Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Most poignant of all was the story of 32-year-old Selma Schneider and her Russian husband, who in 1933 had fled from the Rhineland to Brussels, where they ran a grocery business. When war broke out, they fled again, this time to Paris. Arrested in November 1939, probably as an enemy alien, Selma spent the next two and a half years in various internment camps, until released under Cimade’s negotiations with Vichy and sent to the Coteau Fleuri, where she became the cook for the refugees. Fearing for her life after the rafle in August, she and her husband eventually managed to cross the border into Switzerland, where she believed herself to be safe. Despite her name being on a Cimade list of protected people, she was picked up by the police in Geneva, returned to France, and deported to Auschwitz on Convoi 75 in May 1944, one of the last transports for the death camps. In 1946, searches revealed that nothing was known of her fate, nor that of her husband Hermann, nor of her mother, last heard of in the camp at Noé.

  Six other Jews lost their nerve after the police visit and tried to get away. They were picked up by the French border guards as they were attempting to cross into Switzerland. Since their names do not appear on any of the deportation lists, nothing is known about what became of them.

  Of the 160 Jews sought by Bach throughout his whole département of the Haute-Loire in the rafles of August 1942, 73 were eventually caught and turned over to the Germans before being deported. However, as the records show, nothing that took place on the plateau was ever straightforward. Soon after this, Bach, his behaviour once again surprising and ambiguous, informed Auguste Bohny that the ‘8 foreign Jewish children’ in his care, including Hanne, ‘could return home, without fear of being disturbed again’. He then wrote to the Minister of the Interior in Vichy to say that his police had failed to find any missing Jews, that the whole area, including isolated farmhouses, had been searched, and that the Jews had probably long since fled, since it was far too cold for them to survive for long in the forests. Sergeant Jean Dubrueil from Tence reported that he and his men had paid 625 home visits on the plateau and inspected the papers of 1,350 people. Together with his colleague Silvani, head of the gendarmerie for the Haute-Loire, he suggested that it would be absurd to spend any more money on petrol searching for the Jews. Bach agreed. Dubreuil’s zeal in rounding up Jews was described as being ‘nul’. Silvani’s name appears in the records of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives as ‘official protector of the Jews of Le Puy’. All, it seems, were playing a double game.

  On the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, however, the war had come a step closer. For all the complicity of Bach and his men, for all the bravery of the area’s inhabitants, as a place of refuge it was now on Vichy’s map. It was a map no one would wish to be a part of.

  With the police gone, calm of a kind returned to the plateau. The Jewish children left the forests and the isolated farm buildings and came back to their homes and pensions; the pastors resumed their parish visits and Bible classes; the farmers once again took up the slow rhythm of their agricultural lives. It was just possible to believe that the sudden eruption of Vichy’s police might be a single event, not to be repeated.

  More Jews, both French and foreign, began to arrive, having managed to escape the round-ups and terrified of being tracked down in the precarious hiding places they had found. Some of the first were a small group who had been infiltrated among the Protestants on the day of Boegner’s address at the Musée du Désert and who, instead of boarding the buses returning the faithful to their towns, travelled on up to the plateau at the end of the day. Their escorts, a band of Jewish scouts from the EIF, had sent word ahead, using one of the many codes adopted by the saving organisations. ‘We are sending you marmites [pots]. Will you be ready to receive them?’

  A pattern had now been established, especially when dealing with children. Several times each month, either Madeleine Dreyfus or Madeleine Barot would collect a group of children of assorted ages from some central point in the unoccupied zone, take them by train to Saint-Etienne, then catch the Tortillard to le Chambon. There they would walk down the hill to the main square, enter the Hôtel May on the corner and sit down in the café. The hotel was owned by Jean and Eugenie May; Jean was a renowned chef from Saint-Etienne; Eugenie ran the hotel and the café, with the help of their adult children. The word would go out that homes were needed for a new batch of refugees. Within minutes, the café door would open, and a farmer would appear. ‘I can take two girls,’ he would say, or a small boy, or a brother and sister. The children would gather together their few belongings, follow the farmer to the horse and cart tethered in the square, and disappear. Many arrived very thin, with almost no hair, their skin ‘as dry as a snake’.

