Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Next morning brought a new summons. Laval had sent orders that they were to be released anyway, providing they would at least agree to ‘respect the person of the Maréchal of France’; this they could do. Their return to le Chambon was greeted with subdued warmth, Pastor Jeannet having warned against too much public rejoicing. Praly reported to his superiors that the five weeks in detention seemed to have done the men good: their attitude towards the government was definitely more respectful. He would continue, he added, to keep a very close watch on all three. The following Sunday, the packed temple heard the story of the men’s adventures.

  To what or to whom exactly they owed their release has never been discovered. It may have been due to the fact that Laval had an eye to the future, and that in the aftermath of Stalingrad, the war was swinging in the direction of the Allies; or it may have been, as Trocmé believed, that the commandant feared the men’s disruptive popularity in the camp. More simply, it may have been brought about by the intervention of people like Bach and Bohny. Certainly Boegner used his connections at Vichy to argue for the men’s release with René Bousquet, Secretary General of Police. Whatever the reason, it came not a moment too soon. A few days later, the camp was closed and the 500 prisoners were deported to Poland and Silesia. Few are thought to have returned.

  The first stirrings of spring were appearing on the plateau. There were days of pale sun, when the women would come outside and sit on their doorsteps to make their lace. The ice on the Lignon began to break up, bringing surges of water coursing down the river bed. A young Jewish boy called Lecomte caught a trout with his hands. Underneath the snow could be heard sounds of melting water and the croak of frogs long dormant below the ice. On 9 March, Camus noted that the first periwinkles had come up through the last patches of snow.

  The pastors were delighted to be home. But the village was not quite the one they had left behind. It was an edgier, less tranquil and pacifist place, one in which new cross-currents of thought were moving events forward at a faster, more brutal pace. The plateau did not seem quite so inviolate, and the Jews, the resisters, the STO young men felt anxious. Saving people had moved into a grey area, and grey areas were not what Trocmé liked.

  La Maison des Roches, home to a number of young Jewish men, struck Rosowsky as particularly vulnerable, and he urged its director, Daniel Trocmé, to disperse the students. And it was not long before Curtet received a visit from his Viennese former lodger, Lipschutz, who had returned for a while to live at La Maison des Roches, and who told him that he was shocked by the insouciant optimism of the pension. ‘They can’t see the danger,’ he said. ‘They make light of everything. They are convinced that there is always a way out of everything.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  An unknown and unknowable oblivion

  It was not only on the plateau, but across the whole of France, that the mood was changing. The early spring of 1943 was relatively mild. Even so, people were cold and hungry. The number of cases of TB was rising all the time, along with diabetes, typhus and scurvy. Lack of vitamin B and sugar was resulting in sudden deaths from malnutrition. Hospitals and chemists were running out of codeine, quinine, insulin, gauze, iodine and disinfectants of every kind. The welfare organisations, unable to meet the ever-greater demands on their resources, reported feeling ‘menaced by starvation’. There were now, said the Quakers, at least two million ‘seriously malnourished’ people in the cities, not so much because of a shortage of food, but because so much of it was going to the Germans and to the black market. Across the country, the French, angry with Vichy about the privations, were angry too about the pervasive repressions, the all-too-visible ill treatment of the Jews, the round-ups of their own young men, and the predatory militia recruits, swaggering around with newly acquired weapons. It gave strength to those bent on saving people.

  Despite the savage reprisals, the attacks on the occupying forces by the Resistance were becoming bolder and better organised. In January 1943, the three principal resistance movements in the south – Combat, Franc-Tireur and Libération-Sud – had merged into Les Mouvements Unis de la Résistance. Henri Frenay, head of Combat, was often to be seen in le Chambon, staying at Les Ombrages with his sister, Mme Eyraud, just across the street from the convalescent Germans, all part of the curious inviolability of the plateau.

