Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  On 6 April, Barbie dispatched a party of Gestapo officers to one of the very few OSE homes that remained open, at Izieu, a little village not far from Lyons. The 45 children and their teachers were having breakfast. Most of the children were already orphans, their foreign Jewish parents having been arrested and deported; some had spent months in Gurs and Rivesaltes. It should have been safe: the farmhouse was remote, on a hill, with a long view of the road and any approaching vehicles, and it had been protected by sympathetic Vichy officials. A warning system should have been in place; but it was a beautiful, peaceful morning and it had not been activated.

  One child, who was not Jewish, was released. Everyone else was taken to Montluc. The next day they were sent to Drancy, and a week later, 34 of them were put on a train to Auschwitz; the rest soon followed. Only the director, who happened to be away on the day, arranging for a more secure hiding place for the children, remained free; one teacher survived deportation. Several of the children in Izieu had been placed there by Madeleine Dreyfus.

  Never had the rescue organisations themselves been in greater danger. Two days after the raid on Izieu, the last remaining OSE office, in Chambéry, was visited by the Gestapo. Seven members of staff, and three others working for the Comité d’Aide aux Réfugiés, were caught. They were forced to walk up and down the street, enabling the Gestapo to pick up anyone who spoke to them; then they were interrogated by Brunner, veteran of the Drancy and the Nice round-ups. From Grenoble prison, the director of the OSE, Alain Mosse, who was a Catholic, managed to smuggle out coded messages to close down every last home and take all the remaining children into hiding.

  Two of those arrested were Julien Samuel, the former OSE director in Marseilles, and Nicole Weil’s husband, Jacques Salon. Julien managed to get a telegram to his wife: ‘Claude gravely ill, take every precaution to avoid contagion’; she had time to disappear into hiding with their new baby. Both men were taken to Montluc and tortured. They were then put on a train for Drancy. However they had with them a file, smuggled to them by a friend, and were able to break through the bars, and when the train slowed down, they escaped. They survived the rest of the war unscathed.

  Word reached Garel in Limoges of the raid on Izieu, together with reliable information that the Germans knew every detail of the OSE’s hidden children. Within 48 hours there was not a child left anywhere: all had been moved into deeper hiding. Marianne Cohn and Loinger, meanwhile, were ferrying party after party to the Swiss border. There was a feeling, now, that no one would survive unless the Allies arrived soon.

  Remarkably, Garel was still free, moving around the country on trains with his bicycle, checking up on the new arrangements, still posing as a salesman in pottery. Andrée Salomon, the OSE woman who had done so much for the children in Gurs and Rivesaltes, decided to get a group out to Palestine via Spain. Selected and prepared by the Armée Juive, 12 children aged between 8 and 14, and 5 adults, started out from Perpignan on a day of thick fog. They made it safely to Andorra, and though it took many months to sort out their papers, they eventually embarked from Cadiz on the Guinée.

  Joseph Bass was caught while having lunch in a restaurant in Marseilles. In his buccaneering way, he managed to overpower his guard, get hold of the keys to the handcuffs, and free himself; he reached safety in Le Puy.

  Loinger too was still free. One day he was summoned by his friend Deffaugt, the mayor of Annemasse, who continued to shelter the Jews while remaining on good terms with the Gestapo, from whom he learnt many interesting things. Loinger, Deffaugt told him, though not yet identified by name, was on Gestapo lists. It was time for him to hide.

  He went home, alerted his wife and two children, the younger a six-month-old baby, retrieved the pieces of gold he had prudently hidden for just such an eventuality, and they set out for the frontier. There they joined a party of people waiting to cross. Loinger would later describe how frightened his wife had been, and how he had kept urging her to keep going. As they reached the crossing point, dogs were heard. The passeur panicked and fled. The assembled people began to run, but were quickly rounded up by a German patrol. One officer put a gun to the head of Loinger’s baby, whom he was holding in his arms, and told him not to move; he set his dog to guard him. The dog ran off. Loinger seized the suitcases and, clutching the baby and dragging his wife and older son, ran towards a nearby house, just inside the French side of the border. Its owner and his wife tried to stop them entering, saying that the house would be burnt down by the Germans. Brandishing a knife and proffering his gold coins, Loinger forced his way in.

