Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  On 10 August, Le Forestier was put on to a lorry bound for Montluc. It is not clear what he was thinking when he took off his wristwatch, gave it to Leroi, the maquisard who made this journey with him, and asked him to see that it reached Danielle. On the 11th – taking the watch with him – Leroi was put on the last train to leave Lyons for Germany, where he was forced to work in an armaments factory.

  On Sunday 20 August, Barbie ordered 25 German soldiers and 10 miliciens to conduct 120 prisoners to the Fort Côte Lorette at Saint-Genis-Laval, where there was an abandoned house, once lived in by the guards. Among them was Dr Le Forestier. Twelve of them were women; several were priests; most belonged to one of the many Maquis groups in the area. They were taken, handcuffed in pairs, up the stairs to the first floor, lined up and shot; when the first floor was full of bodies, the rest of the prisoners were shot on the ground floor. Phosphorus was scattered and drenched in petrol; the building was set on fire. Three prisoners managed to climb out of a window; two of them were caught and thrown on to the flames. Explosions continued to be heard until dawn, when the inhabitants of Saint-Genis-Laval crept out to see what had happened. Only a third of the charred remains were in any way identifiable.

  Four days after Le Forestier’s murder, Montluc was liberated.

  Danielle knew nothing of all this. It was only six weeks later, having looked everywhere for traces of her missing husband, that she caught sight, among the fragments of clothing retrieved from the incinerated house and put into 24 bags, of the distinctive buckle of Le Forestier’s belt. She was a widow, at 23. Her sons were five and three.

  Most senseless of all, perhaps, was the third and last tragic incident.

  Trocmé loved all his children. He loved practical, reliable 17-year-old Nelly, not knowing that she disobeyed his orders and went dancing with her friends, dancing being forbidden to the Protestant students at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole as ‘immoral and licentious and likely to give rise to unwanted children’. He called her ‘Trocmette’ when he was in a good mood, and ‘Tante Pauline’ when she got on her high horse. He loved thin, gangly Jaques, with his bursts of idealism and his constantly changing moods, and little Daniel, wild and canny and always getting into mischief. But the one he loved best was Jean-Pierre. He thought this son was just like him, his ‘alter ego’, a boy who could not stop thinking and worrying, who visited the villagers when they were ill, who played the piano with the sensibility of someone far older, and who had once said to his father: ‘There is something in me which prevents me from being happy.’ Jean-Pierre had many friends among the Jewish refugees; his companion after school was often Pierre Bloch, the boy from Lyons, who lived with Mme Roussel just up the road from the presbytery.

  On 13 August, returning with Magda from trying to settle a dispute between a warring couple, Trocmé heard Jaques call out: ‘Papa! Papa! Come quickly. Jean-Pierre is dead!’ They found Jean-Pierre in the presbytery, hanging from a rope tied to the cistern in the bathroom. Dr Riou arrived and pronounced that the boy was indeed dead. Their first horrified thought was that he had killed himself. But then they remembered that a few nights earlier, a celebrated actor called Jean Deschamps had given a recital of fables and poems in the temple, among them Villon’s famous ‘Ballade des Pendus’, and how realistic he had been as he spoke the lines about the hanging bodies swinging and dangling in the wind, swinging and dangling himself in front of the mesmerised audience. Jean-Pierre, his friends told the Trocmés, had been much struck by the poem, and they had heard him recite it to himself several times on the banks of the Lignon. The fact that he had carefully wound his pants around his neck before fastening the noose showed, said Dr Riou, that it had simply been a terrible and stupid accident and that he had never intended to die. Miss Maber, who had seen him that day, testified to how happy and carefree he had seemed.

  Jean-Pierre’s coffin was carried by his classmates, the older boys wearing their odd assortment of maquisard uniforms. He was buried next to Manou Barraud, and both graves were covered with wild flowers from the fields, tied in bunches with brightly coloured ribbons by the village children. From the back of the cemetery, Pierre Bloch looked on, too shocked to cry; the two boys had spent the afternoon of Jean-Pierre’s death together. Pierre would later be haunted by the thought that the fault was somehow his, that they had been too close, too emotionally bound up with one another, and that Jean-Pierre, fearing his father’s displeasure, had indeed killed himself.

