Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  ‘He was killed in a bombardment.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Lille.’

  ‘Now start again. What is your name?’

  By the end of 1942, France was awash with false documents. The simplest were those obtained by using an authentic certificate; a school diploma, say, with a different photograph, obtained from someone who was prepared to say that they had lost it. This could be taken to the Mairie, and used as the basis with which to acquire all the other missing papers. Birth places could then be chosen from areas where it was known that the local government offices had been destroyed, and with them all the archives. What was important was having not only enough corroborating documents of every kind – student card, marriage certificate, ration book – but the confidence to proffer them nonchalantly when stopped by the police.

  Friendly mayors, printers, civil servants willing to stamp documents, falsify papers or turn a blind eye were crucial cogs in the scramble for papers. But now, as the war entered its most lethal phase for Jews, master forgers emerged from the most unlikely backgrounds to work for the underground Jewish organisations, for nascent resistance networks, for the churches, and for themselves and their friends. One of these was an 18-year-old medical student called Oscar Rosowsky, a curly-haired Russian Jew who was trilingual in Russian, German and French.

  Oscar’s grandfather had been a successful exporter of oak in Riga before moving his family and three sons to Berlin in the 1920s. It was here, in 1923, that Oscar was born; he was an only child and the family lived in considerable luxury, first in an apartment appropriated from a German officer, later in six magnificent rooms in Charlottenburg. But Oscar’s father was a gambler, not a businessman, and soon the family drifted to Nice, where he lost in the casinos what little money he had left from his own father’s fortune.

  When, occasionally, his father’s luck turned, Oscar would be treated to a Pêche Melba. His mother Mirra, meanwhile, had learnt the fashion business and in one of the two small rooms to which they had been reduced set up a millinery studio, finding customers for her elegant little hats, copied from the pages of Vogue, among the rich Russian émigrés on the Côte d’Azur. Oscar’s father sat in a café, read the papers and tried to think up schemes to make money; Oscar played chess. In the summer months, when there was less call for hats, the family went hungry. Oscar’s expensive fountain pen was hocked. He was sent to the prestigious Lycée Parc Imperial and joined the Jewish boy scouts. It was 1940. Nice under the Italians was peaceful. That summer he passed his first baccalaureate; the following year, he passed the second. The Rosowskys were not observant Jews; the war was never discussed; there was no radio in the house. If Oscar was conscious of the Statut des Juifs, it was only through fights in the playground between anti-Semitic Pétainists and the Jewish boys.

  The first signs of trouble came when Oscar was refused entrance to the next stage in medical school on the grounds of the exclusion of Jews. Instead, he was apprenticed to a mechanic who mended typewriters, and who had a contract to service the machines in the Prefect’s office. Oscar accompanied him on his rounds. He spent his spare time with the scouts; he loved the camaraderie of the life, the talk, doing things together.

  One day, at the end of September, when he returned from camp, his mother told him that his father had been arrested and had disappeared; and that a letter was waiting for him, ordering him to a work camp set up for foreign Jewish men. Oscar put on his scout uniform and reported. The man in charge was sympathetic and sent him to an Italian enterprise, where they cooked him snails in tomato sauce.

  Three weeks later, he went back to Nice and for the first time realised what danger his Jewish mother was in. They decided to try to reach Switzerland together, but since her false papers – obtained through contacts in the Russian community – were not ready, Oscar went on ahead. He reached the border and crossed, but was picked up by the Swiss police and returned to France. When he got back to Nice, he discovered that his mother had been arrested; on the train taking her to the Swiss border, a beady-eyed inspector had spotted that her papers were false. She was sent to Rivesaltes.

  Oscar understood that he had very little time to act. He had gone back to work cleaning typewriters and knew that he would be able to get hold of blank ID forms in the prefecture. He stole what he needed, filled in false details for his mother’s name and background, and sent the papers to Rivesaltes. Miraculously, they worked. Walking in the streets of Nice soon afterwards, he bumped into his mother, just released from the camp. She had lost 25 kilos. It was November, and the Germans had occupied the whole of France, and though Nice was still theoretically safe for Jews – for the moment occupied and protected by the Italians – Oscar knew that they had to find somewhere else to hide. Too many people knew that they were Jewish.

