In the spring of 1941, Secours Suisse had occupied its first house on the plateau, La Guespy, rented from Mme de Felice. It was presided over by a slightly glowering, very dark Catalan refugee doctor called Juliette Usach. Juliette had one leg shorter than the other and limped. She wore little round glasses and kept her hair parted in the middle and pulled tightly back into a bun. La Guespy took in adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18, most of them removed by Madeleine Dreyfus and the OSE from Gurs.
Among them were Hanne and Rudy, brought up to the plateau on the little train. At 17, Hanne was considered too old for school, particularly as she spoke very little French. Before she mastered enough to be allowed to finish her education, she worked for a nearby preventorium, where children in danger of TB were sent as a precautionary measure. Thinking obsessively about her mother, Hanne felt constantly picked on by Mlle Usach, who, the girls all agreed, was unnecessarily strict and definitely preferred the boys. By the spring of 1942, La Guespy had 22 resident adolescents from 8 nationalities and 4 different religions. Soon afterwards, a second home, L’Abric, was opened to take 30 children between the ages of 6 and 16. Auguste Bohny, the Swiss teacher who had worked in Rivesaltes for Secours Suisse, arrived in le Chambon to run the two houses. He was a pianist, who played both classical music and jazz, and he soon took over le Chambon’s organ. The children loved him.
Collecting the milk from a farm in le Chambon
Hanne was not unhappy. Great pains were taken to isolate the children from the war. There was no radio, no telephone and seldom a newspaper. It gave her, she would say, a sense of peace, though at night she would listen anxiously to some of the other children crying for their mothers, and like them she was often hungry and spent much of her time thinking about food. Simply finding enough for the ever-growing numbers of teenaged children taxed even Emile’s resourceful forays into the countryside. After school, the children foraged: for chestnuts, wild berries, mushrooms. They looked covetously at Mme de Felice’s apple trees. At Beau Soleil, Gabrielle was sometimes sent off to distant farmers in search of a pig or a sheep to buy. Hanne, before her mother was deported, kept back her bread, toasted it and sent it to Gurs, together with potatoes she stole from the larder. She had heard that her aunts had been able to leave for Cuba via North Africa. Max was now on a farm run by the Jewish boy scouts; he and Hanne wrote to each other.
At night, the children in La Guespy gathered at one long table for dinner. They took great care never to ask questions about each other’s lives, knowing that the truth was likely to be both dangerous and painful. Even those who were not Jewish, like Jean Nallet, a 16-year-old orphan, had recent pasts too agonising to share with the others. Jean’s father had died when he was three; his mother had recently succumbed to galloping TB, after which he had been made a ward of state and sent to La Guespy by Mme de Felice. He was, he would say, ‘devastated’, crushed by the loss of his mother, and the presence of similarly grieving and disorientated children was somehow soothing.
Morning exercises for the children of le Chambon
Until the summer of 1942, these refugee and children’s homes on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon occupied a perfectly legal, if somewhat shadowy, zone, their existence recognised by Vichy, which had found them useful in dealing with the overcrowding in the internment camps. When Jean-Marie Faure, inspector of the camps, visited the plateau and went to see the Coteau Fleuri, L’Abric and La Guespy, his report was admiring. So comforting was this ‘peaceful retreat’, he noted, that it would be good if similar houses could be arranged for the elderly and the sick, for whom camp life was inappropriate. He praised the exercise and the manual work carried out by the young and adult foreigners alike, saying that it ‘eased’ their suffering and gave them not only a renewed taste for life, but an altogether better view of France. ‘A healthy and hard-working life,’ he wrote in his report, ‘is being provided for these youngsters.’ The arrangement was ‘excellent’. Of the fact that a large number of both children and adults were Jews, he surprisingly said nothing at all.
There was, however, something else that made the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon exceptional in France, and it would become crucial in saving the Jews in the months to come.
