Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Luck, as Suzanne soon discovered, played an enormous part. She would never forget the night she took four children across the border, the oldest a staunch, uncomplaining little Polish boy of eight whose parents had been deported. The three others were sisters, aged four and three, and a baby of one. They too were Polish, and their parents had vanished. The journey from Annecy to Douvaine passed without problems, but the baby was feverish and kept crying. At Douvaine, Suzanne found a cloth and made it into a clean nappy. By now, both the little girls were clinging to her, desperate not to be abandoned.

  Towards dusk, she set off for the border, carrying the baby; soon, the three-year-old could walk no further, so Suzanne was forced to carry her as well. The four-year-old clutched her skirt. A French border guard suddenly appeared, but instead of arresting them, he took one of the little girls on to the handlebars of his bicycle and helped them to the border. Suzanne had been told to wait by the side of a church until the passeur arrived. Night fell. The baby kept crying. No one came. Eventually a French policeman arrived and looked them over, then said to Suzanne, ‘We know who you are, you’re the girl with the turban,’ and showed her where to cross. Out of the shadows a young passeur appeared and they set off over a stream and across the fields. By now all the children were in tears, even the brave and stoical eight-year-old. They reached the border and crossed it. On the other side, Suzanne placed the children by a large rock, putting the baby on the knees of the four-year-old. Then she left them and went back into France, where she hid behind a tree and watched. ‘And then,’ she wrote later, ‘through the dark, I saw the Swiss border guards approach, their torches glowing. And I knew the children were saved.’

  All of the guides had stories of near disasters. One day, while taking across a group of small children, Madeleine Barot heard the sounds of a patrol approaching. She pushed the children through, but in her haste knocked over one of the wooden staves to which the barbed wire was attached, injuring both herself and a Swiss guard on the other side. Since she was technically in Switzerland, the Germans on the French side did nothing. Madeleine was taken to an improvised prison in a school and told to stay put. She got hold of a bit of paper and wrote a note to Visser’t Hooft at the World Council of Churches, then wrapped it around a stone and threw it out of the window. Miraculously, it was seen and delivered; she was rescued and her wounds were treated by Dr Cramer, the ICRC delegate who had done the inspections of Gurs and Rivesaltes in 1941. Madeleine recovered and was able to return to France.

  Not all passeurs were so lucky. Before the war was over, many had been arrested, and some deported or executed, though very few of those whose lives they were saving were ever caught. What all the passeurs would remember for the rest of their lives was the terror of the crossing, the crying babies packed into rucksacks, the exhausted small children able to walk no further, the men and women frozen into immobility by fear. The survivors too would be haunted by memories of these journeys, stumbling through the dark, tripping over roots and stones, listening out for the tramp of boots, convinced that every bush hid a guard and every sound heralded the arrival of the Gestapo.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Living on a volcano

  Spring came late to the plateau in 1943. The snows did not melt until early April; all through December, January, February and March the people in hiding felt safe, cocooned, the roads up to the plateau blocked for days on end by drifts and ice. Long after the plains below showed new shoots of grass and buds, the forests and meadows around le Chambon, Tence, Mazet and Fay remained sombre and wintry. Up here, noted Camus, ‘the eyes are perpetually confused between spring and winter’. But when spring did finally arrive, it brought narcissi and daffodils in profusion, scented yellow fields that filled the air with their distinctive sweet smell.

  The spring also brought a new family to le Chambon, one of the many French Jewish families finally conscious of the trap into which, unawares, they had been led by Laval with his promises that, as Frenchmen, they would be safe from the Gestapo raids. The story of the Blochs is a Catholic story, not a Protestant one, rare on the plateau, but not unique. The 24 Protestant pastors, though appreciative of the Catholics’ help, tended to remain wary of their intentions. As Pastor Lhermet put it to Madeleine Barot, when he was offered assistance by a Catholic priest in Le Puy, there was much goodwill towards the Jews, but the Catholics ‘will not commit themselves to the bitter end’. How fair he was being is hard to tell.

