Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  The teachers did not simply teach. They entered the children’s lives. Acutely conscious of the need to fill their minds with the present, they found things for them to do after school, arranged outings and fancy dress parties, debates and a great deal of sport. Mlle Hoefert dressed up as an American newspaper reporter, in plus fours and a green eyeshade. On Sundays, after church, the children were dispatched on bicycles to nearby farms to collect the picaudons, small, round local cheeses, and they competed as to who could come back with the most.

  The students, too, came from an extraordinary collection of nationalities and backgrounds. One of Hanne and Rudy’s companions was Alexander Grothendieck, the future mathematician, who arrived from the internment camps one day with Madeleine Barot. When not confounding his professors with his brilliance, he taught himself to play the piano. For many of these children, the Trocmés’ presbytery offered comfort and home life; there was the confident and beautiful Nelly playing the piano, the somewhat mysterious Jean-Pierre seemingly always writing something, the angelic curly-haired Jacot, and little Daniel who looked a bit like the actor Jean Gabin.

  What they all had to battle with, teachers and children alike, was the sheer geographical impracticality of the school, which meant that as numbers grew, so classes were farmed out to outbuildings, hotel rooms, empty pensions and huts. The teachers sped between them, the younger and fitter by toboggan or skis once the deep snows came and the drifts made many of the paths impassable. For the four months of snow, tobogganing became an essential part of le Chambon life, the children casting off from the highest corner of the hilly village, each clinging on to the ankles of the child in front, so that a train of toboggans would come hurtling down the perilously icy tracks. The children were sometimes sad, and often a bit hungry, but they were never bored. At a time of mayhem and uncertainty, when all of France was consumed by its uneasy relations with the Germans and its struggles to make ends meet, they were soothed by le Chambon’s implicit moral message, that of compassion and charity. Most would remember all their lives singing the psalm so beloved of Theis and Trocmé: ‘A toi la gloire / La foi renverse les montagnes / Restes avec nous Seigneur’.

  And yet, as everyone knew but did not dwell on, behind the seemingly cheerful faces and intellectual curiosity lay much grief and sadness. Many of the Jewish children had lost contact with their parents or their brothers and sisters, having heard nothing more after a final frantic note as a train was leaving for Drancy. At post delivery time, they hovered in the hall. A boy called Peter Feigl started a diary, addressed ‘à mes chers parents’. Photographs of his mother and father were stuck into the small black notebook, and he surrounded them with borders patterned in coloured ink. Day after day he wrote: ‘I am anxious . . . I am worried . . . I fear for you, my dear parents . . . Still nothing from you . . .’ On 13 September, he heard that they had been taken to Drancy. After that, nothing. Now, every day, he wrote: ‘no news of you . . . no news of you’ again and again. He also wrote about trying to contact the Red Cross, the Quakers, about getting himself to Marseilles, to America.

  And then the entries stopped. When they resumed, in 1944, there was no more mention of his parents.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rats in a trap

  On 8 November 1942, the British and American forces landed in North Africa. Three days later, at seven o’clock in the morning, the Wehrmacht crossed the demarcation line and occupied the French south. In Vichy, Bousquet ordered the police and army to offer no resistance. Following the Wehrmacht soldiers came the Gestapo and the Abwehr, to set up their offices in Lyons, Marseilles, Montpellier, Vichy, Toulouse and Limoges, bringing with them auxiliaries and calling in collaborators and informers. Some of the ground had already been prepared: since the end of September, naming their operation Donar, after the God of Thunder, plain-clothed Gestapo officers with false French documents had been operating in the south, successfully infiltrating the Allied secret service networks set up by SOE to gather information and supply the French Resistance.

  In the south-east, the Italians moved beyond the French départements they had occupied in 1940 and took control of Toulon and all of Provence up to the Rhône, previously under Vichy; Italian irredentists claimed Corsica.

