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Village of Secrets

Page 13

by Caroline Moorehead


  Just the same, by their third winter in le Chambon, life for the cosmopolitan Trocmés had threatened to become exceedingly dull. The Protestant faith of André’s parishioners seemed somehow stuck in the rhythm of the seasons and a constant gloomy acceptance of the harshness of life and the approach of death. The few young people hung around the streets with little to do but drink. It was now that an idea that had long been brewing in the mind of Charles Guillon, the mayor, began to take shape. Guillon’s plans for a secondary school, ‘lay in spirit but Protestant and international in practice’, had grown out of discussions with the Trocmés, the de Felices, Le Forestier and André Philip and his wife Mireille, on their regular visits to the plateau. Though there was an excellent primary school run by M and Mme Darcissac – for which the children wore little grey overalls and had wooden desks with inkpots, clustered around a stove – there was no secondary school in le Chambon, which meant that when the children moved up, they had little choice but to travel to Le Puy or Saint-Etienne, or to stay at home. Magda recalled a similar venture that had opened in the Vaudois in Italy.

  Trocmé, who dreamt of making the new school pacifist, got in touch with friends and colleagues in international Christian circles. André Philip contacted Jean Zay, Minister for Education at the time. As a private institution, the school would have no need for French government accreditation. For headmaster, they turned to an old acquaintance of Trocmé’s from theology college, Edouard Theis, who had also been a tutor for the Rockefeller family. Theis, who had been a missionary in Africa and was a committed pacifist, was a big, broad-shouldered, silent, enigmatic man, who spoke seldom and somewhat ponderously, and who had an American wife from Ohio and seven daughters. Money was raised surprisingly easily. The Eglise Reformée agreed to appoint Theis as a part-time pastor in le Chambon. He possessed, said his friends, ‘elephantine determination’, and without his obstinacy, his utter lack of all vanity and his total disregard for money, the college might never have come about.

  As it was, the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole opened its doors in September 1937 to some 40 pupils, though the numbers grew rapidly. Some were local children; others had been sent there in the summer for their health and now stayed on. Theis took Greek, Latin and French, Magda Italian. Her students found her handsome, imposing and somewhat regal, and her outbursts of sudden ill temper, followed by equally sudden laughter, could be disconcerting. Since the school was to be co-educational, a Mlle Pont was made joint director. From the first, it welcomed the broadest spectrum of views, but all committed to Christianity. Theis insisted that classes were to be free of nationalism.

  The staff of Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole

  There was another important and unexpected recruit to the school, a handsome, round-faced upper-class Englishwoman of the practical, self-reliant old school called Gladys Maber. She came from Portsmouth and believed that she, and everyone else, could do anything. An ardent Christian Socialist, she had been at university in France and Switzerland, and had taken an MA at Manchester University, then a doctorate in Lyons, before doing social work in the Haute-Savoie. Having inherited a fortune at the age of 21, she had given most of it away. In the summer of 1939, Miss Maber took a party of children up to le Chambon. She decided to stay on, joined the staff and began to teach English; she was, by now, bilingual. She was soon joined by a friend, Jeanne Carillat, who had been widowed and was bringing up two small boys on her own, and the two women decided to open a pension for boys attending the school. They took over a tall, thin house on the edge of le Chambon and called it Les Sorbières.

  Miss Maber (foreground) and Jeanne Carillat, on the Plateau

  Miss Maber was humorous, imaginative and profoundly moral, and was soon friends with the Le Forestiers, offering to serve as nurse during operations. She was also an imaginatively terrible driver, infiltrating her small car between lorries on the bends of the mountain roads, but making her passengers laugh with songs and funny stories. She had been romantically attached to an aristocratic Frenchman who had been a planter in New Caledonia, but he had contracted leprosy and was not expected to live long.