  Pierre and Robert were 12 and 13, the sons of a salesman, liberal and non-practising Jews on both sides of the family, when their father decided that the city of Lyons was no longer safe. Familiar with the plateau from holidays before the war, he rented the top floor of a remote farmhouse at Devesset, just inside the Ardèche; the elderly farmer lived below. Fifty metres away lived another farming family, the Bruyères, who had two daughters. The four children attended the local school together, a kilometre’s walk away. Mme Bloch spent the long, dark days of winter knitting with another neighbour, Mme Duny, while M Bloch continued to spend part of each week in Lyons. One day when the boys were at the Bruyères’ farm, two policemen arrived on bicycles. Mme Bruyère hastily hid Pierre and Robert, but when the men seemed well meaning, she called the boys out of their hiding place. The policemen asked them whether they were circumcised; the boys told them that they were.

  Children playing in the river Lignon

  Whether it was this incident, or the fact that M Bloch’s elderly father, still living in Lyons, was suddenly arrested, put on a train to Drancy and deported to Auschwitz, or that his sister Paulette saw her husband picked up by the Gestapo when he was out buying cigarettes, that caused M Bloch to move the boys to greater safety is not known. But early in 1943, he found a four-roomed house in the middle of le Chambon, cold and uncomfortable, but somehow making them reassuringly anonymous among the many other visitors to the plateau, and installed his family there. It belonged to M and Mme Roussel, whose coal and timber business was opposite, and who lived above their shop. The Roussels were Catholics, two of the hundred or so Catholics in le Chambon. M Bloch gave up his visits to Lyons, pinned a map of Europe on the kitchen wall, and began to chart the military advances of the Allied forces; in the evenings, along with most of their neighbours, they listened to the BBC. Mme Bloch was an anxious woman, her fears made more acute by the arrests of both her father-and-law and her brother-in-law; every untoward event alarmed her, and she was always watchful of the convalescent soldiers stationed in the Hôtel du Lignon, less than a hundred yards away.

  For the boys, it was all an adventure. They loved the deep snow, and tobogganing down the icy run from the top of the village. Pierre became very friendly with Jean-Pierre Trocmé, and was drawn into the chaotic, affectionate life of the presbytery. When the spring came, they fished for frogs and went in search of butterflies and grass snakes. Jean-Pierre, who was a bit older, was an imaginative companion. They joined the Eclaireurs Unionistes, Darcissac’s pack of Protestant scouts, and became a Penguin and a Wolf.

  Pierre was not exactly frightened, but he was always conscious of danger. M Bloch insisted on keeping the shutters of the windows that gave on to the railway line closed, so that it would appear as if there were no one living there. One day, walking past the Hôtel du Lignon, the boys were hailed by one of the German soldiers. ‘We know there are a lot of Jews here! Are you Jewish?’ No, no, replied the boys, we’re Protestants, like everyone else.

  Asked how it was that as a Catholic, Mme Roussel chose to hide Jews, she would say: ‘Yes, we’re Catholics – but is Hitler not a Protestant?’ When Magda Trocmé’s Russian aunt Olga, come to visit her niece, decided to pay a pilgrimage to Lourdes, Mme Roussel’s grandmother agreed to accompany her. The Catholics and the Protestants, said Mme Roussel, were close and friendly in le Chambon. As a commerçant, a shopkeeper, she knew everyone’s business, even that of the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, and she also shared a femme de ménage with Miss Maber. She knew about the Jews in hiding
all over the plateau and in many of the houses in the village; about the STO boys making their way into the Maquis; about the fact that one of the leaders of the Resistance, Henri Frenay, had an aunt who lived opposite the Germans in the Hôtel du Lignon; and about the way that Emile Sèches was feeding all the Jews in the village schools. But it would never have occurred to her to say anything to anyone. The famous Darbyist silence was shared by them all, Catholics and Protestants alike; none of them, as she said, were talkative people.