  Magda wept, saying over and over again, ‘I should have been with him.’ But then she stopped and struggled on, throwing herself back into looking after some of the many people still in hiding who needed her. For Trocmé, acceptance was impossible. Looking at his son’s body, he remembered that of his mother, after the car crash that had killed her when he was 10. ‘An emptiness. A nothing,’ he wrote later, ‘against which one can do nothing.’ He told himself that God would speak to him, but when he walked through the forests, God remained silent. He felt himself to be like one of the tall pines, whose top had been sawn off and which would never grow another. When he preached next in the temple, he took as his text the resurrection of Christ. He and Magda decided that for the sake of the other children, they would get on with their lives, learn to live without Jean-Pierre, as normally as possible. And they took the decision to pay no heed to the ‘odious and pathetic rumours’ circulating around the village, that Jean-Pierre had been a ‘mauvais garçon’, a bad boy.

  Walking up the hill from the cemetery on 15 August, Darcissac fell into step with Trocmé. ‘I know this is a terrible day for you,’ he said, ‘but I have to tell you that the BBC has just announced the debarkation of the Allies in the south.’

  When at last it came, the end came quickly. On 19 August, the German garrison at Le Puy was ordered to move northwards, falling back on Saint-Etienne. Some 6,000 miliciens and their families went with them; those who volunteered to continue the fight were sent to the Pomeranian front, from where not many returned. Pursued by the various Maquis bands of the Haute-Loire, among them Joseph Bass’s group of young Jewish fighters, they were cornered near Saint-Geneys; 17 Germans and seven résistants died. Bass, now known as ‘le Capitaine André’, shouted through a loud hailer to the Tartars, Georgians, Croats and Armenians to lay down their weapons and switch sides. Vastly outnumbered, Schmähling gave the order for his 120 men to surrender.

  Before pulling out, the Germans had soaked the buildings they occupied in Le Puy in petrol, but they had not set fire to them. They had left behind 300 of their auxiliaries with TB. Maurice Nizard arrived to help run the hospital. Oscar Rosowsky’s mother came from Fay to act as interpreter. Though protected for a while by the Maquis, the Russians were eventually handed back to the Red Army; what happened to them then, how the Red Army chose to deal with these turncoats, no one cared to think about. Rosowsky arrived in Le Puy with Samy Charles, requisitioned a local printing firm, and began putting out a newspaper. On 25 August, Lucienne Ruel, Lulu’s daughter from Mazet, was one of dozens of young people from the plateau to join the liberation parade down the main street. They had decorated a cart and filled it with bunches of poppies, marguerites and cornflowers.

  The captured Germans were taken to a manor house at the Pont de Mars, on the edge of the commune of le Chambon, to be guarded by the very policemen who just a few days earlier had been doing their bidding. Feelings against them ran high, and there was talk of revenge. Since they were being held in Trocmé’s parish, it fell to him to be their chaplain. As scrupulous in this as in all else, heedless of how unpopular it would make him, Trocmé went to visit the prison. He found the German officers arrogant and unrepentant, still convinced that Hitler would win the war, and when they attended the service he held for them on Sunday, they turned out in their formal uniforms, clicking their heels and marching in line, as if they were in their own barracks. Trocmé took the opportunity to see Schmähling to find out more about Le Forestier. The major told him that he was already in Germany. Whether
he knew this to be a lie is not known.

  Though he spoke good German, Trocmé had written out his sermon in French and asked Mlle Hoefert, the Austrian refugee who taught German at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, to translate it for him. He had decided to preach on the subject of the Ten Commandments, the forgiveness of God, and non-violence. He announced that he absolutely condemned the war that was just ending. He mentioned Oradour and the gas chambers. That morning, he had preached the same sermon to his congregation in the temple at le Chambon, displeasing the maquisards who attended by insisting that they leave their weapons outside the door. Neither the German prisoners nor his French parishioners liked what Trocmé had to say. The Germans rejected the stories of the killings as lies and propaganda, and said that the French would be sorry when there was no one to protect them from the Bolsheviks and the red plague; the French protested that the barbarity of the Germans could never be countered by nonviolence. Nor did his parishioners like it when, hearing that the prisoners were complaining of hunger, Trocmé took them some of the grapes reaching the plateau from the harvest in the south. There were mutters that the pastor was nothing but a ‘Boche’ himself.

