Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  A priest in Tournon was waiting to introduce her to the passeur paid for by her aunt. Due to cross with her were five other people, and they whiled away the time by playing bridge. As night fell, they set out; when they reached a stream, the passeur kindly carried Hanne across. Though it was pitch dark, confusing, full of menace, they made it into Switzerland and caught, as instructed, a tram. In Geneva, Hanne rang her aunt. She was safe. Despite the fact that she was unhappy with her dictatorial aunt, who refused to believe that Hanne’s mother was dead, for Max and Hanne the war was effectively over. They met when they could, and they planned for their future. Later, when they married and Hanne found herself pregnant, Max was asked what he wanted to put as his nationality on the baby’s birth certificate. The Germans had made him ‘apatride’, stateless, he said, and stateless was how he chose to remain.

  When Joseph Weill, who at every stage feared what Vichy and the Germans were preparing next, was forced to leave for Switzerland early in 1943, he gathered together a group of people to discuss the setting up of filières, escape networks, to rescue those Jews for whom simple hiding places were no longer enough, and for whom Boegner would be able to arrange Swiss entry visas. In this group were the Trocmés, Theis and Mireille Philip, and it was around these last two that an elaborate chain was formed, involving Cimade and Madeleine Barot, the scouts and the Sixième, the OSE and Madeleine Dreyfus, Dora Rivière, a doctor and Christian Socialist in Saint-Etienne, Charles Guillon in Geneva, and several courageous priests, pastors and nuns. Over the next 18 months, they combined to take a great many people – there are no exact figures – to safety. It was a perilous activity, made worse when, in February 1943, the French increased their border brigades from 8 to 12, and the Swiss sent an extra 800 soldiers to reinforce their border guards.

  On the plateau, a meticulous procedure was devised. If until now the operation had largely been a matter of silence, people working on their own, saying nothing to anyone, the journeys to Switzerland would need perfect timing and coordination. Mireille and Theis, already busy hiding people, made certain, with the help of Darcissac and Rosowsky, that everyone had convincing forged papers, with their true ones, which they would need on arrival, sewn into their clothes, usually in the lining under their armpits. They also kept closely in touch with Boegner and Geneva, ensuring that the names of the people who left were on the approved Swiss list, something that Olivier, Mireille’s son, would later say was made very much easier by his mother’s friendship with Switzerland’s commander-in-chief, General Guisan. Though Guisan was better known for his robust attitude towards keeping the Swiss army up to the mark, capable of defending itself against a German invasion, and was later criticised for his open mistrust of refugees, he also, Olivier maintained, opened important doors for Mireille.

  By now there were few farmhouses in and around le Chambon, Mazet, Fay and Tence where no Jew or STO resister was hidden, and the farmers had taken to leaving lights burning to indicate when all was safe. After the Germans occupied the south, and Boegner could no longer travel freely backwards and forwards between Nîmes and Geneva, Guillon, able to go anywhere as secretary general of the world YMCA, took over most of the transporting of money; though he too was now in danger of arrest, having been identified by Vichy as a ringleader in ‘the clandestine emigration of foreign Jews’. To Mireille’s network, which she called ‘le réseau des presbytères’, Guillon was known as ‘le visiteur de Genève’.

  Mireille Philip is one of the quietest, most modest and most efficient players in the story of the plateau. After the war, she said and wrote nothing, and when offered the Yad Vashem medal for the Righteous, she turned it down, saying that she had not acted the way she did in order to receive a medal. As her husband André rose to become a minister in the French government, she retreated back into domesticity and good works.

  In 1942, Mireille was 41. Her five children were all in the US, the eldest, Olivier, having been born there in the 1920s while André was doing a thesis on methods of production and the working classes. Like André, she was a practising Christian, a believer in social equality and extremely well connected throughout the ‘haute bourgeoisie protestante’. Before the war she had worked at Cimade with Madeleine Barot. After her husband’s departure for London to join de Gaulle in the spring of 1942, she stayed on in the third-floor flat of La Bergerie, above Pastor Theis and his eight daughters.