  Next morning, at dawn, they walked to the wire and Loinger called out to the Swiss guards on the other side. He explained that he needed to get his wife and children across, but that he would be going back. Pushing up the barbed wire, he infiltrated his family through. As a father of two small children, he would probably have been accepted by the Swiss, but he had more work to do. Hastening back down the hill to avoid the next patrol, he returned to Deffaugt in Annemasse, where he learnt that the Gestapo had put out the word for his immediate capture. He left, but it was only to collect more children who needed to cross. ‘I was famous,’ he said later, ‘for being the lucky one.’ Between the autumn of 1943 and the summer of 1944, he and his colleagues got 1,069 children to safety in Switzerland.

  Marianne Cohn, who had helped Simon Liwerant to safety, was not so lucky. A German patrol with dogs caught her just 200 metres from the border as she was about to cross with 28 children. They searched the children and found their real names and addresses hidden inside the lining of their clothes. Marianne was taken, with 11 of the older boys and girls, to the prison in Annemasse. Deffaugt managed to persuade the Gestapo to release the younger ones into supervised residence in the town. Loinger got word to Marianne that plans were being made to rescue her, but she refused, fearing repercussions against the children. She was tortured. A month later, the Gestapo took her and five other members of the Resistance to an isolated spot not far away and beat them to death with spades. Deffaugt, learning that all of the 28 children were about to be sent to Lyons, into the hands of Barbie, convinced a Gestapo officer, through a mixture of threat of reprisals and promises of postwar protection, to turn them over to him. They all survived. Had Marianne escaped, it was unlikely that they would have lived.

  At some point during her days in prison, Marianne wrote what would become one of the defining poems of the Vichy years. She left it with the children.

  I shall betray tomorrow, not today.

  Today, pull out my fingernails,

  I shall not betray.

  You do not know the limits of my courage,

  I, I do . . .

  I shall betray tomorrow, not today.

  Tomorrow.

  I need the night to make up my mind.

  I need at least one night.

  To disown, to abjure, to betray.

  To disown my friends,

  To abjure bread and wine,

  To betray life,

  To die.

  I shall betray tomorrow, not today.

  The file is under the windowpane.

  The file is not for the window bars,

  The file is not for the executioner,

  The file is for my own wrists.

  Today, I have nothing to say,

  I shall betray tomorrow.

  On Tuesday 6 June, 160,000 British, American, Canadian and Free French soldiers were landed by sea and air along an 80-kilometre stretch of the Normandy coast. The battle for the liberation of Europe had begun. With the help of SOE, the French Resistance began to attack railway lines, ambush roads, and destroy telephone exchanges and electrical plants. Four days later, in the space of just a few hours, Yssingeaux was liberated. The plateau was, in theory at least, free; but what followed, as the Maquis took over the area and the Milice fought back, was anarchy. Catholics, Protestants and Darbyists alike awaited the arrival of the Allied forces with a mixture of longing for the Americans and fear of the Rus
sians and what communism might bring.

  Just what the Germans would be capable of as they retreated, fighting their way north and east, was brought home when, on 9 June, the SS Das Reich division of the Waffen SS, helped by the Milice and in reprisal for the killing of some 40 of their men, entered the town of Tulle in the Corrèze, rounded up 600 men and boys, some no older than 16, and hanged 99 of them from lamp posts, trees and balconies, so that their swinging bodies lined the streets, while the SS officers watched, drinking, laughing and taking pictures. On the 10th, they drove the women and children of Oradour-sur-Glane into the village church and set fire to it, then herded the men into barns, shooting them in the legs so that they could not run away, and setting fire to them as well, so that by the end of the day, 642 people were dead.