  Sometimes it was hard to find homes for boys over the age of 12; the farmers told Madeleine Dreyfus that they ‘talked back’. One day, she was trying to place two teenaged boys. Going from farm to farm, she told her usual story: that these were sickly children from the mining communities who needed feeding up, this being the agreed policy at the OSE, who thought it safer that no one should know they were taking in Jews. No one volunteered to take the two boys. In growing desperation, Madeleine decided to play her last card. Throwing herself on the mercy of an elderly man and his wife, she confessed that the boys were in fact Jewish, that they were brothers whose parents had been deported, and that they themselves were being sought by the Vichy police. ‘Of course we’ll take them,’ the previously reluctant farmer replied irritably. ‘Why didn’t you say so immediately?’ There is another, similar story, much told. A desperate woman appeared at a remote farmhouse asking for help. She explained that she was Jewish. The farmer immediately called out: ‘Family! Father! Mother! Come quickly: we have amongst us a representative of the chosen people.’

  Two of the children who reached the plateau with Madeleine Dreyfus in the late summer of 1942 were Simon Liwerant and his brother Jacques. Jacques was now two years and four months old; Simon thirteen and a half. He found Madeleine’s serenity, her air of calm and composure, infinitely reassuring. The boys were taken in first by Léonie Déléage in the hamlet of Les Tavas, four kilometres from le Chambon. Mme Déléage, who acted as Madeleine’s main contact in the area, was an affectionate, large, smiling woman, dressed in black down to her ankles. That first night, she fed the boys well and tucked them warmly into bed. From here, they were taken to a farmer at Digon, eight kilometres away, who was willing to offer them a home as long as Simon took charge of his goats. The farmer and his wife were reserved and remote in their manner, firm but not unfriendly. Jacques cried all the time and wet his bed. When the farmer’s wife got angry, Simon took to getting up before dawn to wash the sheets. He begged Jacques to stop.

  One day, when the two boys were in the high pastures with the goats, Simon spotted two gendarmes climbing up in their direction. Realising that they had probably been seen, he made no effort to hide. One of the men asked him who he was, and what he and his brother were doing on the plateau. Simon, as arranged, told him that they came from Saint-Etienne, that they had both been ill, and that they had been sent up to benefit from the good air and better food. When the men left, clearly suspicious, he went to see Mme Déléage, who decided to split the two boys up, sending Jacques to her niece Mme Gilbert and Simon to Mme Barraud at the Beau Soleil. The arrangement pleased Simon greatly. He had been longing to go back to school, and was now sent to join Darcissac’s classes. He was the youngest in the pension and was put to share with another Jewish boy. There were three Barraud daughters, and Gabrielle, the eldest, looked after him, took him tobogganing and mended his trousers when they got torn. Simon had heard nothing more from his mother, and knew only that she had been put on a train to Drancy. He had news of his father, still on the work placement for foreign Jews, and of his sister, safe in Lyons.

  But this arrangement did not last either. Mme Barraud’s husband began to complain that there were too many children in the house, and that the money they brought in – small sums from the OSE – was not
enough to cover their keep. Simon was moved again, this time to a family of Darbyists, M and Mme Bard, whose only daughter had recently died. In exchange for his keep, he was expected to help on the farm and look after the cows and goats. An elderly grandmother lived with them, and on Sundays Simon accompanied the family to the Darbyist meetings. He slept in an alcove off the stables. At five in the morning, before it grew light, he was woken by the farmer and worked with him until 7.30, when he had breakfast and left to walk the four kilometres to school in le Chambon. After dinner at night, the three adults knelt and prayed. They were kind, and always fair, but Simon never saw them make any gesture of affection or tenderness towards each other, or to him. Neither did they mention the war, or the Jews.

  Jacques, meanwhile, was not doing well. He continued to cry through the nights and wet his bed. Mme Gilbert, at first sympathetic and understanding, grew irritated, particularly after Jacques started soiling the bed every night as well. After school, Simon walked to the Gilberts’ farm to see his brother. He reasoned with him, begged him, told him again and again that he had to stop. The little boy listened, cried, nodded. The bedwetting continued. The day came when Mme Gilbert informed Simon that she was not prepared to put up with it any more. Jacques would have to go. What happened next is a scene that would haunt Simon all his life. He told Jacques that he would punish him, hit him hard until he stopped wetting the bed. He did what he had threatened, and Jacques, finally, stopped. But now, when Simon came to visit him, Jacques avoided him. Nothing that Simon did made any difference. Jacques refused to speak to him.