Among its inhabitants were not only a very high percentage of Protestants, steeped in the embattled faith of the Huguenots, but also a number of Darbyists, followers of a nineteenth-century English preacher, John Darby, sober, austere, very private people sometimes likened to Quakers and the Amish. By the outbreak of war, the plateau had 12 Protestant parishes, and some 9,000 of its 24,000 people were Protestant, in a country in which Protestants counted for less than 10 per cent of the total population. The Darbyists, and an even smaller and more obscure sect, the Ravenists, were said to number about 2,000, making these communities some of the largest in Europe.
The Protestants of the Ardèche and the Cévennes had a long and honourable tradition of defiance. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and Louis XIV’s declaration that Protestants were to be considered heretics, schematics and enemies of the state had driven tens of thousands into the mountains of central France, to join communities of earlier refugees from Catholic repression. Many had settled in the Haut-Vivarais and along the banks of the Lignon. They had brought with them a spirit of resistance, a code of strict morality and a number of underground churches they referred to as Les Eglises de la Montagne. Since if they were caught they were sent to prison and their children taken away, they met stealthily in secret cults, behind vast fortified doors and shuttered windows, where they read the Bible and told each other that the answer to their persecuted lives lay in the Old Testament. They knew the Bible intimately and were familiar with the history of the Jews; they likened themselves to the persecuted people of Israel, wandering in the wilderness, whom they recognised as the chosen people of God. They were willing to die for their faith.
Out of these independent-spirited Huguenots came the Camisards, the word probably taken from the Occitan camisada (surprise attack) or camisa (the shift that many of them wore). Although they were initially doctrinally identical to the Huguenots, worshipping in the vernacular and modelling every detail of their lives on the scriptures, their experience of persecution led them to develop a more ardent and apocalyptic form of worship, fuelled by ecstatic visions and relying on prophecy to inform their lives in the midst of chaos. In caves and ‘rocks and dens in the earth’, their children, some as young as three, spoke in tongues. Their symbol was the dove, which nested in the clefts in the rocks, to represent the persecuted church forced to worship in the desert; their heroine was Marie Durand, sister of the executed Camisard leader, Pierre Durand. Marie was locked up in the Tour de Constance at Aigues-Mortes for 38 years and carved ‘résister’, resist, on a stone wall in her dungeon. ‘Resist’ was a word that would resonate down the years.
Through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, great assemblies of people gathered to hear prophecies, designed to console and to exhort, at secret nocturnal meetings, which could last as long as 12 hours, and in which the Catholics, the forces of the Antichrist, ‘the devil and his followers’, were branded as persecutors to be confronted in a holy war. Because many of the Camisards were illiterate, the teachings were distilled into images and utterances calling for militancy. Leaders inspired by prophetic trances led ill-clad and poorly armed guerrilla bands, who went into battle against the King’s soldiers singing psalms. Lacking the money and contacts to join the Huguenots who had fled to England and Switzerland, they wandered around the villages carrying bibles bound to their backs with leather straps, which left their hands free for weapons. The Cévennes came to be seen as a ‘sacred theatre’ where these clandestine religions might survive.
After countless Camisards had been slaughtered, their farms torched and those who refused to repent tortured by the Abbé du Chayla and his inquisitorial troops in dragonnades, conversions enforced by dragoons of ‘missionaries in boots’, the few survivors surrendered. O
nce peace was restored, the Huguenot pastors built their reformed church, harking back to Calvin and not Luther, on a Geneva model, holding their first synod of the ‘Désert’ in 1715. The years without clergy had produced an independent style of prayer and extensive singing of psalms, such as the Puritans later developed in the New World. Adopting many of Calvin’s teachings, the Huguenots took communion up to four times a week, and excluded from their meetings anyone they considered to be spiritually unready. Gambling, blasphemy and obscenity were punished. Social welfare and charity towards fellow believers was encouraged. From the days when the burial of Protestants was forbidden in Christian cemeteries came a tradition of planting a tree for every birth, and another after every death.
