a clandestine network to save and hide Jewish children, whether orphans whose parents had already been deported, or those whose parents the OSE hoped to persuade to part with them, on the grounds that they were more likely to be safe. ‘Let us save children by dispersing them,’ he said. For this, he added, Garel would need a cover, helpers, money, families, false documents and safe houses. Garel, who had been thinking of joining the Resistance, agreed. He made two suggestions: that his new organisation would act as much as possible on its own, and that everyone involved in it would take on an Aryan identity.

  For his cover, Garel became a travelling salesman in pottery, concealing documents and money under the cups and saucers in a false bottom to his bag of samples. He called on Mgr Saliège and explained that he needed Catholic families who were willing to take in Jewish children. Saliège gave him a letter of introduction to his most trusted priests, in which he referred to Garel as of ‘good and certain faith’. This opened many doors. After this, Garel went to Montauban, to see Mgr Théas, who also promised help. Money would come from the JDC, brought into France from Switzerland and Portugal. Helpers were to be found among the many Jewish students, and the young social workers who had been gathered into Pétain’s national revolution to help preach the message of a ‘stable, faithful, fecund, united, educative’ family. These young women, some no older than 19 or 20, remained in their official jobs while helping Garel on the side. It was one of the many anomalies of the occupation that, even as Jews were being rounded up and deported, others were continuing to work, and not all of them bothered to change their names.

  The Circuit Garel was born. It would operate in the unoccupied zone, on the model of the Resistance, with small cells unknown to each other, and Andrée Salomon, chief inspector of the OSE’s children’s homes, would be in charge of recruitment and planning. Salomon immediately set about vetting helpers to screen out those who might be recognised as Jewish by their appearance or accent. Within the OSE, the Aryans were soon known as ‘les purs’; those who were Jewish but looked Aryan as ‘les synthétiques’. Garel, said Lily Tager, was a born organiser. She had worked at his side at Vénissieux and was soon to marry him.

  For a while at least, until it all became too dangerous, Circuit A of the OSE – as distinct from Garel’s Circuit B – remained above board, operating as one of the Jewish organisations formally affiliated to Vichy under the Third Directorate – health – of the Jewish umbrella union, the UGIF. This gave them the cover of legitimacy. The OSE had an office at 10 Rue Montée des Carmelites in Lyons and a total of some 280 workers, most of them doctors or social workers, scattered around the country. Madeleine Dreyfus, who had been drawing closer to her Jewish roots, was officially a psychologist with the organisation; unofficially, she would become the link with Garel and his circuit. Though her husband Raymond, who travelled around looking for leather for an American company, had taken a false name to disguise his Jewishness, she preferred to remain as Dreyfus. Raymond was constantly afraid that she might be arrested. Their eldest son, Michel, was now eight; the younger, Jacques, was five.

  Madeleine now embarked on a double life: on the surface, she helped run the OSE’s children’s homes, still legitimate and full of Jewish children, in the peculiar and anomalous way in which the Germans allowed them to continue, but more and more of her time was spent clandestinely, making contact with convents, schools and orphanages, asking them whether, when the moment came, they would take in a false ‘Dupont’.

  But in the summer of 1942, the OSE was not the only organisation galvanised to act. Small acts of resistance were catching alight in every form and shape. Earlier paralysis over whether or not Vichy was indeed the legitimate government, and over fears of communism and the destruction of French morality, was giving place to a growing mistrust of the government. Péguy’s celebrated line, ‘Je désobéirai si la justice et la vérité l’exigent’ – I will disobey if justice and truth demand it – was much quoted. Both justice and truth seemed clearer now, with Catholics and Protestants turning their churches into places of asylum, monks becoming passeurs and helping people across the demarcation line, convents offering staging posts to safety. As Donald Lowrie rightly observed, this new feeling of moral outrage ‘gives each one something he can do’.

  Cimade, the Protestant group that
had been working in the camps, was also turning to clandestine work, and setting up safe houses of its own. Madeleine Barot was already in touch with the Abbé Glasberg about places to put children. What was becoming known as ‘la solidarité judéo-chrétienne’ was bringing together people newly angered by Vichy and the Germans, Catholics and Protestants working side by side as never before. Some of the most active were the Jewish scouts, the Eclaireurs Israélites de France, who had already been very helpful in spiriting the children out of Vénissieux. When the Jewish welfare organisations were forced either to close down or to merge under the UGIF, the Jewish scouts had found a home under the Sixth Directorate. Calling themselves the ‘Sixième’, they would become a crucial arm of Garel’s enterprise. The Jewish scouts were sporty, altruistic and energetic, muscular rather than studious, and they were proving themselves skilful as rescuers of adolescents and producers of false documents.

  Among the French Jewish authorities, however, there persisted an almost wilful blindness about what was taking place before their eyes. Obedience to Vichy seemed to remain their almost sacred duty. In September, long after Vénissieux and the rafles of the southern zone, and many weeks after they had themselves formally protested to Pétain that there was no longer any doubt about the ‘fate that awaits the deportees’, the Central Consistoire in Paris sent out a directive urging Jews ‘not to conceal your Jewish identity . . . Keep informed about the laws and obey them . . . You will thereby be better Jews and better Frenchmen.’