Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  It was not to be. On 3 September, Badoglio signed a secret armistice with the Allies. The day set for the Allied landings in Italy was 12 September. However, on the 8th, without warning, Eisenhower landed his forces in Salerno, just south of Naples. Whether those few extra days could have changed the fortunes of the trapped Jews is not clear: Donati’s optimism was boundless, but the chaos into which Italy had been plunged suggests that an orderly evacuation of Jewish refugees would have been highly unlikely. As it was, the Germans, who had been waiting and planning for this moment, acted at great speed. Within 24 hours, much helped by the men they already had in place, Wehrmacht troops had occupied Nice and disarmed the unresisting Italian forces. Nice was now a souricière, a mousetrap, with 30,000 Jews caught in its spring.

  The next day, 10 September, Aloïs Brunner, former commandant of Drancy, arrived to purge the city of its Jews. He brought with him an equally vicious anti-Semite called Brückler, a 25-man squad of interrogators, willing volunteers from the Milice and Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français, founded by former communists turned Fascist, and a group of ‘physionomistes’, men ostensibly trained to recognise Jews by their appearance, who were dispatched into the streets like truffle hounds. Soon, the elegant bedrooms of the Hôtel Excelsior, commandeered by Brunner as his headquarters, resounded to the cries of people under interrogation. For the Niçois, the Excelsior became a metaphor for horror. ‘The city of Nice,’ reported the representative of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives to his superiors, with smug satisfaction, ‘has lost its appearance of a ghetto . . . there are now seats on the Promenade des Anglais for Aryan walkers, which until now have been occupied by the Jews.’

  From his informants, Brunner knew that there were at least 25,000 Jews in and around Nice; he planned to catch them all. His men stopped the trains in and out of the city, and began to comb the streets, house by house, alleyway by alleyway, emptying the hotels and the hospitals, shouting, dealing out blows, bullying, forcing the men to drop their trousers to see whether they were circumcised. The French police, mistrusted by Brunner, were given the job of manning the roadblocks. Brunner’s first setback came when he ordered the recently elected Prefect, Jean Chaigneau, to turn over all his files on the Jews, only to be told that Chaigneau had taken the precaution of burning them. His next was when it became apparent that, far from denouncing the Jews, many local inhabitants were choosing to hide them instead. Rewards of 5,000 francs – the equivalent of two months’ average salary – for every Jew failed to yield the number of victims he had hoped for, and even the informers, of whom there were many, produced disappointingly meagre results.

  It was not long, however, before trains began to leave Nice station for Drancy. Over the next three months, 1,819 Jews would be deported, far fewer than Brunner’s goal, but still enough to send many trains north. The low number proved what could be done when neither the local population nor the French police were prepared to help. But it made the Germans all the more determined; and those who escaped the round-ups in Nice were now in great danger. Never had the rescue organisations – the OSE, Cimade, the Jewish scouts, Garel’s Circuit B – worked harder, or, as it turned out, at greater cost to themselves. New groups of Jews began to leave for the plateau, both orphans and families.

  When the Germans had taken over the south, in November 1942, the rescue operations had been driven ever deeper into hiding, or had transferred their offices to Grenoble, Chambery and Nice, at that point still safely within the Italian zone. From here, they had continued to forge documents, find hiding places and conduct parties of Jews across the border and into Switzerland. In Lyons, where she had remained, Lily Garel worried constantly about her husband, ceaselessly circulating around the south to check up on his team of helpers. By the early autumn of 1943, Garel’s circuit had 1,600 children on its books, scattered around central and southern France, several dozen of them on the plateau, with 29 full-time workers, organised into four sectors. When Nice fell, he sent two of his best helpers, Huguette Wahl and Nicole Weil, to the coast. Joseph Bass, ‘l’Hippopotame’, and his assistant Denise, ‘Colibri’, were also in Nice, and had been joined by a young Italian anarchist called Ermine Orsi, who had been working as a cook at Les Grillons in le Chambon until Daniel Trocmé’s arrest, after which she hid the 45 children on neighbouring farms before leaving for Nice. Ermine became Bass’s main conveyer of children from the coast up to the plateau.