  When the autumn term started, the Jewish children hiding on the plateau were mixed in with the villagers and went to school. Rachel Kamienkar, the little Polish girl saved from Vénissieux, had been put into a family in nearby Silhac; closing her mind determinedly to the past, she set about making friends in the local school.

  Hanne was being given French lessons with an Austrian girl by one of the teachers at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole. She and Rudy continued to live and work at La Guespy, into which more new Jewish children were being crammed, often arriving with nothing but what they stood up in. There was a constant problem with shoes, since leather was scarce and rationed, and most of the children wore clogs.

  Two of the new arrivals at La Guespy were Joseph Atlas, come from Gurs with his twin brother. The boys were 16; Joseph was bookish, his twin sporty. They were Polish, and their family, who owned a business selling objets d’art, had been driven from Warsaw in the late 1930s by anti-Semitism, only for the boys to encounter it again in a boarding school in Fontainebleau, where Jewish teachers and pupils were regularly mocked with gestures about long noses. At Gurs, where Joseph had watched his mother turn from being tall, blonde and strong to frail and piteous, he had been constantly hungry and wretched; in le Chambon he felt ‘fed, protected, safe’. At night over dinner in La Guespy the children talked. Not all were Jewish, which, Rudy felt, seemed to make the place safer, particularly as here no one knew or cared who was Jewish and who was not.

  Food was on everyone’s mind, and particularly on the minds of the growing boys. By the autumn of 1942, many parts of France were down to 1,100 calories per person per day, with the cities suffering the most. The British blockade had become so stringent that at one point Pétain contemplated appealing to the Pope in an attempt to bring food into France under the Vatican flag. Transport by road was almost at a standstill; due to the dearth of fertilisers and fodder, crops were meagre and more cows were being slaughtered, which meant less milk. Sugar, coffee, rice, soap, meat, milk and potatoes were all rationed. Though the inhabitants of the plateau were somewhat insulated from the general hunger, their diet was monotonous and much reduced, especially since farmers were supposed to deliver punishing quotas of their produce to the Germans.

  What made food even scarcer locally was the presence of the weekend ‘touristes alimentaires’, the families from the surrounding mining areas who came up to the plateau on their bicycles or by the Tortillard to barter for eggs and chickens and butter, or anything else that the farmers might be prepared to sell. A black market flourished, with local people complaining that the richer refugees, who had managed to escape with money, were pushing prices up. Writing to his brother Robert, Trocmé observed that although they were certainly far better off than people in the cities, his salary no longer covered the food and wood for heating that the family needed. ‘Our farmers,’ he wrote, ‘overwhelmed by these offers [of money] have quite literally lost their heads, which means that we are having to dip heavily into our small capital.’ Miss Maber, longing for a more varied diet, gave her fur coat to a farmer’s wife, to be paid off in butter.

  In the presbytery, Magda dried mushrooms by hanging them on a line across the kitchen, and made blueberries into tarts and jam. During her midday break from teaching Italian, she bicycled around the countryside to see what else she could find. Though Trocmé continued to refuse to allow her to offer the farmers wine coupons in exchange for food, saying that it only promoted alcoholism, she took with her their cigarette coupons and occasionally came back with supplies of butter and cheese. At Tante Soly, Emile Sèches was struggling to find enough provisions for the ever-growing number of children, while at L’Abric, August Bohny was constantly conscious of the hunger of his 75 small charges. Foraging had become part of daily life. Frogs, caught in the fields, were a necessary delicacy.