  Through friends, he had heard about the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. He decided to go on ahead and explore. He caught a series of trains, and met a contact who was living in one of the students’ pensions in le Chambon, who sent him to Fay-le-Froid, where the new pastor, Daniel Curtet, agreed to help. His mother arrived in Fay under the name of Mlle Grabowska, a Russian émigré widow. She stayed a few nights in the Hôtel Abel, then moved into a small apartment, where she cooked stews of offal and potatoes. Oscar, taking the name Jean-Claude Plumme, went to live in the Barrauds’ pension, Beau Soleil, in le Chambon. It was like being a scout all over again, a collection of some twenty young people from all over Europe, some Jewish, some not, all talking. Oscar was able to fill them in with news of the round-ups and describe what he had heard about the black hole into which the deported Jews appeared to sink. Every ten days or so, on the pretext of taking Russian lessons, he visited his mother in Fay. Only Pastor Curtet knew that they were mother and son.

  At Beau Soleil, he was introduced to a young man called Louis de Juge, who was a student at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, though he was spending more and more time involved in plans to oppose the Germans, and through him to Roger Klimoviski, another Jewish scout, who under the name Roger Climaud was helping to find hiding places for the Jews on the plateau. From them, Oscar learnt that teachers in the college were using a primitive form of photocopying to manufacture false documents, buying supplies of paper and ink from the stationery office in Tence. One of these was Jacqueline Decourdemanche, the school secretary, whose former husband, Daniel,* had just been arrested as a resister in Paris and shot by the Germans. Jacqueline had a beautiful copperplate hand and was much in demand when the flowery signatures so beloved of French bureaucracy were needed. Oscar, who had little with which to fill his time, volunteered to help. He soon discovered that he had a natural aptitude for the work. He was deft, quick, diligent, imaginative. The rafles in the south, the tracking down of Jews in the north, the closure of borders and emigration were driving more and more people up the mountain and on to the plateau. They all needed documents.

  Using drawing pens, inks, stamps, stencils, tracing paper and a special kind of gelatine, Oscar was soon turning out ration books, demobilisation papers, birth certificates, school diplomas, marriage licences, hunting permits and college diplomas. An intricate form took him an hour to forge; the simpler ones 15 minutes. If you heated the gelatine for the transfer too much, it dripped; too little and the transfer did not take. Twenty-year-old Gabrielle Barraud helped with the stencilling and printing; she was watchful, she would say later, and wary, but she never really thought that anyone would catch them. The ration books, which came in various shapes and colours, took the longest. What made the job easier was the state of bureaucratic confusion into which the war had plunged the French civil service, which helpfully meant that it was impossible for the police to check documents against their supposed sources; and the fact that, apart from a couple of forms that were standard throughout France, all the others came in different shapes, colours and sizes, according to the département in which they had apparently been issued. Whenever he required a flowery flourish, Oscar turned to Jacqueline. Often,
he and Gabrielle worked through the night.

  After Convoi 45 left Drancy for Auschwitz on 11 November 1942, with 33 elderly residents of the Rothschild Foundation Hospice on board to make up the numbers, there was a mysterious lull in deportations. But on the plateau, almost every week the little train brought more Jewish families, more children gathered up by Madeleine Barot and Madeleine Dreyfus, to be met by Mme Déléage, taken to the Hôtel May and dispersed among the farmers.

  In the children’s homes run by Cimade and Secours Suisse, and in Emile Sèches’ Tante Soly, where Jewish and French children continued to be mixed in together the better to conceal them, the French ones who now arrived from the plains and the cities were hungrier, less healthy than before the war, long, thin, children with the first signs of rickets, who had trouble concentrating at school. The Jewish children went about the streets openly, because they were obscured by other children. The Jewish adults stayed indoors, fearing to draw attention to themselves and feeling protected by the habitual silence of their Huguenot and Darbyist hosts. Everyone was conscious of the need not to know too much: who the Jews were, where they were hidden. Later Gladys Maber would say that in the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, she went to great lengths to avoid learning the religion or backgrounds of her pupils, and that it was only after the war that she discovered that one of her close fellow teachers had been a rabbi.