  With Nice occupied, and no safe zone left anywhere in France, the need for hiding places and for getting people across the border intensified dramatically. The Jewish scouts, the EIF, quickly closed their children’s homes and dispersed the 400 children there, taking them in groups of 10 to Loinger in Annemasse, though the former sports instructor was finding the task of negotiating the border ever more hazardous. ‘The entire Jewish community,’ wrote one woman later, ‘gradually built itself deeper and deeper into an underground existence.’ It had become, the rescuers told each other, a race against time, for the war was at last turning in the Allies’ favour; but how many people, and in particular how many children, could they keep safe until France was liberated? A sort of frenzy enveloped them all. They hardly slept, filling their days and nights with audacious plans, the forging of ever more documents, scouring the countryside for people still willing to help. ‘Whatever else we do,’ they repeated to each other, ‘we must save the children.’

  The night of the bold rescue of children from the camp at Vénissieux had thrown up one hero, Georges Garel; the events in Nice created another, a man just as resourceful and unconventional. His name was Moussa Abadi, and he was a scholarly Syrian Jew who had come to Nice to write a thesis on medieval literature; he was also a successful actor, having worked with Louis Jouvet in Paris. Walking along the Promenade des Anglais one day, Abadi had seen a milicien hit a Jewish woman over the head. She had a small child with her. He asked a bystander what was going on. ‘It’s nothing,’ the woman told him. ‘They are just disciplining a Jew.’ In the summer of 1943, Abadi and his 29-year-old Parisian girlfriend, Odette Rosenstock, who had been forced to give up her practice as a doctor on account of the Statut des Juifs, had met an Italian chaplain, Don Giulio Penitenti, recently returned from the eastern front. Penitenti described to them the atrocities carried out against the Jews by the Einsatzgruppen. ‘When the Germans get here,’ he told them, ‘your children will really suffer. I am warning you.’

  Abadi took heed. When the Germans arrived, he acted. And in the same way that Garel had found a bishop, Mgr Saliège, to protect him, so Abadi sought out the Bishop of Nice, Mgr Paul Rédmont. Later, the conversation between the two men would be reported in several different versions, but at the end of it, Abadi emerged from the episcopal palace with an office in which to forge documents, the rank of inspector of schools, a letter of recommendation to everyone working for the diocese, a pile of blank birth certificates and a soutane to wear as a disguise, in case of need. Odette was made a ‘social worker, to take care of the children under the charitable arm of the church’. She took the name of Sylvie Delatre.

  Working independently from, but in close cooperation with, Garel, the Jewish scouts and Bass, and like them using money sent in by the JDC, Abadi and Odette set up a network of their own, the Réseau Marcel, taking charge of the Jewish children along the coast, providing them with false documents and getting them into convents, hospitals, orphanages, children’s homes and presbyteries. They set up sub-offices in Grasse, Antibes, Cannes and Juan-les-Pins. The hardest part, Abadi would later say, was having to ‘depersonalise’ the children. ‘We had to steal their identities. We became identity thieves.’ As with all the rescuers, they quickly discovered that the children hardest to conceal were the youngest, who could not understand what they were told to do, or those who, like Jacques Liwerant, wet their beds, or those whose looks might give them away. Having spent many hours coaching them in their new names and altered pasts, Abadi kept a file of their true names, which, like Gare
l, he hid for after the war. Constantly moving the children about, trying always to keep one step ahead of the Germans, Abadi and Odette asked a local pastor, Edmond Errar, to visit le Chambon and the plateau, and soon more of Nice’s Jewish children were making the journey up into the mountains on the little train.

  Just how dangerous it had become, for children and rescuers alike, was brought home when the Germans, having got hold of the lists of Jews from UGIF and announced that henceforth no one might be moved from a children’s home without permission, descended on a house at La Verdière, near Marseilles, and took away 40 children. Deportations from Drancy of children whose parents had already been sent to Auschwitz had become common; but Convoi 77 long haunted those who watched it leave. This train carried 299 children, of whom two were a year old, and a third a baby. Over half the children were aged between 4 and 12. ‘The little ones went first,’ wrote a witness later. ‘They trotted along, whimpering, clutching some little toy in their hands. They kept falling out of line, stopping, turning back . . .’