  Nor was it only food that was lacking. Few of the children arrived with clothes to grow into. As they became taller, clothes were handed down from child to child, trousers and shirts and sweaters increasingly bleached and threadbare as time passed. Hanne, who could sew, spent hours patching and mending. In Faïdoli, a third house opened by Secours Suisse, Bohny divided the children into four teams – lions, tigers, eagles and squirrels – and each took turns at cooking, washing and taking the handcart several kilometres down to the village to collect supplies. To keep warm, the children wore many layers of ill-assorted clothes, which gave them a ragged, unkempt look. A signal had been devised: when all was safe, the Swiss flag flew over Faïdoli, L’Abric and La Guespy. If the flags were lowered, it meant the children had to hide.

  On Sundays, many of the Jewish children went to hear Theis and Trocmé preach, knowing that their feigned Protestantism gave them a certain protection. For Hanne, isolated in La Guespy, it became the day she saw other people and heard news of the plateau and of the war. Trocmé’s brother Francis, who came to hear him preach one day, reported to Robert, another brother, that he had never in his whole life encountered such original and profound oratory. ‘He starts in a familiar, simple tone,’ he wrote, ‘then his voice grows stronger, he analyses what he has said, he becomes almost confessional, sincere, with a clarity that is almost troubling . . . His voice rises, becomes grave, the sentences flow in larger and larger circles, and then, in a great spiral of words, he seems to rise and rise, higher and higher, with great sweeping gestures, magnificently confident, rising further still, leading you to the very summit of religious thought, to the very limits of the ineffable, and having reached that peak, he keeps you in a veritable state of ecstasy; then, slowly, his voice becomes gentler, his tone more intimate, and he brings you gently back to earth and to a sense of peace.’

  To listen to him, said Francis, was to feel yourself in a dream, and it was hard to stop your eyes filling with tears. What was most impressive, he thought, was Trocmé’s unmistakable sincerity, his lack of all artifice, as well as a richness of language and expression that appeared to be completely spontaneous. Francis was not alone in his admiration for his brother’s sermons. Few of the adults who heard Trocmé preach ever forgot it. Among the refugee children he sometimes inspired awe, and when he lost his temper, he could be truly terrifying. Theis, gentler in manner, was more loved. Magda, for all her raucous voice and sometimes overwrought manner, was liked for the way that she was always looking around her to make certain that no one was being left out.

  At the very heart of
le Chambon life stood the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole. Long after the war was over, people who had spent their childhood on the plateau hiding from the Germans would think about the school and marvel at its warmth and intellectual brilliance. As an educational experiment, it was new and original; for the children in mourning for their families, constantly afraid of the future, their thoughts filled with memories of violence and loss, it provided both an anchor and a distraction. Conceived by Guillon, Trocmé, Theis and Mlle Pont as a bastion of international, pacifist Protestantism, it was also liberal and unstuffy. Long before such things became fashionable, it encouraged friendly, informal relations between staff and students, pupil assemblies and a measure of self-governance, as well as a focus on individual interests. There was no rote learning. None of its students forgot what they had lived through.

  Edouard and Mildred Theis

  In large part, the school’s excellence came from its unusual teachers: foreigners such as Miss Maber; outstanding professors who had lost their university jobs in Paris; Jews who had fled Austria, Poland and Germany and had found refuge on the plateau. Between them, they created a sense of enormous intellectual excitement, so that children who had never read Ronsard or Racine and barely spoke French were soon visiting M Barbezat, the bookseller in the village, to find the French classical writers.

  The school librarian was M Schmidt, who had worked for the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. There was Mlle Hoefert, a small, talkative Austrian woman, who smiled so much that her eyes remained permanently crinkled, and who ‘trotted along like a busy little mouse’; she taught her pupils German and introduced them to Rilke in a ‘soft, melodious’ voice. There was the very tall, very thin Mme Dreyer, who had a ‘majestic nose’ and a pale, grave face. She taught mathematics and had two sons as tall and thin as herself. She reminded her pupils of a Greek tragic heroine. There was Mme Lavandes, professor of French and Latin, who looked like a black ant, with her black hair and eyes and black clothing from head to toe, but who for all her apparent severity had a generous heart. Miss Maber, determined that everyone in the school would speak the King’s English, made the students recite, again and again, ‘Timothy Tim has ten pink toes, ten pink toes has Timothy Tim’. She forbade them to call her anything but Miss Maber, saying that ‘miss’ alone was common. At weekends, there were long, laughing hikes across the plateau and up the Mézenc.