Then, in 1979, Philip Hallie, an American historian in search of proof that pacifism could successfully counter violence, chanced upon the story. On a visit to Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia, he discovered André Trocmé’s autobiography, together with additions by Magda, deposited there, with no plans for publication. It proved to be a small unexploded bomb.
According to Hallie’s book, Lest Innocent Blood be Shed, André Trocmé, the ‘soul of le Chambon’, acting more or less single-handedly, so infused his parishioners with his belief in non-violence that his presbytery became the centre of the rescue operation. There is little or no mention of Madeleine Dreyfus, Joseph Bass, Mme Déléage, Miss Maber or Madeleine Barot, or of any of the other important villages, Mazet, Tence or Fay. The Darbyists are nowhere to be seen.
The mayor, Charles Guillon – who had not even been in le Chambon at the time – is credited with having urged Magda to turn away the first Jewish refugee. Pastor Boegner is described as having tried to persuade Trocmé not to take Jewish children. Le Forestier is a ‘puro folle’, an imprudent, heedless man who could have ruined them all with his hotheadedness. Schmähling, the German major who presided over the tribunal that dispatched Le Forestier to his death, is said not only to have done what he could to save him, but to have become so imbued with the pacifism of the plateau that he cast his benevolent eye over the villages and saved the Jews hiding there. The local police are described as having been so impressed by the spectacle of non-violence that they ceased to look for the hidden Jews. Eyraud, the Maquis leader whose calm authority prevented many of the young men from performing foolish actions, never features at all. In this version of events – the basis of the myth that endures in some places to this day – the village of le Chambon, acting more or less on its own and steered by Trocmé, demonstrates that non-violent resistance could conquer even the hearts of Vichy and the Germans.
For a while, until Hallie’s book appeared in French, little notice was taken of its claims, though Boegner, alerted to various slurs to his character, had four of the most derogatory pages removed. The plateau was quietly basking in pleasure at the presentation of a plaque, largely engineered by Oscar Rosowsky, and written in both French and Hebrew, honouring those Protestants who had ‘hidden, protected, saved the persecuted in their thousands’, and unveiled at a ceremony in the summer of 1979. By now Trocmé himself was dead, buried in the cemetery near the plaque, but Theis and his family attended.
Then, in 1987, Pierre Sauvage, a film-maker who happened to have been born on the plateau, decided to put together a documentary film on its war. He gave it the title Weapons of the Spirit. A reviewer for Le Monde at the Cannes film festival called it a ‘hymn’ to the Protestant peasants who had behaved so selflessly. In the film, Sauvage took up many of Hallie’s points about Trocmé’s remarkable actions and about the all-pervasive spirit of goodness that shaped and steered the minds of his parishioners. Hallie, meanwhile, still in search of more goodness, gave a lecture in the US in which Schmähling emerged as the protector of the Jews on the plateau, a flawed, compromised man, but ultimately noble. Roger Bonfils, the proprietor of the Hôtel du Lignon, home to the convalescent German soldiers, was heard to describe a meeting between Trocmé and Schmähling, at which only he had been a witness, and at which some sort of agreement to shelter the Jews had been tacitly forged.
What followed was consternation in some quarters. There were letters, reviews, protests. An effort was made to have Sauvage’s film banned from an event. In Le Monde Juif, which ran the story over several furious weeks, Oscar Rosowsky, Madeleine Barot and Pierre Fayol all put their names to a detailed critique of what they called a ‘mutilation of historical truth’. There was talk of ‘approximations, inexactitudes and extrapolations’. The claim made by Bonfils was ridiculed, both because he had been one of the very few suspected collaborators on the plateau, and because there was no other evidence at all that Schmähling and Trocmé had ever discussed the Jews in the village. Schmähling’s ‘goodness’, and what Hallie elsewhere described as his ‘passionate compassion’, were vehemently denied: had he not arrested and deported 234 people from the Haute-Loire? Had he not referred to the Milice as ‘the best French children’? Were the Mennonites, possible backers of a film of Hallie’s book, not the very people who had given sanctuary in South America to Dr Mengele after the war?