  By the end of the month, Vichy no longer had a free zone, nor an army, nor an empire, nor a fleet. What remained of its navy was scuttled in Toulon. Tunisia was in the hands of the Axis powers, Indochina in those of the Japanese. Out of some dim and mocking consideration for Pétain and Laval, what had been known as the ‘unoccupied’ zone was now to be not a zone of ‘occupation’, but of ‘operation’, for though nothing was left of France as a sovereign state, the Germans still needed French civil servants and policemen to administer the country. Swastikas went up; the clocks were put on to German time. German military forces were moved around and a commander-in-chief of France-Sud, General Rolf Muller, was installed in Lyons. The ornate and imposing Hôtel Terminus by the Perrache station was made into Gestapo headquarters, and Klaus Barbie, veteran of countless murders of Jews, communists and Gypsies across Holland and the Ukraine, arrived as one of its senior officers. Strict censorship was imposed; letters and phone calls were monitored; anyone circulating unauthorised material was threatened with savage punishments. In le Chambon, where he had settled for the winter, Camus was hard at work on La Peste, whose story echoes the position in which the French now found themselves. In his diary, he wrote: ‘Like Rats in a Trap!’ In the novel, in which the city of Oran is sealed off after a plague of rats spreads bubonic plague, Raymond Rambert, the journalist stuck in Oran after the gates are closed, says that until that moment, he had felt like a stranger, but now ‘This story concerns us all.’

  Throughout what had been Vichy France, the Germans began to move their men in, commandeer hotels and offices, reserve the cinemas and restaurants, hang their enormous flags and take stock of the gendarmes and policemen on whose help they would have to rely. Julius Schmähling, a small, round man with spectacles, a balding egg-shaped head, a rolling gait and the look of a benign hamster was made commander of the Haute-Loire. His headquarters were at Le Puy, on the Boulevard Maréchal Fayolle, named after the much-decorated hero of the Somme and the Marne. He brought with him a garrison of some 200 auxiliaries, more or less unwilling Croats, Russians, Georgians and Tartars, and a small number of elderly and not always reliable German officers, whose idea it was not to find themselves suddenly transferred to the eastern front. The Tartars, under an ambitious officer called Coelle, were regarded as brutal but uncertain in battle. How all these blunt and violent men would get along with Bach’s hesitant policemen and his 36 brigades of gendarmes, under their noticeably anti-German commander, Sébastien Silvani, who were the effective police of the countryside – the regular police operated in the towns – was still to be seen. All were enjoined to keep a keen eye on the ‘Protestant circles’ on the plateau, whose ‘memory of the wars of religion’ had left them attached to notions of ‘liberty and internationalism’.

  German soldiers in the Haute Loire

  Schmähling is another of the plateau’s enigmatic figures. Called up as a reserve officer in 1939, he was 50 when he arrived in Le Puy. Somewhat lazy, amiable and intent on surviving the war without mishap, he was a professor of history from Nüremberg, more interested in his food and drink and discussing the Thirty Years War than in hunting down wrongdoers in the Haute-Loire. In his memoirs, written after the war, he spoke of his desire to keep his area neutral and peaceful. This, it became clear from their fortnightly meetings, was also exactly what Prefect Bach wanted, as he explained when he was later accused of ‘having courteous, even cordial’ relations with the Germans, and of having permitted his wife to accept a box of chocolates from Schmähling. In this story, neither of the two men, the equivocating Bach and the calculating Schmähling, is ever quite what he seems. They wait, watch, adapt.

  What both had to contend with, however, was the growing zealousness of the Service d’Ordre
Légionnaire, the ‘shock troops of the Revolution Nationale’, flag-waving, thuggish young patriots in their blue uniforms and berets, who had sworn allegiance to Pétain and vowed to oppose ‘bolshevism, Gaullism, Jewry, pagan Masonry, anarchy, egalitarianism, false liberty, apathy, scepticism’ and much else besides. The SOL had been forbidden to operate in the occupied zone, but they had been gaining unpleasant strength throughout the south.