  More important for this sense of isolation and safety on the plateau than its remoteness and lack of transport – only Dr Le Forestier, for his rounds, and Emile Sèches, for his food-gathering, had cars – was the fact that none of the local people had ever strayed far, and that they had no tradition of talking. When the international and sophisticated Trocmé and Theis preached their worldly sermons about international affairs, they were addressing people who had seldom moved many kilometres from the place in which they had been born. Robert Ebart, whose family owned a farm six kilometres from the village, would later say that during the entire course of the war he very seldom went as far as le Chambon, and that he never once saw a German. As a small boy, he observed the touristes alimentaires who came up from the plains over the weekends in search of butter and eggs, and he knew of the existence of a cave in the woods in which people hid, just as he knew there was something strange about some of the children in his class, but what all this was about, he had no idea. He did not ask, and he was not told. His parents, he would say, were ‘pas bavards’, not talkative.

  Refugees arriving on the plateau remarked on the ‘esprit de frondeur’, the spirit of rebellion, that seemed to unite the inhabitants – the doctors, the teachers, the pastors and the farmers – even when nothing was said and though many knew of each other only by name. The Darbyist families who from the first had so willingly concealed Jews on their isolated farms, hiding them among their many relations and children, continued to go about their lives in their orderly, separate, silent way. In the cub and scout meetings, much encouraged by the schoolmaster Darcissac, children re-enacted the heroic legends of the Camisards and sang ballads celebrating the Huguenots holding out against the King’s dragoons. When Trocmé sent out messages to let people in the Bible groups know what text to discuss that week, they were written on postcards of Marie Durand imprisoned in the Tour de Constance. To make his point plainer, he often wrote ‘résister’ on the bottom. Watching the snows arrive, bringing with them an even greater sense of isolation and safety, the refugees felt that they had arrived on a little island, not part of occupied France.

  L’Echo de la Montagne, the Protestant paper assiduously read by every household, had spent the first two years of the Vichy government piously praising Pétain’s pronouncements and lamenting France’s moral collapse, while filling its columns with attacks on alcoholism and calls for sacrifice and duty. Nothing had been said about the persecution of the Jews. Now, under a new editor, the pastor of Tence, Roland Leenhardt, triumphant ‘maréchalisme’ was replaced by exhortations to give asylum to strangers. The word ‘résistance’ made its first appearance in an issue in December 1942: the 500 Biblical circles of Jerusalem were likened to the 12 Bible groups in and around le Chambon as ‘noyaux’, kernels of resistance.

  What form, precisely, this resistance might take, however, was becoming a slightly awkward undercurrent among those divided over questions of pacifism. While Theis and Trocmé continued to preach absolute non-violence, there were beginning to be stirrings of something more assertive among the younger people, who resented the way that Trocmé imposed his views on the parish and did not seem to mind hurting feelings. They found it irksome that he saw himself not only as a pastor but as the leader of the community, so that inevitably, when something needed to be done, someone would ask: ‘What would Pastor Trocmé say?’ Yet this endlessly self-doubting man, longing to do good, whose notebooks are filled with angst and uncertainty, and whose manner veered between the stern and the homely, also found compromise very hard. The whole village would remember his wrath when a woman in the congregation who had left young children at home tried to slip away from the temple just as Trocmé was preparing Communion. And relations were not always easy between Trocmé and the former mayor Guillon, who continued to travel back and forth between the plateau and Geneva, carrying false documents, letters and funds for the children’s homes. Beneath the apparent harmony, tensions and disagreements simmered.