It was among this robust and persecuted people, the Huguenots and the Camisards, whose one source of authority and inspiration was the Bible, that the teachings of John Nelson Darby found fertile ground. Darby was the nephew of a soldier who had fought with Nelson at the Battle of the Nile; Nelson was his godfather. The Darbyists, as they would become known, were to play a crucial role in the battle against Vichy for the Jews.
In the early 1800s in Britain, a number of Church of England clergymen, unhappy with the formalities and rituals of the established Church and yearning to return to earlier and simpler times, broke away and flourished in Christian evangelical movements. There were, according to the theologian Thomas Edwards ‘176 distinct heresies’. Congregationalist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist preachers travelled around the country on horseback, proclaiming a shared belief in a diligent study of the scriptures, a more direct form of worship and the possibility of doing without a pastor or priest to lead the church. When God promised salvation to Christians, they believed, this included the Jews; Palestine was regarded as their second homeland.
One of these preachers was John Darby, a fine-looking man with intense deep-set eyes and a full, wide mouth, the son of a family of Anglo-Irish aristocrats, who, having trained for the priesthood in the Irish Church, broke with it over matters of doctrine. The idea of an ordained clergy and an established Church, with links to the Crown, was, he said, contrary to the scriptures. Irascible and disputatious by nature, Darby joined the new Brethren assembled in Plymouth, who rejected all organisational structure beyond the level of the congregation. Before long these Brethren too fractured into small sects, and Darby emerged as leader of the stricter faction. He was an excellent speaker, fluent in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, French, German and Italian, a prolific writer of poems, hymns and interpretations of the Bible, and he also supervised new translations of the scriptures into English, German and French.
In 1837, Darby went to Switzerland, where the ‘Reveil’, the religious awakening from a lazy, unthinking faith to a more personal piety based on salvation and repentance, was winning many converts. He travelled on to France and visited the Ardèche and the Haute-Loire, where he preached to enthusiastic gatherings. God, he told them, was a covenant-keeping God, whose honour and integrity were linked to Israel, where Jews should be returned to their own land. In the Book of Revelation the Apocalypse, with its four horsemen, giant locusts and blood raining on the earth, was an unveiling of what was hidden. He found his listeners agreeably ‘devoted and zealous’ and remarked that the Brethren he encountered were ‘well, and walking near the Lord in general’.
Essentially mystical rather than theological, Darby’s often obscure and tortuous sermons included prophecies, an emphasis on the utter depravity of the human race, new birth through the word of God and the second coming of the Saviour. True believers, he told them, would be ‘raptured’ from the earth, rising to meet Christ in the air halfway to heaven, before the onset of the period of ‘tribulation’, the seven-year rule of the Antichrist. After the Battle of Armageddon would follow the second coming of Christ, when his elected would reign in happiness and prosperity for a thousand years. Much of what Darby preached was not new, but he wove the strands of earlier millenarianism and prophecy into a tightly spun system of his own, supported by Biblical texts, then communicated it to his followers in his endless writings and during his impassioned speaking tours. When he visited the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in 1849, crowds gathered from all over the region to hear him speak. They took notes and later said that his words would feed their congregations for many months to come. Commenting on this foreign messianic preacher, the local prefect told his superiors that since his sermons were made of ‘inoffensive dreams’, he could see no threat in them.
The Brethren were, however, prone to schisms and jealousies, particularly in Britain. They disagreed over baptism, over the need for ‘godly, elder Brethren’, over prophetic events and over the relationship of the assemblies to one another. Protesting against what he called sectarianism and clericalism, Darby split away again. He remained a complex, enigmatic and authoritarian figure, thriving on ceaseless controversy, and he seems to have believed that he personally had been granted unique insight into the scriptures and appointed by God as an emissary to battle the forces of evil. His followers became known as the ‘exclusive’, as opposed to the ‘open’, Brethren, and as such, he told them, they would benefit from special blessings.