Dr Le Forestier’s widow and his son Jean-Philippe were drawn into the fray and declared that for anyone to maintain that Schmähling had no idea that Le Forestier would be killed was absurd, as was his claim to have persuaded his senior colleagues not to execute the doctor on the spot. Commenting on Trocmé’s memoirs, the Protestant writer Jacques Poujol told Piton, the former scout and passeur to Switzerland, that they were nothing but the work of ‘a poor man who had become paranoid writing far too long after the events to be credible’. Trocmé’s words and deeds were picked over, analysed, ridiculed. In the wake of all this came more attacks and counterattacks, reams of accusatory letters, oceans of calumny. Sauvage can be forgiven for remarking that it was all rather excessive, and that Schmähling was not, after all, ‘a very dynamic enemy’. Schmähling himself lay low.
The disputes rumbled on. Then, in 1990, a young Protestant pastor, Alain Arnoux, with links to the Ardèche and an interest in the past, was appointed to the temple in le Chambon. He felt honoured. Soon aware of the battles beginning to agitate his parishioners over the various renderings of the past, Arnoux had the idea of holding a colloquium, to which all involved would be invited. He was sick to death of the bickering, the animosities, the films, books, speeches, each one more inaccurate than the last, the ever-inflated numbers of those rescued – 5,000! 8,000! – and of the parade of American evangelical visitors, who had taken this tale of religious non-violence to their hearts, and came to worship at the shrine of Trocmé’s house. Over the years, Trocmé and Magda had acquired a kind of sainthood; it made Arnoux deeply uneasy. As did the idea of the myth becoming a tourist attraction.
The colloquium would, he thought, bring peace. It was, he says, the worst thing he has ever done.
For three days in October 1990, the war on the plateau was rehashed. All those previously neglected – Eyraud, Fayol, Bonnissol, the maquisards, the people of Tence, Mazet and Fay, the many other Protestant pastors, the Catholics, the farmers who hid the children, the children themselves, now grown into adults – were heard. But tempers were not calmed; animosity prevailed. It was probably not helped by Arnoux’s decision to dwell on the fact that the inhabitants of the plateau had never sought and did not want publicity, and that once someone made a profit from the story, ‘then the spirit that reigned here would be betrayed . . . If a church, or any other organisation, or any family, seeks to glorify what was done, they would reveal themselves as totally unworthy of those who preferred to remain silent.’ Remembering what took place, Arnoux declared, should inspire not pride but humility.
Nor, probably, did he soothe tempers when, in the presence of the Israeli ambassador, come to bestow Yad Vashem’s medal on le Chambon after the colloquium, he announced that he sincerely hoped that, since Israel was honouring the people of the plateau for what they had done, they would now undertake to blow up no more Palestinian homes, expel no more Palestinian families, close no more schools to Palestinian children. Not surprisingly, perhaps, anger followed. In an Israeli paper, Arnoux was called a ‘Nazi pastor’.
Silence has not returned to this land where silence was for so long the essence of its people. There have been other colloquia, other debates, of a more mollifying kind, but the competing wars of memory have not gone away. The sniping continues, between historians and academics, pacifists and resisters, bystanders and rescuers. Rosowsky and Sauvage, locked in disagreement, have each in their own way become custodians of the plateau’s history, recruiting and shedding adherents, endlessly debating the exact hour at which Le Forestier was or was not arrested, the precise tone of Schmähling’s words, whether or not Bach an
d Schmähling were ultimately good or bad. President Chirac’s visit to le Chambon in 2004 and his eulogy to the local inhabitants has served chiefly to reinforce the myth, since in the national coverage of the event there were many references to the ‘5,000’ Jews saved, to Trocmé and to the village of le Chambon, where a conspiracy of good shone brightly in a country otherwise plunged in darkness; yet again, the wider picture was not in evidence. Of the 11 most important sites on the Justes in France, Trocmé’s name is the only one to appear on all of them.