  The OSE, at the time of the German occupation of Nice, had 840 children in homes throughout the south. Fearful that their names would now be seized by the Gestapo – the OSE, like all the other Jewish welfare bodies, remained formally under the auspices of the UGIF – the organisation decided to close all the homes and hide the children elsewhere. The Jewish scouts, to pre-empt further Gestapo raids, carried out a number of bold kidnaps of children remaining in UGIF homes. Interestingly, the OSE made no move to close La Guespy, L’Abric or Faïdoli, clearly believing that the plateau remained one of the last places of true safety. Madeleine Dreyfus continued to go up and down the mountain once or twice a week, checking on the welfare of the children in hiding, and bringing new ones to Mme Déléage to find homes for. ‘I have to deliver four “Old Testaments”,’ she would say, getting off the train. The children whose features might give them away, she bundled up in hats and scarves for the journey.

  Remarkably, until this moment, most of the rescuers had escaped capture. It could not last. Very quickly, one after the other, Claude Guttmann of the Jewish scouts, Jacob Weintrob of Loinger’s network, and Huguette Wahl, Garel’s assistant in Nice, were arrested, tortured and deported. The Haute-Savoie had become particularly dangerous since the Prefect, Edouard Darliac, had ordered the gendarmerie to check every train and every station for suspicious travellers. When the number of arrested Jews reached 500, he spoke of ‘edifying results’. Nicole Weil, who with her new husband Jacques Salon had been frantically closing the OSE’s homes and taking parties of 15 to 30 children at a time to Loinger in Annemasse, was arrested in Nice on 24 October. Nicole had been indefatigable, rushing from task to task, place to place. She was a slender, short young woman, little more than a girl herself.

  From Drancy, she was able to send her husband a coded message, warning him of a possible informer in their midst. She told him that in the camps she had met up with Huguette Wahl and several other young rescuers. ‘Our morale is superb,’ she wrote. ‘Tell everyone not to worry about us – we’ll hold on.’ In Drancy, Nicole had taken charge of three small orphans. On 23 November, they were all deported together to Auschwitz. It would later be known that though selected as a worker – and therefore for a while at least safe from extermination – Nicole had refused to be parted from the children, and went with them to the gas ovens.

  On the plateau, while the hidden Jews now seemed to exist in a curious limbo, continuing to be ignored by the convalescent German soldiers, the predatory Milice and Bach’s inspectors, the same was not true of the rescuers. On the evening of 5 October, Dora Rivière, the Christian Socialist reforming doctor from Saint-Etienne, who had been at the heart of a network placing Jews on the plateau, using the lorries and horse-drawn drays of the family haulage business, was arrested by the Gestapo. She was at dinner with her family when a group of French policemen, accompanied by three plain-clothed men in trilby hats and raincoats, forced their way into the house, demanding to see everyone’s papers. Dora was taken to Montluc, already infamous as Barbie’s headquarters. Her elderly mother was held briefly as a hostage, but then released. A few days later, Dora was put on to a train for Paris. Not being Jewish, she was held for a while in the resisters’ prison, Fresnes, before being sent to Ravensbrück, where she worked in the infirmary as a doctor. It soon became known that she and her family had been denounced by a disgruntled young man, angry at having been turned down by their network as too unreliable.

  The next to go was Dorcas Robert, the robust, no-nonsense café and grocery owner from Yssingeaux. She had taken the nom de guerre of Tabitta and was much loved by the young men she hid, whose feet she massaged when they returned from long journeys. ‘Dorcas became a mother for all of us,’ one later wrote. She was arrested on a Sunday morning, along with her sister and her sister’s baby, and her assistant Rose Bérard, the young girl who had grown up to know ‘the value of good causes’. The women were in the shop shelling peas when three armed men came in and demanded to see their papers.