  In 1939, with war clearly approaching, Trocmé offered his resignation to the church council, saying that in the event of being called up, he would have to refuse to bear arms, and therefore did not want to embroil them in controversy. (Somewhat surprisingly, he also volunteered to go to Germany to kill Hitler.) Boegner, who was known to regard Trocmé as potentially ‘difficult and dangerous’, agreed that he had done the right thing. Once again, however, the Protestants of le Chambon thought otherwise. They refused his offer. Personally, Trocmé worried ceaselessly about the German side of his family; his six aunts were all married to pastors in the Confessing Church. Throughout the first winter of the war, he and Theis and Darcissac, all three of them pacifists, all obdurate in their faith, fretted. They were upset when a Mme Bertrand, who had started a pack of cub scouts in the village, put it about that they were not ‘patriotic’. One day, Trocmé found the words ‘Go back to Italy with your Italian wife, Hun, and get the hell out of here’ scrawled on his wall.

  Theis, as the father of eight children – an eighth daughter had just been born – was exempt from military service, and in due course Trocmé was informed that he too, as the father of four, would not be called up. It left both men feeling relieved but confused. They offered their services to the American Red Cross, but were told that it was open only to volunteers from neutral countries. Trocmé had said he would be happy to serve as a ‘chauffeur’ in order to help civilians ‘in the war zone and in a dangerous place, naturally at no salary’.

  In May 1940, as the Germans were beginning their push into France, Trocmé wrote to Burners Chalmer of the American Friends Committee, who was also a member of the Nîmes group, to ask whether there was anything that he might do in the internment camps. The Quakers had been providing relief across Europe during the 1930s, and were as a result on good terms with the Germans. The two men met in Marseilles. Burners Chalmer was struck by Trocmé’s ‘imaginative, brilliant’ talk, but thought that the pastor might be better suited to a more ‘informal and non-institutionalised setting’. A report written after his visit noted that he was ‘iron-willed, rock-like . . . tough and tender at the same time’, dynamic rather than flexible, but also ‘dogmatic and authoritarian’; in short, a ‘pure spirit’. Out of their conversation came an idea that le Chambon might be a suitable place to take the children from the internment camps, for whom the battle was now under way. Burners Chalmer told Trocmé that money would not be a problem, and that the Quakers would fund them.

  Soon after Trocmé’s return to the plateau, the Germans occupied France and Pétain signed the armistice. Trocmé and Theis immediately decided to preach, together, a sermon on the war. The duty of Christians, they told a packed congregation on 23 June 1940, the day after Pétain’s total capitulation, ‘is to use the weapons of the Spirit to resist the violence that will be brought to bear . . . We will resist whenever our adversaries will demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We will do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.’ Humiliation, they told their listeners, should never be confused with discouragement, nor should freedom ever be renounced. In a letter written at about this time, given to a friend for safe keeping and not found until many years later, hidden in an attic in le Chambon, Trocmé wrote a testament to his own pacifism. Speaking of Christ as a ‘non-violent who allowed himself to be crucified by us’, he said that his own vocation had been ‘imperative’. ‘I am not a fanatic,’ he wrote. ‘I have never had visions. I do not think of myself as better than other people.’ He had, he said, no politics and no commitment ‘other than to God’. It was God alone who commanded him, and it was because he was a believer that he did not believe in violence.

  On the plateau, the winter of 1940–41 was again ferociously hard. Invigorated by his meeting with Burners Chalmer, Trocmé threw himself into his work, gathering his parishioners for fortnight
ly Bible studies, sometimes led now by the refugees arriving on the mountain. He divided his large parish into 13 quartiers, in which designated people conducted discussions, and introduced notions of asylum and refuge. The religious life of the plateau had never been so lively or so intense, with a programme of conferences on capitalism, the USSR and world affairs, André Philip and Le Forestier sharing the teaching. It was at this time, Trocmé would later write, that he thought through exactly what ‘non-violent resistance’ meant, and how it was an ‘itinerary to be explored day by day in communal prayer and obedience to the directives of the Spirit’. Boldly, for many of his parishioners had sons in the army, he continued to preach on the need to love one’s enemy.