Nowhere has this spirit of unhappy divisiveness found greater expression than in the interminable and ongoing saga of the museum, an idea first mooted in 1980 by a newly formed Société de l’Histoire de la Montagne, and which only saw the light of day in 2013, having undergone many twists and turns, sometimes emphasising spirituality and non-violence, sometimes the Resistance and the Maquis, with innumerable bad-tempered meetings and accusations of theft of archive material, and complaints that the project had been hijacked by Parisian historians and political cabals. The formidable new mayor of le Chambon, Eliane Wauquiez Motte, whose son held a government position under Sarkozy, resolutely rising above the squabbles, finally forced through a project in which all aspects of the plateau’s history are represented. But she did not achieve this without alienating the other villages, who protested that, yet again, they had been ousted from the story, ‘dispossessed of their past’ by an explosive mix of entrenched interests and ambitious outsiders. The museum is in the old school, opposite the temple in le Chambon. Mme Wauquiez hopes it will draw tourists, along with schoolchildren, who study the Holocaust in their curriculum, and that it will act as a reminder that there were, in the years of Vichy, places where people were decent.
Where does the truth lie? Was Schmähling a hero, or simply a German officer trying to survive the war? Was Bach more humane than collaborationist? Were the local inhabitants peculiarly altruistic? The plateau was not alone, of course, in saving people during the years of occupation. All over France, other villages, other towns, convents, families, Protestants, Catholics, Gaullists and communists, at great risk to themselves, sheltered those pursued by the Nazis. Dieulefit in the Drôme, the Vabre in Tarn, Vialas in the Cévennes, all did similar things. From one end of France to the other, there were civil servants who falsified ration books, policemen who turned a blind eye, telephone operators who warned of impending raids. Parallel to the map of Vichy is a map of decency.
Just the same, there is something different about the story of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon.
In these 22 communes and isolated farmhouses, more people, proportionately, were saved than anywhere else in France. Saving was what the local people did, silently, acting together, working things out, planning, sharing the burden. They certainly did not save 5,000, the figure bandied around after the war; it was probably more like 800, though perhaps 3,000 more may have passed through, helped along their way to safety. And why this was so remains one of the many questions that continue to feed into the plateau’s enduring wars.
One explanation for what happened is that the mayor, Charles Guillon, paved the way with his foresight about the coming war and the need to help the refugees. As Gabrielle Barraud explained, ‘We were prepared by Guillon, he told us to get ready to take in people.’ Another is the presence of so many Protestant pastors, steeped in the Old Testament and Judaism, in touch with Protestants across Europe and with the persecuted Confessing Church in Germany; and that of the pious, staunch Darbyists, whose habitual modesty and silence has meant that they have never received the recognition that is due to them. Yet another is the fact that the plateau was inaccessible for weeks at a time during the heavy winter snows, and that even in summer its narrow, winding roads through the forests were not easy to follow. Then there is the fact that the plateau, long before the war, was already well known for its children’s homes and pensions, so that it became a natural place to house the refugees. The links with neutral Switzerland also played their part.
After that is the fact that the garrison of Germans in Le Puy was small, and many of its soldiers were the unreliable Tartars, Georgians and Armenians, by no means certain to do the Nazis’ bidding. This in part explains what is otherwise a mystery: just why the Germans convalescing in the heart of le Chambon for the last 18 months of the war made no move to denounce or arrest the many Jews of whose presence they were certainly aware. But they were Wehrmacht soldiers, not Nazis, and certainly not keen to stir up hostile feelings, particularly after the Maquis became active in the area. And Eyraud and Brès were on hand to keep the maquisards calm.
To this must be added the fact that neither the Prefect, Bach, nor Schmähling, the Wehrmacht major in Le Puy, was a zealous anti-Semite; and that Oscar Rosowsky was an excellent forger. There is also the long history of the area, with its cult of discretion and silence, the presence on the plateau of a great many liberal and influential refugees, the fact that the policemen in Tence and Yssingeaux were local men, belonging to the very families who were sheltering the Jews. And, of course, there were André Trocmé and Edouard Theis, who, until they left to go into hiding themselves, were strong influences on their parishioners, as were the plateau’s other Protestant pastors. Trocmé may not have been the saint he is sometimes portrayed to have been, nor was non-violence anything but one small part of the story; but to him and his family must go much honour in the saving of the plateau’s hidden people, as much must also go to the silent and unboastful Darbyists, and to all the modest Catholics, Protestants, atheists and agnostics, who, supporting each other with little heed for their own safety, ensured that of the hunted and persecuted refugees.