  One of Dorcas’s hidden Jews, always known as ‘Le Parisien’, managed to get away through the attics, and the local policeman, Gauthier, who had helped Dorcas before, was able surreptitiously to retrieve a gun hidden in a sack of dried beans, while Dorcas’s 10-year-old daughter Berthe concealed some papers in a cupboard. But the women were taken off, along with eight young men. They made a lot of noise as they went, to warn others to keep away. That night, in their police cells, the young men asked for a drink of water. The guard brought it in a heavy pitcher, and they used it to knock him out, after which they fled into the darkness, but they could do nothing to rescue Dorcas. Next day, her sister and baby were released but Dorcas and Rose, having been interrogated and beaten about, followed Dora Rivière to Montluc and into Barbie’s hands. Flyers were pasted up all over Yssingeaux’s walls: ‘Yssingelais! Protest against Mme Robert’s arrest! Force them to return this mother to her 3 children!’ In the prison, Dorcas sang psalms to comfort the other detainees. Berthe and her two little brothers were taken in by relatives.

  Most upsetting of all, because she had played such a crucial role in the plateau’s crusade to save the Jews, was the arrest of Madeleine Dreyfus. Her sons Michel and Jacques were now nine and six, and at the end of August she had given birth to a daughter, Annette. All through September and October, as one rescuer after another fell into Gestapo hands, Raymond had begged his wife to hand her work over to someone else. But Madeleine seemed possessed, saying that no one minded about the children the way she did, no one knew where they all were, nor had such good contacts all over the plateau. In the little notebook in which she kept the true and false names of those in her care, there were now dozens of addresses of families and farmhouses where children were hiding. Who, she would ask, can possibly take my place?

  At last, worn down by Raymond’s entreaties, and mindful of the fact that she was still breastfeeding Annette, she agreed to find a replacement. The danger that they were in was brought home to her when Raymond’s sister and her two children, aged 11 and 2, were suddenly picked up and deported. But then, on 27 November, Madeleine received a phone call from the father of a child she had hidden in the school for deaf and dumb children in Villeneuve, just outside Lyons. Madeleine frequently used the school for children preparing to depart for Switzerland. He had heard, the frantic father told her, that the place was to be raided by the Gestapo.

  Madeleine rang the school, which was run by a M Pellet and his wife, to be told, in a curious, formal tone, that she was urgently wanted and should come as quickly as she could. Though suspicious, she decided to investigate. Taking the precaution of locking away incriminating papers in a trunk and putting it in a storeroom, she caught a bus to Villeneuve. The door of the school was opened by the Gestapo. René and Marguerite Pellet had, it turned out, been running the Marco Polo Resistance network in the area, collecting information on the Germans and the Milice and transmitting it to London. It had been one of the biggest
and most effective networks, with contacts all over the south, René using the school as cover for his comings and goings, Marguerite in charge of encoding and transmitting. The Gestapo had been watching them for months. Having arrested everyone on the premises, they had sat tight for 17 days, picking off the Pellets’ associates when they came to call, eating their way through the supplies of condensed milk, jam and chocolate intended for the children.

  Madeleine found a way of hiding her little book with the names of the children in it. She asked to be allowed to go home to breastfeed her baby. When that was refused, she begged to be allowed to make a phone call, so that someone would give Annette a bottle. Her real fear was that, discovering that she was Jewish – though not the nature of her clandestine work, of which she professed complete innocence – they would raid her home in search of her Jewish relations. She used her one permitted call not to ring home, but to speak to the offices of the UGIF; when she got through, she just had time to say that she had been arrested by the Gestapo, knowing that they would then warn everyone, before the phone was seized from her hand and she was slapped. René Pellet had managed to escape, but Marguerite was deported to Ravensbrück.

  When Raymond got home later in the day, he found Madeleine gone and the baby unfed. He went for news to the Garels’ house, where he found Lily and another the OSE helper called Raia, and the two young women, who knew of Madeleine’s connections to the Pellets’ school, offered to go there to see if they knew anything of her movements. They too fell into the Gestapo’s hands, but not before Lily caught Madeleine’s eye and saw in it a mixture of horror and disbelief that anyone could have been so stupid as to follow her there. Taken into custody and interrogated, Lily, who was pregnant, told them that she was Catholic and that her horrible Jewish husband had abandoned her and she knew nothing of his whereabouts. On Raia was found a list of Jewish names. She denied knowing anything about it. Neither woman was physically assaulted, but the Gestapo took pleasure in spelling out to them, in great detail, the sorts of torture they reserved for Jewish women, and from nearby cells they could hear screams and shots. Two months later, in the odd and random way in which these things sometimes happened, Raia and Lily were released.