  Schmähling’s reasonableness, he would say, stemmed from an incident that had taken place when he was a young teacher in Bavaria. One day, having started to give a lesson on lions, and looking forward to all the dramatic tales he had prepared on the king of the beasts, he noticed a hitherto totally silent boy at the back of the class imperiously waving his hand. Schmähling ignored him and kept talking. Suddenly the small boy jumped up and called out – without permission, a heinous crime in a Bavarian classroom – ‘Yesterday, Herr Professor, I saw a rabbit! Yes, I saw a rabbit!’ Schmähling was enraged: ‘Shut up, you idiot! Sit down!’ The small boy sat. For the rest of the year, he never spoke again. Schmähling took note. His hot temper had been wrong: in destroying that ‘moment of sunlight’ in the little boy’s life, he had destroyed something in himself. He had vowed, he would tell his listeners, never to exercise such cruelty again and to make room always for people to speak; and as he saw it, he kept that vow.

  As an officer of the Wehrmacht, Schmähling had no authority over the Gestapo, who in principle chased political refugees and Jews, while the Feldgendarmerie tracked down German deserters. But Le Puy had no Gestapo office – the nearest was at Saint-Etienne, 75 kilometres away – and, along with matters of resistance, the black market and requisitions of every kind, all denunciations of Jews, hidden or otherwise, came to his office. The portly middle-aged Schmähling now had total power over the Jews of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. What was crucial was how he would use it.

  Pétain made one stand, which he won, over the Jews, both French and foreign, who now found themselves in the new ‘zone of operation’, insisting that they should not have to wear a yellow star. But the reality was that no Jew was now safe, anywhere in France. By the middle of November 1942, Vichy had allowed 17 convois, deportation trains, to carry 11,012 foreign Jews from independent French territory to German-occupied France, from there to be deported to the Polish death camps. How many were left, in the internment camps, in hiding, in the cities, in the Italian zone – desperate, terrified people, spilling out all over the countryside in search of better hiding places, protectors, documents to get out of France – no one knew.

  What exactly awaited them in Poland was still a matter of conjecture; many found it impossible to believe that it was mass murder. But what was clear was that with the German occupation of the whole of France, another step had been taken in the delivery of Jews for deportation. The little optimism that had remained among Vichy’s Jews now died. Orders went out to mayors and police to report every incident, ‘however anodyne’, even those taking place at night and on holidays. Posters, propaganda, suspicious people, sounds of aeroplanes, suggestions of discontent: all and everything was to be noted and reported. Along with, of course, the name and identity of every Jew. Under a new edict, law number 979, Jews were no longer allowed to leave their residences without special papers. They were to be numbered, considered possible chips for bargaining with the Germans; or simply kept in readiness for Vichy’s next step in helping Hitler towards his Final Solution.

  The arrival of the Germans in the unoccupied zone had a further, bitter, result. For over two years, the Jewish organisations had been battling to secure visas for children to emigrate. Several hundred, after interminable wrangling, had done so, often after precarious and fearsome adventures. One young Austrian girl who had been hiding in le Chambon had finally heard that her visa for the US had come through before the snows melted in the spring of 1942. During a last heavy snowstorm, when the little train had been halted by impassable drifts, she had walked 15 kilometres down into the valley, got herself to Marseilles, negotiated with the authorities and caught one of the last boats out to the US. She was 16.