  But spring brought danger, too. The Gestapo and the Milice, with their orders to keep supplying Jews for the quotas demanded by Himmler and Eichmann, could once again visit the plateau with ease, and Praly’s reports would no longer be filed away unread. In the anomalous way in which everything to do with the Jews was still somehow arbitrary and unclear, there were a number of ‘Juifs en règle’ on the plateau, registered and known to the authorities but as yet untouched. In February 1943, the Bureau of Jewish Affairs reported the existence of 244 French Jews en règle in the Haute-Loire; as well as over 100 foreign ones, 23 of them in Tence and 35 in le Chambon, most of them Polish, German, Russian and Romanian. What was less well known, however, was that the prefecture had other, secret lists with names and addresses for a great many other people, suspected of being Jewish and in hiding. How long these, or those en règle, could now remain safe was the question. For them, the plateau was entering its most perilous phase.

  On Friday 11 June, sitting in his presbytery at Fay, Daniel Curtet finished one of his coded letters to his father, begun a few days earlier. ‘On Tuesday,’ he wrote, ‘two high peaks of the Weisshorn in plain clothes paid a visit here to a family of Mt 15/24. Total: two lambs were requisitioned, an old and a young one, both male. Nothing to be done of course . . . sad affair!’

  The two male lambs were Gilbert Nizard’s father, Armand, and his eldest brother, 28-year-old André. Tuesday 8 June was a clear, fine, hot day. At 11 o’clock in the morning, a taxi, an old Citroën C4 running on gazogène, drew up in front of Chazot’s hotel in the main square of Fay, and a man giving his name as Decarpentier and producing a card complete with swastikas and German signatures, stating that he worked for the Gestapo, demanded the whereabouts of the Nizard family. He had with him a second man, who appeared to be German; both wore the leather jackets favoured by the Gestapo when out of uniform. The chief of the gendarmerie, Louis Glaizon, was summoned, looked over their papers and announced that there was nothing that he could do to interfere with Gestapo orders.

  While Bella looked on appalled, the two men ransacked the Nizards’ apartment at the top of the Exbrayat house, demanding money. Fifteen-year-old Gilbert was mesmerised by the sight of a Luger with its long barrel, which he associated with gangster movies, Robert and Henri, the two youngest boys, had been spirited away by neighbours and hidden in an attic. Armand handed over all the money he had, which came to about 100,000 francs. The leather-coated men then forced Armand and André into the Citroën and they drove off, leaving behind them a shocked and silent crowd of onlookers. They had wanted to take 22-year-old Maurice as well, but there was no room for him.

  Next morning, Bella and Maurice went to Le Puy. At the prefecture, M Romeuf, the secretary, who happened to be a member of the Resistance, tried to comfort them, then took them to see the Procureur de la Republique, M Bernard. Bernard was brusque and unhelpful.*

  They returned to Fay, where Marie Exbrayat, who had become a devoted friend to the family, urged them to go into hiding. She found an empty farmhouse, isolated well away from the road, and the next day, a group of men from the village helped Bella and the children, still in a state of confusion and disbelief, to make the house habitable. It had neither water nor electricity. Whenever there was a threat of danger, Mme Exbrayat sent someone to the farmhouse, so that they could take to the forests. ‘We kept asking ourselves,’ Gilbert would say, many years later, ‘why was she doing this for us. What sort of mysterious inspiration moved her?’ The Exbrayats were Protestants, faithful attenders of Curtet’s temple. Their ironmonger’s shop thrived, and Mme Exbrayat ran a successful food business on the side, providing butter and cheese to people coming from Saint-Etienne. The Nizards lacked for nothing. What Gilbert would later remember were the rich meat soups, full of lard and potatoes and vegetables of every kind. There were Catholics who helped them too, he would say, but their kindness seemed sometimes to be a little too much like charity. ‘The Protestants just opened their arms.’