Of the many splits and schisms that followed, often over questions of discipline, both in Britain and on the plateau, the most important for the Haute-Loire and the Ardèche was that led by the son of a solicitor’s clerk from Essex with a sweet and powerful singing voice, piercing eyes, and a large white beard and flowing moustaches. Frederick Edward Raven was 28 when he left the Church of England in 1865, meeting Darby at around this time. In Greenwich, where he took a job as secretary to the Royal Naval College to support his family of nine children – over whom he ruled with great strictness, much emphasis on fresh air and exercise, and a ban on the use of slang – Raven was in due course accused of blasphemy and heresy. He had preached that prayer and meditation, as well as the direct words of the Holy Spirit, were in fact as important as – or even more so than – Bible study, and that not all believers were the equal possessors of eternal life. Throughout the plateau, his followers in turn accused the Darbyists of being ‘derogatory to the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Calling themselves ‘Ravenists’, they set up their own assemblies.
Keeping to themselves and holding to their own interpretations of the word of God, these little communities of Ravenists and Darbyists, who preferred to be known as ‘assemblies of Brethren’, settled into parallel lives of quiet piety largely unaltered by the advent of war. Centuries of violence and persecution had lent them a mixture of wariness, pride and suffering, and a strong oral tradition as tellers of the stories of their heroic past. They met on Sunday mornings, after the cows had been milked, not to listen to sermons or prayers but to place their souls before God, unmediated by a priest, and again in the afternoon, for Bible studies or Sunday school. Their families were big, with eight or even ten children.
Darbyists in the woods outside le Chambon
Services were held in barns, or people’s dining rooms, unadorned, bare of all religious symbol, without altar or cross. Men and women sat separately, the women in hats, with neat, rather severe black or white clothing, and the Eucharist was passed from hand to hand along the rows of chairs. It was the men, never the women, who spontaneously initiated the singing of the psalms or the commentaries on them, and no woman ever spoke. Newcomers, sent from other assemblies, would be carefully vetted before being invited to join in, and if found wanting, they would be excluded, the better to protect the assembly from sin. In the evenings, the silence that marked most Darbyist and Ravenist homes would be broken only by readings from the Bible, the ‘parole de Dieu’, the word of God, kept open always in a prominent place. What Darbyist children would remember as they grew up was the silence, the lack of laughter. These were, as one of them put it, people who were ‘morally conscious’.
Since it was only possible to be a true Christian when living a life of faith, the solution was to have as little as possible to do with the ways
of the world, which was seen as entirely evil. The heated political disputes of the 1930s had barely touched the plateau. People who drew their codes of behaviour not from the laws of the land but from the teachings of the Bible might welcome Pétain’s return to a more moral France, but they would still not expect to associate themselves with its diversions. True Darbyist or Ravenist faith meant no cafés, cinemas, bars, alcohol, dancing, hotels, parties or even church festivals. It also meant being alive to the fate of the Jews, the chosen people, whose salvation was implicit for their own.
For the Catholics and Protestants on the plateau, whose generosity of spirit and courage was about to be tested in precisely the same way, the issue was rather simpler, more to do with conscience and obedience to ecclesiastical authority than inner faith. For all of them, however, whether Catholic, Protestant, Darbyist or Ravenist, their rural, highly literate community, with its economy revolving around the fields and the forests of pine and oak, was an island, marginal but protected by its isolation. It felt, at times, as if it were barely part of France at all. In such remoteness, there was little need to conform to others. Largely untouched either by the Enlightenment, or by the 1848 revolution, or by the Great War, they continued to hand down their religious observances from father to son and during their evening veillées kept alive the oral tradition of the Camisards. They all read the Old Testament, with its many references to the rescue of the oppressed, the sharing of bread with the hungry, the taking in of the homeless into one’s house. As the war now swept through France, there was probably no single person on the plateau who had not heard the parable of the Good Samaritan a hundred times, or the words from Deuteronomy, ‘I command you [to protect the refugee] lest innocent blood be shed.’
Village of Secrets Page 11