  On the plateau, Virginia Hall radioed Buckmaster for more supplies, planned a mission to cut the railway line between Lyons and Saint-Etienne, and welcomed Allied agents, dropped in threes as part of the combined SOE–OSS commandos, known as Jedburgh, to whom she gave schnapps stolen from the Germans.

  News had finally come of Daniel Trocmé, whose last message before Christmas had spoken of a transfer to another camp. His brother François had lost both his hands trying to save his factory in a fire the Maquis had started in the hope that it would prevent supplies from reaching the Germans. The German officers who came to see him in hospital to thank him for his efforts asked him if there was anything they could do for him. ‘Find my brother Daniel,’ François told them. They said that they would do what they could. Towards the end of May came the information that Daniel had died in the camp at Maidanek in Poland. He was 31.

  Later, from survivors, it became known that he had been ill all through the spring with heart trouble, and that he had spent some time in Dora in the concentration camp, in a work battalion, but that, growing thinner and weaker all the time, he had been put on a transport for Maidanek with 500 other sick and dying men. Given the length of the journey, some 900 kilometres, and his state of health, it was highly improbable that he had survived the journey. His friends reported the intensity of his pleasure when a parcel had arrived for a fellow prisoner from the plateau and the way that it had been shared out while Daniel described the bands of people protecting the hidden Jews. The tragedies to hit his immediate family did not end with his death. His mother Eve was badly injured by shrapnel when the Americans shelled L’Ecole des Roches, and died soon after; his father was killed in an accident with an American jeep.

  And then tragedy came to the plateau itself, in the shape of three unrelated, senseless events. It was, wrote Trocmé later, as if the divine intervention that had shielded them was suddenly lifted, and he understood for the first time how it was that the Romans consulted auguries in search of clues to the future.

  The first malevolent act of the gods concerned Manou Barraud, Gabrielle’s 17-year-old sister, a cheerful girl who had often been heard to shout ‘Nasty! Nasty!’ whenever she encountered a young woman in le Chambon whom she considered too friendly to the convalescent German soldiers. At Beau Soleil, Mme Barraud had continued to take in students from the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, along with Jewish boys and girls sent to her by Madeleine Barot and Cimade. It was an affectionate, noisy household. Until the Normandy landings, Gabrielle helped Oscar Rosowsky with the forged documents; M Barraud was away in the mountains with the Resistance.

  Manou had a boyfriend, a youth not much older than herself, who had got hold of a gun and joined the Maquis. On the afternoon of 5 July, he visited Manou to show off his gun, reassuring her that he had put the safety catch on. Suddenly it went off. A bullet hit Manou in the stomach; she died in Gabrielle’s arms. Le Forestier was called, but there was nothing he could do. ‘The best,’ he said sadly, ‘are the ones who die.’ Laughing, fearless Manou was buried in the cemetery. All the village attended. Mme Barraud insisted on keeping her daughter’s boyfriend by her side for several days, fearing that his guilt and grief might lead him to take his own life. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said to him. ‘It’s the world that is mad.’

  Running for the hills

  The next day, after a shoot-out between the Maquis and German troops not far away at Le Cheylard in which the Wehrmacht killed some 50 people, there were fears that the Germans might reach le Chambon. Emile Sèches sent his Jewish children from Tante Soly out to the forests. He had built them a hide in the woods, a pit dug out of the earth made of tree trunks covered in moss and leaves, and there they huddled until his piercing whistle – one long, three short, morse for T and S – told them that all was safe. Miss Maber led her own boys out of the village and on to the high plateau.