  Two new lodgers had arrived to live at the presbytery. They were both refugees, and both Jewish. One was Berthe Grunhut, a 50-year-old woman from Karlsruhe, who did not know where her children or her husband were. Madame Berthe, as she became known, took over the cooking, but she was an appalling cook and the presbytery soon smelt of burnt potatoes and turnips. The other was a M Cohen, who called himself Colin, a 25-year-old leatherworker from Berlin, whose experience of the Nazis had so aged him that he was almost totally bald, his skin yellow and parched. To give him ‘dignity and something to do’, Trocmé asked him to make furniture in the attic. Never blind to shortcomings either in himself or in others, he later noted that Cohen’s incessant desire to please and sudden outbursts of ill temper made him both egotistical and irritating.

  It was on one of these freezing, snowy days that there was a knock on the presbytery door. The story of what followed is one of the many that no one can agree on. Magda opened the door to find a bedraggled, desperate Jewish woman begging for help. She welcomed her in, sat her by the fire and gave her food before going to see the mayor. This is where the story falls apart. The mayor at the time was a man called Benjamin Grand, appointed to replace Charles Guillon, who had been fired for his clear hostility to Vichy; both men, however, were much loved locally, and Guillon, in particular, had long urged the plateau to be generous towards refugees. ‘The mayor,’ Magda later claimed, sometimes using Guillon’s name and sometimes not, was horrified. ‘Above all, no Jews,’ he apparently told her. She was to turn the woman away, on the grounds that it would endanger the lives of French Jews already in le Chambon. Magda’s story goes on: she returned to the presbytery, discovered that the woman’s shoes had caught alight on the stove and gave her new ones, then helped her on her way, directing her towards Switzerland. Thus began, noted André Trocmé in the autobiography he wrote after the war, ‘the first clandestine work’. And, as it happened, the first of the many variations of historical disagreement.

  How true this story is, how correct the details of the mayor’s intransigence, who the mayor in question was, has long been lost in conflicting views of history. What is true is that le Chambon, and the plateau generally, spent the first two years of the German occupation of France in relative tranquillity. Small acts of defiance – Amélie, the feisty little churchwarden, refused to ring the bells on a Pétain anniversary; a groups of boys in black tipped a mock coffin with Laval’s name on it into the Lignon while chanting the De Profundis – were carried out, but they were largely overlooked by the Vichy authorities. The boys who had carried the coffin were arrested, held for a few days in a cell in Tence police station, then released with a ticking-off. Jewish families, in ones and twos, arrived in the mountains, escaping the round-ups in the plains, and settled in rented farmhouses or in Mazet, Tence or Saint-Agrève. Jewish children like Hanne and Rudy found homes among accepting villagers. In the college, there was no saluting the flag, and no one sang ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’

  The atmosphere on the plateau was bracing, energised by the classes organised by André Philip and Dr Le Forestier, at which everything from capitalism to the works of nineteenth-century French writers was discussed, with many references to the war, the Germans and Vichy, all disguised behind metaphor and classical allusion. The Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, where the numbers of pupils had doubled and redoubled, now counted among its teachers many distinguished Jewish professors, sacked from their jobs in Paris and the French universities. Trocmé had never been busier, racing from meeting to meeting, holding surgeries for his parishioners in his house, where they would be certain always to find someone ready to advise. There was, as Miss Maber described it, a prevailing spirit of helpfulness. The Protestant temple, just down the road from the main square, had become the focus of village life, and the parishioners, in their black clothes and little white caps, had never attended the service in such numbers or with such enthusiasm, listening intently as Trocmé strode up and down, accusing, menacing, condemning, ‘as terrible as an Old Testament prophet’, heady stuff for people who had seldom strayed 15 kilometres from the plateau. In L’Echo de la Montagne, Trocmé repeated the words he had often used in his sermons: ‘You will love the stranger, for you have been strangers in Egypt.’ Theis, who had a slight stammer, was considerably less eloquent.