  Before the occupation of the Vichy zone, Marseilles had been the centre of diplomatic life for those still desperately hoping to emigrate, and foreign consuls had been able to issue visas for anyone possessed of all the necessary documents. The Czech consul, Vladmir Vochoc, was a committed anti-Nazi, and when his stock of passports ran out, he had false ones printed and issued, until he was put under house arrest. All through 1941, Varian Fry, the young American working for the Emergency Rescue Committee in New York, had continued to organise departures, both legal and illegal, from his office in the city, most often across the border into Spain, then to Lisbon and from there by sea to Shanghai, the Belgian Congo or Mexico. One of his passeurs was Dina Vierny, a Trotskyite, and former model for the sculptor Maillol. Of the 20,000 people who had approached Fry for help, he had managed to arrange departure for about 2,000. But for some of the people on the list drawn up in the US he had been unable to do anything. The Czech writer Ernst Weiss had taken poison in Paris; the art critic Karl Einstein had hanged himself near the Spanish border. Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Max Ernst, Golo and Heinrich Mann and Max Ophuls had all got out.

  On 28 September 1942, six weeks before the arrival of the Germans, under heavy pressure from the Quakers, the OSE, the YMCA and the JDC, the American State Department had finally granted 1,000 visas for Jewish children coming from France, to be accompanied by 75 escorts from Marseilles to Lisbon. On 15 October, it increased the number to 5,000. Laval prevaricated. On the 16th, he and Bousquet, piously declaring that they were interested only in ‘bona fide orphans’, said that Vichy would never let children cross the Atlantic while ‘their parents are left in Poland’. At last, after more wrangling, Vichy gave permission for a first shipment of 500 children, saying that this was a dry run for the others, in exchange for an undertaking that there would be no adverse publicity about the French treatment of Jews. The children were collected from camps and children’s centres by the OSE and the Quakers, and assembled to wait in Marseilles.

  Meanwhile, a separate rescue operation, led by Böszi – Elisabeth Hirsch – from the OSE’s team in Gurs, set out across the Pyrenees with another group of 12 children, aged between 8 and 14, to cross into Spain and then Portugal, where the Guinea was waiting to take them to Palestine. It weighed anchor on 26 October.

  At last, it seemed, in little groups, Jewish children were escaping the Nazis. But it was an illusion.

  Early in November, the children in Marseilles had been issued with both their visas and their tickets for the US from Portugal to New York. Their escorts had been chosen. A boat, chartered in Lisbon, was waiting. There were more delays, more last-minute caveats. They were told that only 100 of them were to be allowed to go, and that they needed to be vetted. Then Vichy announced that only women could act as escorts. After this came disagreements over definitions: who was an ‘orphan’? Who was an ‘abandoned’ child?

  On 4 November, Vichy vetted a first group of 37 and abruptly rejected eight of them. The children waited. Then five of the escorts were detained as ‘deportable’. Some more children were held back on account of having impetigo. They were still waiting when, on the 8th, the Allies landed in North Africa and relations between Vichy and the US broke down, and they were still there when, on 11 November, the Germans arrived in Marseilles, effectively putting an end to all further hopes of emigration.

  Chaos and confusion spread around the voluntary organisations, many of whom were now forced to leave France. On 16 November, as they packed up their offices in Marseilles, handing their work over to Secours Suisse – which still had diplomatic relations with Germany – the American Friends Service Committee informed the State Department that they were ‘placing all applications for United States visas on behalf of applicants in Southern France into a suspense file’.

  What every Jew in France needed now was a false identity. Under a law introduced s
oon after the total German occupation, Jews, whether French or foreign, were obliged to carry ID with a ‘J’ stamped on it, without which they could neither travel nor collect ration cards. For French Jews, vulnerable to denunciations from covetous neighbours or spiteful employees, it was still sometimes enough to move house, change district or département, and declare themselves not Jewish. For foreign Jews, many with strong accents and little French, concealment became almost impossible. They needed wholly new identities, new stories, new pasts.

  Children, more confused and forgetful, had to be coached to remember who they were supposed to be. At the OSE, the young social workers would make their charges rehearse their new identities again and again, until there was no hesitation:

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Philippe Crochet.’

  ‘Repeat it.’

  ‘Philippe Crochet.’

  ‘Where is your father?’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘How did he die?’