  There was a curious moment when 50 Jewish survivors of a ‘ghost train’, one of the last deportation transports sent to Drancy as the Allies landed in the south and the Germans retreated, suddenly arrived in le Chambon. The train driver had surreptitiously rerouted it into Resistance-held country, where it had been liberated by the Maquis. The survivors, ghost-like themselves from their ordeal, were taken in and looked after.

  Committees of liberation were established in the various villages and tribunals appointed to begin a process of ‘épuration’, the cleansing of those deemed to have been collaborators. Given the numbers of policemen accused of helping the Germans throughout France, what was remarkable was that not one local policeman was among them. Three young women from le Chambon and its immediate surroundings had their heads shaved, but how guilty they had really been of fraternising with the German convalescent soldiers no one was quite sure. In and around le Chambon, Mazet and Fay, there were no summary executions, but over the border in the Ardèche, there were terrible acts of revenge.

  In the war trials that followed, Colonel Metger, who had commanded the Légion Tartar, was condemned to death; Schmähling was acquitted. Several local people came forward to testify to the unwillingness with which he had obeyed orders, and the protection he had provided to a number of Jews. He had thrown, so it was said, many letters of denunciation into the waste-paper basket. The prefect, Bach, was also brought to trial; he too was acquitted. Magda Trocmé and Miss Williamson were among those who gave evidence on his behalf, saying that he had been a ‘bon Français’, ‘un laissez-faire actif’, that he had played a part in getting Trocmé, Theis and Darcissac released, and that he had warned the plateau of impending raids. When the verdict was handed down, there were cheers. But Bach’s prefectorial title was annulled; his career was over.

  Once Lyons had been liberated, on 2 September, and three battalions of men had been trained and armed, Virginia Hall requested to be allowed to go to Alsace to continue the fight. She took with her 18 young men who called themselves ‘le corps franc Diane’. Before they disbanded and joined the regular forces of the French army, they had a final gathering in an abandoned chateau. A great deal was drunk, many speeches were made and Virginia sang old naval ditties. A photograph shows her in military uniform, surrounded by a group of boys, many of them teenagers. One of them is a small, stocky French-American second lieutenant, parachuted in by OSS to join her. His name was Paul Goillot. Another is Jean Nallet, who would always remember their journey through France, ordered to flush out pockets of German resisters and lucky enough not to encounter any. Virginia left them, he said, as abruptly and casually as she had arrived, with a handshake and a packet of cigarettes. And then she was gone; he never saw her again.

  Virginia Hall and her corps franc Diane

  On their way north, Virginia and Goillot liberated a chateau and paused to enjoy its magnificent wine cellar. Before she left Paris, Virginia helped hunt down the false Abbé Alesch, who had sent so many agents to their deaths. He was eventually caught, tried and shot.

  Pierre Fayol, the engineer who had taken charge of much of the resistance on the plateau, struck north too to join de Gaulle’s army. Summoning the maquisards who had served under him, he asked those who felt that they had other commitments and preferred not to accompany him to take three steps back. Olivier Hatzfeld, the teacher known as Penguin, who had successfully ambushed a German convoy on the road to Le Puy with no loss of life, was one of those who decided that he had done enough. It was, he would later say, the hardest decision of his life.

  On 1 September, General de Lattre de Tassigny, at the head of a convoy of tanks and armoured cars, drove up the main street of le Chambon. From every balcony hung tricolour flags. Shopkeepers came out with bottles of wine and baskets of peaches. The French troops included Africans from the French colonies; many of the Chambonnais children had never seen black people before. M Dreyfus, Madeleine’s husband, anxiously awaiting news of his wife, was among the crowds watching the soldiers throw chocolates and chewing gum to the villagers, who both laughed and wept. At first they had taken the soldiers for Americans, and they were pleased when they realised that it was the French, their own people, who had come to liberate them.