  Since the execution of hostages seemed only to alienate the population, Eichmann ordered that the trains carrying people to the concentration and extermination camps, a more effective measure of control, be resumed. After a lapse of five months, during which the trains had been needed to carry men and supplies to the eastern front, the deportation of the Jews from France began once more.

  February was a murderous month. A first round-up of Jews in Paris took away children – whose names had been found through lists held by the Jewish umbrella organisation the UGIF – the sick and the very elderly. Four 90-year-olds and 54 men and women in their eighties, taken from the Rothschild Hospital in Paris, as well as seven three-year-olds, were on the 49th convoi of the war to leave Drancy for Auschwitz. On arrival, a little girl called Sylvia Menkes was gassed; it was her first birthday. All but a very few of these new deportees were foreign Jews, but the net around the French Jews was drawing tighter all the time. By mid March, 49,000 people had been sent to the death camps; almost none were still alive. Plans were afoot to increase the number of new deportees to between 8,000 and 10,000 every week. Deportation, it was announced over the radio, was a question of ‘public hygiene’. That many would be French was no longer in doubt: like foreign Jews, they were obliged to have ‘Juif’ or ‘Juive’ on all their IDs. To make their arrest more palatable, those now rounded up were carefully branded as ‘criminals’. The Germans had played their cards with Laval with skill and cynicism; but France was running out of foreigners.

  There were fewer people in Gurs, Rivesaltes and the other internment camps, so many having already been deported, but they continued to be places of extreme hardship and constant fear. Rivesaltes, noted a visitor, had become a ‘sorting station for people who pass into an unknown and unknowable oblivion’.

  Except that this oblivion was not any longer unknown. It was over six months since Gerhart Riegner, the outspoken and sober young secretary of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, had begun supplying reliable information about the Final Solution, obtained from dozens of different sources throughout Europe, to the Allies, to the Vatican, to the International Committee of the Red Cross and to Jewish leaders all over the world. He had sent eye-witness accounts of the gassings, the mass shootings, the round-ups, the deportation trains. He had even reported precise details of the gas used by the Germans, Zyklon B, and of the numbers of Jews they planned to murder, where, when and how. An account of an order issued by Hitler regarding the ‘extermination’ of all Jews by the end of 1942 had been received by Carl Burckhardt of the International Committee of the Red Cross and passed on to the US Secretary of State. All of which had resulted, on 17 December 1942, in a joint Allied denunciation of the ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination directed mainly against the Jews’ being carried out by Germany.

  The statement, read out in the House of Commons in London by Anthony Eden, and in Washington by Roosevelt, concealed none of the facts: the ‘infirm . . . left to die of exposure and starvation’ or ‘deliberately massacred in mass executions’, the hundreds of thousands of victims, ‘entirely innocent men, women and children’. But the world was not much minded to listen. Earlier in the year, at the ICRC in Geneva, an extraordinary plenary session called on 14 October to decide whether or not to go public with the information had resulted in a virtually unanimous vote against – ostensibly in order not to jeopardise the work being carried out with prisoners of war. The piecemeal, often uncoordinated, requests by the Jewish leaders – for safe havens for escaping Jews, for evacuations from Bulgaria and Romania, for the bombing of the gas chambers at Auschwitz – were ignored, denied, or conveniently put aside. No Western Allied po
wer wished to put the saving of the Jews high among its war aims; their liberation would have to come about only as a by-product of military victory.

  When, on 18 January 1943, the French ambassador to the Vatican was called in to see Pope Pius XII, he was warmly congratulated on the excellent work being done by Pétain ‘for the renewal of religious life in France’. About the Jews, not a word was said.

  In Lyons, Amitié Chrétienne, though knowing itself to be closely watched by Vichy and the Germans, had continued, behind its pious, respectable front, to provide new papers and hiding places for Jews, and to put out its cahiers, to an ever-spreading number of readers. Early in 1943 it brought out a cahier on the STO, with a clear message that it was to be resisted. The widely respected Catholic and monarchist author Georges Bernanos wrote a cahier called Où allons nous? – where are we going? – which went out to 85,000 people.