  In her farmhouse up the road, the fiery Mme de Felice was busy typing out flyers. ‘Do not despair! and above all, do not submit to the Maréchal’s politics . . . Nothing is lost yet.’ Already, rumours were circulating in Vichy about the presence of a ‘nest of opponents’ on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, and the names of Trocmé, Darcissac, André and Mireille Philip and Le Forestier were all being noted. The Philips had just sent their five children to the US, and André, aware that he was being watched, was preparing to escape to join de Gaulle in London.

  Then came the summer of 1942, and on the plateau, as elsewhere all over France, everything changed. The question was whether and how the very nature of its inhabitants – dour, plucky, contemptuous of Vichy – and that of the wild mountain on which they lived could between them save the Jews now arriving by every train.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On Vichy’s map

  As the Vichy government saw it, their policies were to be both feared and obeyed; but they also wanted to be loved. From the very beginning, money and effort were poured into group activities, patriotic ceremonies and festivals reminiscent of the Jacobin extravaganzas of 1792, and above all into young people. Children were to return to a classical education, to the history of French imperialism and to religious instruction, taught by men and women who had shed their feeble secular republicanism and who, if they had not, or if they turned out to be communists or Freemasons or Jews, likely to prove ‘an element of disorder, an inveterate politiciser or incompetent’, could speedily be dismissed. To shape young French minds for the national revolution, there was to be no more cramming of arid facts and useless theory. In his classroom in Paris, Jacques Liwerant was only one of hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren all over France who had sung ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’ and saluted the flag in weekly ‘colour ceremonies’.

  In their thousands, too, French children were enrolled as scouts and cubs of every type and hue: religious and lay, Protestant and Catholic, and even, until they were banned, Jewish. On the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, as in every community in France, children joined packs, bought uniforms, played basketball and volleyball, went camping and celebrated the great outdoors. Miss Maber and Miss Williamson, a second English-speaking teacher at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, were both called on to help. Miss Williamson, who had a snub nose, a high forehead and a long chin, her hair severely pulled back into a bun, was known as ‘Castor’, beaver. The packs took the names of birds and animals; there were Wolves, Penguins, Storks.

  Léon Blum had done much to encourage sport and fitness, but Vichy wanted to do more. They wanted young men and women to walk, swim, run, jump, crawl, climb, balance, throw, lift and learn self-defence for at least six hours every week, in order to strengthen their bodies and train their wills. To this end, French teenagers were enrolled in youth movements with leaders, discipline and obedience, to acquire a new virility as opposed to the effeminate ways that had led to the collapse of France. The first of these movements to be
formed under Vichy was the Compagnons de France, whose motto was ‘Fight to be a Man’, and who were organised into medieval units and put into military-style blue uniforms. They were to be the knights of a ‘grande renaissance Française’, ready to lead a new France in a Europe essentially German. The emphasis was all on boys.

  The second was the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, aimed at boys who would have been conscripted; after manly training in such things as forestry, strenuous sports and solemn ceremonies, there would be campfires and much singing. These activities would also serve to remove the young men from the influence of prostitutes, who, since they were unable to get rid of them altogether, Vichy had decided to keep out of sight in ‘maisons closes’. And there were the ‘écoles des cadres’, the schools for leaders, where future priests, teachers and youth workers would learn to ‘influence the structure of the French of tomorrow’.

  At Uriage, a cavalry officer called Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, graduate of Saint-Cyr, took over a chateau that had belonged to Bayard, ‘chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’, and combined a spartan diet of manual work and physical training with intensive courses on politics and economics, marching his students in military formation from one class to the next. Many evenings were spent reflecting on the spiritual crisis that had led to the military collapse. As the writer Jean Guéhenno remarked on a trip around France early in 1942, France had become a strange country, full of people in uniform, regimented into groups.

  How seriously Vichy and the German occupiers took the behaviour of French students and their teachers, and how inventive these had become in defying them, is reflected in the list of crimes which were reported to be taking place: spitting at Germans, wearing British or American colours, reading All Quiet on the Western Front, ringing the doorbell of the German military police without a good reason, jostling German officers, carrying two fishing rods (deux gaules – de Gaulle), drawing caricatures of German soldiers, singing revolutionary songs. The list was interminable, the penalties sometimes draconian.

 

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