  Until the end of 1942, a man called Pierre Gallant was her principal guide to the frontier, but after his cover was blown, his place was taken by the 17-year-old scout Pierre Piton, who, with his chubby face and very blue eyes, and wearing his scout uniform, looked very much younger. After the theology students Piton was supervising in the Pension des Genêts went to bed, he would take his sledge and collect the hidden people next on the list for departure, escort them to Mireille for a final briefing and prepare to leave with them on the 250-kilometre journey to the border. Sometimes, when time was pressing and the travellers were frail, he borrowed a lorry, pretended that he was helping to move furniture, and drove in broad daylight through le Chambon, the Jews hidden in a cupboard at the back.

  Using a Polish or German speaker as interpreter when one was needed, Mireille and Piton would explain to the travellers that they were to follow Piton at a certain distance, that they were to appear to be asleep on the trains and in the station waiting rooms, and that they should never speak, make eye contact with anyone, or mention anyone’s name. Piton, in his scouting beret and shorts, positioned himself nearby, but not with them, travelling in the corridor of trains to keep an eye out for Gestapo inspections.

  The first leg of the journey took them to Saint-Etienne, either in the little train or concealed in the Rivière lorries belonging to the family haulage business, which regularly made the journey up the mountain. They spent a night in Dora’s house before catching a train to Lyons, then another to Annecy, where, close to the station, there was a Protestant temple and a pastor, Paul Chapal, who took them in and gave them food. Mireille had made contact with the chaplain of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, the JOC, Abbé Camille Folliet, whose parish was also in Annecy, and with the Abbé Rosay, curé of Douvaine. Both priests had good relations with nearby monasteries and convents, and the men waiting to cross were put with the Trappists in Tarnié, the women with the nuns at Chavanod.

  One possible crossing was to take a boat across Lake Leman, but Mireille and Theis preferred two other routes: one across the plain, entering Switzerland between Collonges-sous-Salève and Douvaine, where the frontier ran along the side of roads, past people’s gardens and across streams; the other over the high mountain passes of Balme, Buet and Barberine, safer, because less patrolled, but hazardous and steep, and impossible for small children or elderly people. When taking the Collonges-sous-Salève route, another priest, the Abbé Jolivet would receive the party of travellers in his presbytery and hide them in the attics, from where they could see the fields and peaks of Switzerland behind forbidding rows of barbed wire, until a safe moment came to cross. Everything had to be left behind, and the presbytery was piled high with abandoned bags and cases, to be collected, they told each other, after the war. Patrols passed every 20 minutes, the sound of their metal-tipped boots usefully audible on the roads before they came in sight.

  Immediately after one had passed, Piton would lead his group – never more than three people – over the road and into a ditch just by the barbed wire. There they would wait for a second patrol, and when that had passed, they would negotiate the wire. Piton told them that the moment they were through, they were to run as fast as they could across no-man’s-land towards the waiting Swiss guards. Usually he waited, crouched in the ditch, until he was certain that the Swiss had accepted the group, having checked that their names were on the list. After this, he returned to the presbytery, slept, then set off back for le Chambon. Lyons, always full of Gestapo and the Milice, was particularly dangerous.

  After 20 successful crossings, Piton felt
confident. One day, he left the plateau with a husband and wife, both magistrates, and a nurse, all three of them German Jews. All went well until the barbed-wire fence. As they were pushing through, the whole area was suddenly floodlit and shots were fired. Piton shouted to the two magistrates, who were already across, to keep running, while he and the nurse were arrested and taken to a police post, and from there, to his great relief, not to the Gestapo but to the Italian authorities in Grenoble. Both of them had false papers relating to places in the north where the archives were known to have been destroyed by bombing. Piton was roughed up, but not badly hurt. Three weeks later, the two of them were released.