  For all his irritation with the maquisards on the plateau, Dr Le Forestier remained very close to the resisters, prompt to treat their injuries, alert to the dangers they found themselves in. Brès, the scout leader, was godfather to the doctor’s three-year-old son, Bernard; Le Forestier’s brother-in-law ran a Resistance group in the south of France. Le Forestier’s nature had always been somewhat slapdash, quick to act, impatient of obfuscation. Whether he had or had not imprudently kept copies of the medical notes on the young men he treated along with the rest of his patient files, and whether they were actually removed in secret one night by Maquis leaders, has long since been lost in the mists of history. But he was certainly on their side, and he was much loved throughout the plateau. He had had to flee le Chambon for a while after the police in Tence told him the Milice were looking for him. He had also taken in and hidden Jews and people escaping the Gestapo, and had insisted on keeping open the door to his house at night in case anyone arrived in need of safety. How far he was a model for Camus’ hero Dr Rieux in La Peste is also not clear; certainly the two men were remarkably alike: humane, optimistic, tolerant, free-thinking, ever alive to injustice and acts of inhumanity.

  At one o’clock on the afternoon of 4 August, the doctor told his wife Danielle that he had to go to Le Puy to intercede for two maquisards held by the Germans. She tried to persuade him not to go – and Trocmé would later say that he too had told Le Forestier that it was an act of folly – but he was adamant. The boys were risking death; something had to be done. His assistant and midwife, Lucie Chazot, covered the roof of his car with an enormous Red Cross flag and he set out, taking with him Denise Debaud, daughter of the grocer in Villelonges, who was the fiancée of one of the imprisoned men. Along the way, they took on board Bob, of the Armée Secrète, and another maquisard, and also a petrified boy called Jean Rambaud, suspected of being an informer. Le Forestier was told to stop near a disused quarry, where two other maquisards were waiting. Jean was led away; shots were heard; the doctor was asked to certify that the boy was dead.

  The group resumed its journey to Le Puy, getting there around 3 p.m. Bob went into a bookshop, Denise set off for the prison with some food, and Le Forestier entered a café to talk to two men who, he hoped, might be able to save the prisoners’ lives. He left the second maquisard, Leroi, to guard the car, but the young man wandered off to talk to two friends. At this point, a group of Feldgendarmerie arrived and rounded up the three young men. When Le Forestier and his contacts, hearing shouts, came out of the café, they arrested them too. Bob and Denise escaped and returned on foot to le Chambon to spread the news.

  Meanwhile, the Germans searched the car and found two revolvers left by the maquisards despite Le Forestier’s repeated reminders about the rules of neutrality governing Red Cross vehicles. Le Forestier spent that night in the prison in Le Puy and was taken next day to the Kommandantur. A court martial was convened, under Major Schmähling, who was still in Le Puy, though his command of the Haute-Loire had passed to a harder man, Oberst Metger; Le Forestier was condemned to death. Danielle hastened to Le Puy, accompanied by Trocmé and Auguste Bohny of Secours Suisse. Bohny would later say that Schmähling had been frank and polite and that he had not received the impression that he was ‘speaking to a blank wall’. Danielle, who was appalled at the sight of the bruises on Le Fo
restier’s face and the swellings on his ‘beautiful hands’, was told that the death sentence had been commuted: Le Forestier was to go instead to serve as a doctor in Germany.

  Through the air vents in his cell, he was able to talk to a neighbouring prisoner to whom he described his family; for much of the time he hummed, recited prayers and sang snatches of psalms, but there were moments of silence, after torture.

  When Danielle returned to see him on the 9th, she was told – in error – that he had already left. But he had written her a letter. It had a curious, somewhat stilted tone, as if there were things that he was not saying. He had spent, he wrote, ‘hours, nights and days prey to physical and mental torture, but my soul is calm because, at the peak of my ordeal, my Christian faith has never deserted me’. He told her that he had deliberately asked to be sent to serve as a doctor wherever he was needed, since medicine was something that transcended nations. ‘Kiss the children for me every morning,’ he concluded. ‘Keep your hair in plaits in memory of me, because I like it that way.’ At the bottom of the letter was a small list, under the heading of ‘suitcase’; it included a pullover, a travelling blanket, underclothes, soap, a selection of books from the Pléiade collection, a bible and a ‘belle photo’. But it was too late to get them to him.