  But the Gestapo had long since opened a dossier on the ‘great conspiracy’ of which the Abbé Glasberg and Père Chaillet were the principal suspects. Very early on the morning of 27 January 1943, they rang the bell of the offices of L’Amitié Chrétienne on the Rue de Constantine. By ill fortune, Chaillet was in the office, and it was he who answered the door. Together with his fellow editor of the cahiers, Jean-Marie Soutou, he was taken to the Gestapo headquarters in the Hôtel Terminus. Left standing with his face to the wall, the stocky, bespectacled Jesuit was able to extract some incriminating documents from the ample sleeves of his greatcoat. He proceeded to chew and swallow the papers. When they had all been destroyed, he began to complain loudly about his arrest.

  Before long, Cardinal Gerlier intervened and Chaillet was released, but Gerlier could do nothing for Soutou, who spent the next three weeks in a Gestapo prison. In the office, meanwhile, Germaine Rivière, who worked with Glasberg and Chaillet, passing herself off as the cleaning lady, had managed to station herself just outside the front door, where she was able to warn and turn away any Jews arriving in search of help. On his release, Chaillet, more determined than ever to reach a larger audience for his messages about spiritual duty and resistance, started work on a new series, more popular and easier to read, less weighed down by theological arguments, to be called ‘Le Courrier Français du Témoignage Chrétien’. For what he imagined would be greater safety, he moved for a while to the Italian zone in the south-east. It was thought more prudent for Soutou to go to Switzerland.

  Though officially no order had been made public about the fate of the French Jews, in practice, no Jew, neither French nor foreign, was any longer safe in France, and no organisation working on their behalf either. On 9 February, apparently acting without formal authorisation from either Berlin or the German headquarters in Paris, Klaus Barbie, the SS officer stationed in Lyons, decided to raid the offices of the UGIF in the Rue Sainte-Catherine. Here he found 86 people, some of them staff and social workers, others clients unlucky enough to be there that day. Two men escaped. The rest were sent to Drancy, from where 78 were put on the next convoi to Auschwitz. The spring of 1943 saw the appearance of flying squads of Gestapo, making up for their small numbers in France by carrying out sudden raids in Nîmes, Avignon, Carpentras and Aix. Trains were checked and people taken off. In April, Bousquet renewed his police accords with Oberg and committed his men to the ‘struggle against terrorists, communists, Jews, Gaullists and foreign agents’. Orders were issued that no Jewish child should henceforth be removed from his assigned place of residence.

  These arrests only served to convince both the Jewish scout movement and its underground wing, the Sixième, as well as the OSE, of the urgency of finding more false papers and, above all, better hiding places for the children in their care. The Sixième was reorganised into regions and départements, working closely with the OSE, and the young social workers were given false papers of their own. Liliane Klein-Liebert, who had taken part in the rescue of the children at Vénissieux, became a Protestant scout leader. There were no more reunions now, no more of the great scouting gatherings of the early years of the war; the scouts, Protestants as well as Jews, were too busy. In Paris, a spectacular escape was organised for 63 children aged between 3 and 18 in a home on the Rue Lamarck. A group of women, some Jewish and some not, claiming to be relations and friends of the children, arrived one Monday to take them, in ones and twos, on an outing. Once out of sight, they spirited them to the Protestant presbytery of L’Oratoire du Louvre, where the pastor, Paul Vergara, had helped arrange for families to take them in. By nightfall all had disappeared; a list of their names, new identities and addresses was buried in the garden.

  But these bold escapes were very hard to pull off. Now that it was known that the Gestapo either already had lists of children from the offices of the UGIF, or knew how to get hold of them, it was a question of stealthy and steady planning, with every appearance of calm so as not to alert the authorities. As Dr Weill had long argued, there was very little time left in which to close down all the homes set up in the unoccupied zone during 1942; the children had to be moved, rapidly, preferably to Aryan homes, under new Aryan identities.