  Piton decided to try again, wanting to get the nurse across as soon as he could, fearing that her name might be passed to the Germans. On the train taking them to Annecy, he was arrested by the French police, handcuffed and taken into custody. The nurse was not spotted. Chapal, who was waiting for them at Annecy station, saw what had happened and notified Folliet. The abbé had good relations with the local French police captain, and he agreed to let Piton go. As the young scout left, the captain said to him: ‘I don’t know exactly what you do, but I congratulate you. But do not let me see you again.’ The German nurse, helped by Folliet, made it to Switzerland. When Piton recounted his adventures to Mireille, she decided that someone else should take over his role. He had taken 60 people to safety. Now he turned to helping STO evaders instead. Mireille, Piton wrote later, was ‘our sole chief of staff, our unique commander . . . For her, I would have done anything.’

  Mireille herself was often on the move, checking on the routes, collecting money, meeting contacts, taking lists of new people screened by Boegner for submission to the Swiss. The original number agreed was 80 people, but the list kept growing. Later it became known that one of Mireille’s disguises was a bulky, oil-stained boiler suit and cap, in which she travelled in the cabs of trains crossing the border with engine drivers friendly to the Resistance. Unable always to find enough safe places on the plateau, she also put people into remote farmhouses in the Haute-Savoie, much nearer the border and with shorter journeys involved. And when eventually her cover too was blown, she went to the Vercors, to help with the nascent Maquis, returning to the plateau with money and information, and keeping in touch with London and the French provisional government in Algiers. Her place was taken by a young lawyer with Cimade, Suzanne Loiseau-Chevalier. ‘Be frightened,’ Mireille told her, ‘but keep going.’ Suzanne had been working in the internment camp of Brens in the Tarn, but had been sacked by Vichy for helping people to escape.

  Another man to whom Weill turned when he needed someone to negotiate the perils of the closed Swiss border was a sports master named Georges Loinger. Born in 1910 in Alsace, to a Jewish father who served in the Great War before becoming an antiquarian, Loinger was a tall, good-looking, sporty boy who loved to trek in the mountains with his Zionist scout troop and swim in the wild waters of the Rhine. The family was observant and patriotic, keen admirers of Bismarck. Studying engineering in Strasbourg, Georges met Weill, then working as a specialist in digestive disorders on both sides of the Rhine, and already very anxious about Hitler’s growing power. He gave the young man Mein Kampf to read, and told him that, as a Jew, he must prepare himself for terrible things to come. Now, when Loinger listened to Hitler’s frenzied speeches relayed over the radio, he feared for his family’s future.

  On Weill’s advice, and to the displeasure of his father, who wished to see his eldest son practise as an engineer, Loinger moved to Paris to train as a sports teacher. That way, Weill told him, he would be able to spread the word among the young. While studying, he lived in a rabbinical college; to keep fit, he ran backwards and forwards across Paris to his classes. On the outbreak of war, he served in a French infantry regiment on the Rhine, and was taken prisoner and sent to a stalag in Bavaria. He escaped, and made his way back to Paris, where his wife was working for the Rothschilds in a home for Jewish children. For a while, he helped at the home, and worked with a group of resisters to get Allied soldiers and agents out of France.

  Unexpectedly encountering Weill one day in Montpellier, Loinger learnt about the OSE’s 12 homes and the need to distract the children from the loss of their parents and the uncertainty of their futures. He became the OSE’s director of sport, teaching the children how to trek and swim and play games; he arranged competitions and matches and trained other teachers to do the same. And when Weill decided that the moment had come when the homes were no longer safe and the children were going to have to be moved, he sent Loinger to take a diploma in gymnastics at a training centre for Pétain’s Compagnons de France in Mégève.

  Angular and patrician-looking, Loinger did not appear Jewish, and his Alsatian name posed no problems. As a trained Compagnon, a transparently good Pétainist, the holder of an impressive official Vichy card, he was entitled to go anywhere on the Maréchal’s business: he visited schools, factories, colleges and student groups all over southern and central France. It provided the perfect cover. His wife had just given birth to their second son. The OSE sent a nurse to live with her, and Loinger became a passeur, working with Garel in Circuit B. They specialised in getting children to Switzerland, starting with those most traumatised by events and those most observant and hardest to conceal. In the OSE homes, Andrée Salomon and another veteran of the internment camps, Jenny Masour, prepared the children for the journey, coaching them in their new identities. At this stage, Garel estimated that they needed to get between 200 and 300 children across the border, some of them those rescued at Vénissieux, others from Gurs and Rivesaltes, others again from Mireille and Theis in le Chambon.