  From the archives of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, opened after the war, it is clear that Guillon, still known to everyone as ‘l’Oncle Charles’, was already marked out as a helper of Jews and fabricator of false documents. For the transport of money from the JDC in Switzerland into France, he had taken to using a secretary and old friend, a woman who dressed herself up as a little old lady and pretended to visit relations over the border. She was soon a familiar figure with the border police at Annemasse. One day, when her bag was particularly full of money, a jocular guard asked her: ‘And how much money do you have today, mademoiselle?’ ‘Millions,’ she replied, and they laughed merrily.

  Dr Le Forestier, who took few pains to conceal what he felt about the Germans, was also conscious of being on a list of suspects, but paid very little heed to anyone. ‘The medical apostolate is a ministry without words,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘a silent activity which can be an expression of faith.’ A first son, Jean-Philippe, had been born to the Le Forestiers in 1940; a second, Bernard, in November 1942, just as the Germans swept south.

  The autumn brought Max Liebmann to the plateau to join Hanne. In November, Max had learned that his mother had been deported from Gurs. He had been living on a farm run by orthodox Jewish boy scouts but felt increasingly isolated by his lack of religious commitment, and, knowing that Hanne was hiding on the plateau, he decided to go in search of her. Not sure precisely where or how to find her, he was standing in the road near le Chambon when six young girls ran past, laughing. Max whistled; they stopped; one was Hanne.

  They had very little time together. Max was now in great danger of being caught and deported. She took him to see Mireille Philip, who, now that her husband André, the former socialist deputy, had got to London – his safe arrival was broadcast in code over the BBC – was becoming increasingly involved in the hiding of the Jews. Mireille asked Hanne: ‘Can we trust him?’ By nightfall, Max was in the hayloft of a Darbyist farm an hour’s walk from le Chambon. There were said to be police in the forests looking for him. The farmer cut a hole in the floorboards above the stable, to act as a lavatory. Max emerged from his hiding place only after dark; the only book the house possessed was the Bible. After four weeks, by which time he felt himself to have been entirely forgotten, he received a note from Hanne. Plans had been made for him to join three other teenage boys who were leaving for Switzerland. They agreed that she would follow him as soon as she could; they made a pact that whatever happened, they would survive, not become victims. Max knew that his father had just been arrested in Nice. Both their mothers had been deported to Auschwitz. Having each other was the
only thing that made sense of their lives.

  The winter of 1942 also brought, for the first time, the Germans. Until now, it had been the French police and gendarmes alone who had patrolled the area. One day the Service Français des Relations Franco-Allemands, one of the many collaborationist bodies, arrived in le Chambon to announce that 80 beds for German officers and 90 for enlisted men, all convalescents from injuries received on the eastern front, were to be commandeered. To the dismay and initial terror of the Chambonnais, they took over the Hôtel du Lignon on the main street, less than a hundred yards from the square, and next door to Emile Sèches’ Tante Soly, now home to some dozen Jewish children, mixed in with the same number of French ones. From her bedroom window, five-year-old Madeleine Sèches looked straight out on the terrace where the Germans did their exercises. She could hear them talking.

  Soon the roads leading in and out of le Chambon rang with the sounds of marching and singing. When the Chambonnais seemed to avoid them and disappeared as soon as they emerged, the Germans observed that it was obvious that the French had never cared for music. Dr Le Forestier, already someone who refused to act with caution, took to blowing his car horn loudly whenever the soldiers gave a concert in the square. For a while, the villagers with radios were terrified that they would be overheard listening to the French BBC service and reported. But as the Germans seemed intent on being friendly, behaving correctly and doing what they could to avoid being returned to the eastern front, and as they expressed no interest of any kind in the foreigners and the refugees, the Chambonnais began to feel reassured. They went back to listening to their radios, crouched round their sets, waiting for the familiar opening bars of Beethoven. When one day a German soldier overheard a boy mutter ‘sale Boche’, he yanked him by the arm, saying no, not ‘sale Boche’, but ‘bon Allemand’, and ordered him to repeat it over and over again.