  By early 1943, the OSE had 1,025 children in its care, 50 of them under the age of 3, and all but a few of them orphans or those whose parents had disappeared. There were also more children to be extracted from the internment camps. Many of these were ill, severely malnourished, covered in sores. They were suffering, noted one social worker, from ‘a psychosis of anxiety, even terror’, always watchful, waiting for something to happen, crying for their mothers, unable to take in what was happening to them. For all these children too, the OSE needed to find homes. To make certain that their true identities were not lost, that they could be identified and returned to their families after the war, a central register, with real names and fingerprints, was started in Switzerland, and a copy lodged with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

  Ever since the rescue of the children from Vénissieux, Georges Garel had been at work setting up his clandestine Circuit B for the OSE. His headquarters were in Lyons, but he was very seldom there, spending his days and nights on trains or moving from place to place on his bicycle to find new havens and to have meetings with the young social workers whose job it was to scout out hiding places and then monitor the children they placed there, as well as delivering money and food coupons to their hosts. Garel preferred to hold his meetings on trains, saying they were safer. He kept up his cover as a salesman in pottery, using the false bottom to his case of samples to store money and forged papers. One of his helpers was Lily Tager, one of the young women who had taken part in the escapes from Vénissieux; the pair were now engaged. Garel’s circuit extended across 30 French départements. Like Pastor Curtet in Fay, he used codes for everything, referring to his Jewish protégés as ‘books’ or ‘stationery’, to be delivered on specific days. Twenty-four ‘Aryanised’ children from Vénissieux had been lodged with a Catholic organisation for poor children, Sainte-Germaine. By 1943, some 350 others were hidden all over the south and centre of France. The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was not alone in hiding children; but it was perceived by all as exceptional for the safety it offered.

  For many of the children, who had already been separated once from parents and no longer knew what had become of them, this fresh upheaval was often extremely upsetting. From the archives of the OSE, collected after the war, emerges a picture of children overwhelmed by confusion, loneliness and loss, sent on sudden long and terrifying journeys, sometimes on foot, to isolated farmhouses. The memories exude sadness and fear. Long after the war was over, many of the children remembered being schooled never to speak Yiddish, and never to mention their real names; listening out all the time for the sound of lorries, which might spell a Gestapo visit; trying always to appear ‘normal’, that is to say, not Jewish. They retained a fear of uniforms. Many spoke of having grown up overnight; many said that they would never feel themselves to be a child again. Not least of the remarkable aspects of the plateau’s story is that so many of the chil
dren hidden there by the OSE felt safe, protected.

  To clothe this growing collection of children, most of whom had arrived with nothing beyond what they were wearing, and in any case at an age when they were growing fast, Garel employed a number of knitters and seamstresses in Grenoble and Limoges, where he set up a clothing depot. Garel had an air of authority; he was a methodical and rational organiser, who seldom lost his temper or mislaid anything. His nature was warm, but, said one friend, ‘he had a secret garden’.

  His link with the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was Madeleine Dreyfus, who was now pregnant with her third child. At least twice each month she took the little train up the mountain to le Chambon, where she met Mme Déléage and her daughter Eva, visited the Mays in their hotel on the square, and set out on her rounds of the farms in which the children were hidden. In a small red notebook she recorded their names and wrote down a list of their requests for future visits. Sometimes she brought new children up with her, a dozen at a time; as before, the word would go out and farmers would arrive with their horses and carts to collect their new charges. Though the monthly payments of 500 francs allocated for each child barely covered their keep, there were no demands for more money. From time to time, having run out of possible homes, Madeleine placed an advertisement in the local paper: ‘Social worker seeks to place children from a broken marriage in the countryside, with remuneration.’ Nothing was said about them being Jewish. When a child had a living parent, every effort was made to keep the hiding place a secret, the OSE acting as go-between for letters and parcels, to avoid unannounced visits from mothers and fathers who often spoke very little French.