It was all these things: a felicitous combination of timing, place and people.
In the summer of 2012, I asked Madeleine Sèches, the daughter of Emile, who looks out so happily from the photograph of Tante Soly’s children, to walk with me around the plateau. Madeleine had spent her professional life as a doctor, and returned to le Chambon from time to time with her children and grandchildren. She showed me how the refugees had climbed off the train in the little station at the top of the village, now closed and the tracks grassed over, and walked down the hill to the Hôtel May, where the farmers were waiting to drive them away in their pony traps to be hidden in farms and outhouses. We looked at Trocmé’s presbytery, where Le Forestier had made the children laugh with his antics, and at the temple where Theis and Trocmé had preached so many fiery sermons, and at La Guespy, where Hanne and Rudy Appel had lived, at L’Abric, Faïdoli, the Coteau Fleuri and Les Grillons, where so many Jews, children as well as adults, had lived out the war years unharmed, and Beau Soleil, where Oscar Rosowsky and Gabrielle Barraud had worked all night forging documents. In Tante Soly, Madeleine showed me her bedroom with its window looking straight out on to the terrace on which the German soldiers did their exercises.
We walked along the banks of the river Lignon, where a German soldier would have drowned had it not been for the actions of a local boy, and where Jean-Pierre Trocmé and his friends had stolen another German soldier’s clothes, so that he had to climb out and walk home naked, and where Pierre Bloch had gone looking for frogs. Madeleine pointed to the house in the square where Praly was shot, and to the Maison des Roches, on the road to Mars, raided by the Gestapo in the summer of 1943.
At different times, I went to Mazet, where Lulu Ruel and her daughter had hidden people in their attic, and Tence, where Pastor Leenhardt had supervised the protection of 163 Jews, and Chaumargeais, where Joseph Bass trained his Jewish Maquis and Itzhak Mikhaëli read the Book of Ruth by his candle and the light of the stars. And I went several times to Fay, as cold and windy as during the war, but empty now of the many shops that once made it the commercial centre of the plateau. In Fay’s presbytery, Daniel Curtet had sat writing his coded letters to his father. These places, Madeleine said, are much as they were when she was a child; the people have gone, but the buildings and the plateau look the same. Though not the trees:
Sylvester pines now grow where once were open meadows.
Were John Darby to return to the plateau, to preach and wander from village to village, he would find life curiously unchanged. The Ravenists have gone, though there are still small communities of ‘les purs’, who keep themselves apart from the world. In the Darbyist homes, the Bible is still read with undiminished piety. The war is remembered with some pride, but with no surprise. ‘We are morally conscious people,’ one man said to me. ‘Our families didn’t think of themselves as doing good. They did what they had always done, given sanctuary to the persecuted.’ This self-effacement has meant that there are very few Darbyists among the Justes.
I went to Marseilles to see Gilbert Nizard, who, when he retired not long ago, built himself a little house above the city with a view across the sea. His six surviving brothers and sisters had, between them, 20 children, and they in turn gave birth to 61 children of their own. Today they live scattered between France, Israel, the United States, Switzerland and Brazil. They remain a close and loving family. It was only at the very end of the war, when the trains returning from Poland had brought all the survivors back to France, that they realised that Armand and André would not be coming home.
I went to New York, to find Max and Hanne Liebmann. In 1948, the TB that both had contracted in Gurs caught up with them, so that they spent 18 months in a sanatorium and were forced to put their baby daughter with a foster family. Far from being bitter about what had happened to them and their families, Max and Hanne say that they are profoundly grateful that they came across people so committed to their beliefs that they were willing to risk their lives for strangers. Both now in their nineties, they ask: which of us would have done the same? In New York, I also found Rudy Appel, still working with the export firm he joined not long after the war.
Village of Secrets Page 36