  Curtet, meanwhile, having discovered that the man driving the taxi had himself been very suspicious of the two armed men, went to Le Puy, where he soon learnt that they had most likely been impostors, since Bach had secured an agreement with the Germans that no arrests would be carried out in the Haute-Loire without the presence of the French police. Curtet was taken to see Bach, who, interestingly, began to shout at him for not having acted more quickly to alert the prefecture to the incident, for then he might have been able to save the Nizards. It turned out that the Citroën had made several stops on its journey to Lyons, even spending a night at Lemastre, and there would have been many opportunities to rescue them. Later, the family would find it hard not to feel a sense of blame towards the pastor.

  By the time Bach was alerted, André and Armand were in Drancy. The two men had indeed been impostors. Having pocketed the money, they proceeded to sell their captives to the Gestapo. The Nizards had been tracked down, it transpired, through Armand’s letters to his business associate, intercepted in Marseilles.

  In Drancy, Armand soon got hold of some paper and wrote to Bella, entrusting the letters to the unfortunate men and women released for a few hours at a time from Drancy so that they could go to their homes and collect the members of their families still in hiding. Their return was guaranteed by the children they were forced to leave as hostages in the camp. Armand’s letters were calm, without self-pity. It was a great comfort to him, he wrote, that the rest of the family were not with them, and particularly not Bella and the girls, for what he saw happening to women in Drancy was sickening. He described sleeping in a bunk below André, with a blanket but happily no fleas; of having three cold showers and one hot every week; and of having met several old friends from Marseilles, among them Mireille’s friend Jacqueline, taken by the Gestapo the day that the two girls were stopped as they left their lycée. He counselled the children to remain ‘dignified and brave and above all of exemplary behaviour’. Maurice was to carry out the duties of head of the household.

  Since the two prisoners lacked everything, and their daily rations consisted of just two bowls of thin vegetable soup, Armand asked that the family send them parcels, of soap and clean clothes and above all food: hard-boiled eggs, sugar, bread, sausage, jam and biscuits. Even the tins they sent would be useful as plates and cooking pots. ‘We are learning to be perfect clochards’ – tramps – wrote André on 23 June, ‘but we are dirty among friends, which is a consolation.’ Apart from the filth of the toilets, Armand reported that their sleep was ‘untroubled’, and that, having nothing else to do, they spent most of the day lying on their bunks. This shared misfortune, he said, had made equals of them all, and in Drancy there were no class distinctions. Two kind women were washing their few clothes, in exchange for sugar and bread, ‘far more valuable here than money’. Albert Exbrayat, who as a garage owner had a car, drove the 500 kilometres from Fay to Drancy with his brother to take them money and provisions; they were not allowed to see the prisoners, but they handed in their parcels and later learnt that Armand and André had received them.

  On 3 July, the Germans dismissed the French who had been running Drancy, and a fanatical anti-Semite called Aloïs Brunner, aide to the chief of the Gestapo in France, Heinz Röthke, and fresh from the deportation of 43,000 Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz, took over the management of the camp. Conditions worsened dramatically. Two men caught trying to smuggle out letters were whipped before the assembled 2,000 inmates; the sight, wrote Armand, was ‘painful and revolting
’. Trains were departing regularly, some, he thought, destined for Cherbourg, where men were needed to help build the Atlantic defences, others probably towards the east, to ‘Upper Silesia, to a salt mine where death comes in slow stages . . .’ He found these departures ‘heart-rending’.

  On 4 July, by which time the Nizards had been in Drancy 15 days, Armand wrote to tell Bella that they had been placed into category 6, among those held back from deportation until their families could be tracked down and brought to join them. ‘Whatever you do,’ he wrote, ‘you must move and hide, so that you won’t be found’; that way, perhaps, they would all remain safe until the end of the war. He had learnt that his brother Simon and sister-in-law Marthe had been sent to Metz, where they were possibly working in a big food factory. On 21 July, he wrote that there were fresh deportations all the time, and that he had been ordered to send Bella a letter telling her and the children to come to Drancy. She was to ‘pay no attention’ at all, and he underlined the words.