  One of Loinger’s first and luckiest breaks was an introduction to the mayor of Annemasse, a known centre for children’s homes before the war. Jean Deffaugt was a tailor, with a shop selling men’s clothes. Uncertain as to his reliability, Loinger approached him warily. But the mayor had already heard about Circuit B. Standing beneath a large, fine portrait of Pétain, he told Loinger: ‘I don’t agree with these manhunts. I will certainly help you.’ The border was full of smugglers, dealing in cigarettes, silk stockings and other luxuries, who now doubled as passeurs of people for the final journey across the wire and through no-man’s-land. Their services were not cheap – between 1,500 and 3,000 francs per child – but Deffaugt introduced him to the most trustworthy. The most venal were already making small fortunes out of people they agreed to guide into Switzerland, demanding more money from them at the last moment, and then turning them over to the Gestapo just the same.

  Annemasse was always full of children, and the Germans had become accustomed to seeing parties of them arrive for holidays at the various colonies de vacances. Those who came with Loinger were Jewish orphans. A new train stop, ostensibly in order to lessen the overcrowding at the main station, was arranged with the help of résistant train drivers; as a Vichy sports professor, Loinger met the children and took them to a centre for the night. Many arrived exhausted, anxious and excitable; they needed to be calm and strong to make the crossing.

  It was Deffaugt who showed Loinger a sports ground that skirted the frontier. When they were ready to cross, he took a large group, Jewish children mixed in with locals, and they played football, vanishing in ones and twos over the wire during the game. The number going home at the end of the day seldom tallied with that of the original teams. There was also a cemetery nearby. Parties of mourners, wearing veils and evidently distressed, arrived to kneel and weep around the graves. When the passeur decided that the road was clear, they gave back their veils and crossed into no-man’s-land and then into Switzerland. The veils were used for the next group. And not far away, at Ville-la-Grande, there was an order of Salesian monks and a college, whose gardens lay along the border. One of the brothers, Raymond Boccard, positioned himself at a high window, and when a patrol had passed, flapped his hat; the fugitives, who had been waiting in a ditch, used a carefully concealed ladder to clamber across.

/>   Between February and May 1943, Loinger, with the help of various passeurs, got 81 children, aged between 4 and 17, in 9 groups, into Switzerland. The total figure for those months, for he was not alone in helping children across, was 123. Once in no-man’s-land, they were told to cry, appear pitiable, but give nothing away until they were taken to Geneva, where Weill was waiting for them.

  Among the adults who made the journey from the plateau, guided by Piton, Mireille and Suzanne, during the winter of 1942 and spring of 1943, were 20 of the Jews who had been rescued when the Coteau Fleuri was raided and who had been hiding in the woods and the mountains ever since. They were Poles, Germans and Austrians. For some, and for their passeurs, the journeys were terrifying. Soon after taking over from Mireille, Suzanne, who had become known as ‘la jeune fille au turban’, on account of the funny round hat she always wore, set off on the little train from le Chambon with four young women, all travelling on forged Alsatian papers. The tickets somehow got lost as the train drew into Annemasse, and only immense good fortune got the party past the barrier unchallenged. When the Abbé Rosay met them at Douvaine, he seemed acutely anxious, saying that there was no passeur available. Suzanne decided to act as passeur herself. The party set out, the abbé carrying their few belongings on his bicycle, but were spotted by frontier guards and arrested. In the police station, while Suzanne swore that not one of the women was Jewish, the four lost their nerve, and despite all instructions to stay silent began to argue and plead. There was only a single policeman on duty. He listened, but said nothing. Then, very quietly, he told them to proceed. Just before 11 p.m., they crossed into Switzerland at Chevrens. They had been extremely lucky. By the spring of 1943, more and more policemen were shifting away from Vichy.