  Watching them file past, Trocmé wondered whether ‘the hardest and most useful years of my life’ were not now over. ‘As a Christian,’ he wrote later, ‘I knew that political deliverance is not the Kingdom of Heaven.’ But he was not downhearted. Though not entirely successful, as an experiment in non-violence, what had taken place on the plateau was nonetheless such that he ‘could imagine an entirely non-violent Europe offering total resistance to Hitler . . . A Europe that the dictator and his police would not have been able to conquer.’ It was wishful thinking, but he thought it.

  The war was over. The Jewish families hiding in their farmhouses with the Darbyists, the Jewish boys and girls – many now orphans – in Beau Soleil, Tante Soly, La Guespy and L’Abric, the STO evaders, the refugee teachers at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole – all were now safe. No one had been caught in the last nine months of the war and none would be caught now. How many had the plateau saved? Many hundreds, certainly; possibly thousands. In ones and twos they emerged from their attics and barns, their children’s homes and the presbyteries of the pastors’ temples, and tried to take stock of what peace might bring. In the four years of the German occupation of France, 234 people had been deported from the Haute-Loire – 171 men, 42 women, 21 children – to the extermination camps in Poland. Of these, 176 did not return. For France, this was an exceptionally low figure. Even lower was the number of those taken from the plateau – barely a few dozen.

  ‘Liberation,’ wrote Trocmé, ‘carried away, like a great wave, all those that the war had brought to us.’ It took the young maquisards, who joined de Gaulle’s army to liberate the rest of Europe; it took Oscar Rosowsky, ill with typhoid and jaundice, to finish his medical studies, and his mother to find a job as a modiste while she waited in vain for her husband to come home; it took Jacques Stuhlmacher and his brother Marcel, after their unhappy and hungry year with the Francs, to rejoin their parents; it took Rudy Appel to Grenoble, where he found that his parents were still alive; and Simon Liwerant to Paris, where, having left his younger brother Jacques on the plateau, he set about making his fortune in the leather business. The two boys were never friends again. ‘Some came to us as children,’ remarked Mme Eyraud, watching her ‘gosses’ leave Les Ombrages, ‘but left as men.’ It made Trocmé think of swarms of sparrows, flying away.

  In Geneva, Max and Hanne got married.

  Emile Sèches, watching his young charges depart, decided to continue to run his children’s home in peacetime. Madeleine would later say that the constant presence of so many strange children deprived her and her brother and sister of a family c
hildhood.

  Trocmé, ‘a director of a factory without a factory’, as one of his parishioners put it, turned his attention to larger causes, to antinuclear campaigns and reconciliation. Magda’s interests led her to follow in the steps of Martin Luther King and Gandhi. ‘A curse on him who believes in gentleness,’ Trocmé wrote. ‘He shall finish in insipidity and cowardice, and shall never set foot in the greater liberating current of humanity.’ His pacifism had never been feeble or accommodating. But as he grew older, his face softened and he became more benign. Magda never lost her Italian accent. The Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole continued to flourish, renaming itself the Collège Cévenole.

  Alfred Morel, who had sent warnings of German raids to the plateau, was given the Médaille de la Résistance.

  The Roanne girls, emerging with their parents from farmhouses scattered from one end of the plateau to the other, went home, borrowing cars from the farmers and piling them high with their belongings. Genie and Liliane’s parents took eggs, cheese and butter in canvas bags to see them through the first days.

  Rachel Kamienkar, the little girl rescued from Vénissieux, knew for certain that she had lost everyone. She continued to think about her curly-haired little brother snatched by the Gestapo, and for a long time she wanted to become a soldier, in order to kill Germans. She became a nurse instead. A neighbour of her parents had saved some of the things from their house and gave her a photograph she had found. It was taken at her aunt’s wedding, for which her mother had sewed all the clothes. Rachel was one of three little girls in long dresses. When she saw it, she thought how like her mother she looked. She later married and had six children, working nights while her husband worked days; she decided that she would never go anywhere, never leave them, never travel.

  Miss Maber went to Germany to take part in a programme of reconciliation, and then to Valence to work with mill girls. When, many years later, she returned to England, her English had grown rusty and she spoke with the accent and expressions of her Edwardian childhood. Asked for her enduring memory of the war years in le Chambon, she would say: fear.