The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide

by Peter Grose

  At another meeting, this time in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, Trocmé got a hearing from a hostile audience by springing out from behind the curtains and barking: ‘Deutschland erwache!’ (‘Germany awake!’) As this was a favourite line of Hitler’s, the Brownshirts lapsed into startled silence, and listened respectfully while André called for equal and fair treatment for both German and French former World War I soldiers. This led to cheering and general applause. Why? As one of the Brownshirts explained afterwards: ‘You have precisely expressed what our Führer tells us every day—justice for all, fairness for all, and peace for all.’ It was not exactly the kind of endorsement André Trocmé had in mind.

  • • •

  The Trocmé family now had a pressing personal problem: the children’s health. The foul industrial air of Sin-le-Noble was starting to affect them all, Nelly in particular. So André began to look for a new parish. The first invitation came from Clamart, one of a group of three parishes on the southern edge of Paris. In early 1933 he met the church council of Montrouge–Malakoff–Clamart, who liked what they saw and voted unanimously to accept him. The appointment then had to be approved in Paris by the Regional Council of the Evangelical Reformed Church, the same council that had rebuked André for his pacifist views at Sous-le-Bois. André managed to persuade the Regional Council to allow him to present his case to them in person. But the council asked him only one question: ‘In case of war, would you put on a uniform and defend the Fatherland? Answer yes or no.’ The answer could only be no. That ended his candidacy.

  With the help of a friend, André now found a vacancy for a pastor at Thonon-les-Bains, near the Swiss border and not far from Geneva. As with Clamart, André met the church council and they approved of him. But one dissident member of the council tipped off the Regional Council in Paris. This time there was no need for André to go to Paris and speak for himself. The Regional Council had already made up its mind. No, again.

  In 1934 Roger Casalis wrote to André asking if he would be interested in taking over from Casalis in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. As we’ve seen, this third church council also liked what they saw, and they voted unanimously to accept him. But this time they were forewarned: stay clear of the Regional Council in Paris. If they called the appointment ‘temporary’ there would be no need to seek approval. So on 22 June 1934, the church council of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, an isolated village high up on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in the Haute-Loire department of France, appointed as their new pastor—temporarily, of course—a restless, charismatic, multilingual, troublemaking, notorious pacifist called André Trocmé.

  • • •

  Charles Guillon left behind no memoirs. André Trocmé did, as did Magda Trocmé. It is quite striking that neither Trocmé makes much reference to Guillon. There is no evidence that the two men did not get on, but they clearly did not have much to do with each other. However, Guillon and the Trocmés combined to play a key part in one of the most influential developments on the Plateau.

  Guillon wanted to build a UCJG camp at Le Chambon, along the lines of American summer camps. It would be primarily set up as a holiday camp, but it could be used as a school during term time. The two Trocmés had a much more ambitious idea. Le Chambon had long needed a secondary school, and the Trocmés would be delighted to set it up. So began the École Nouvelle Cévenole, the New Cévenole School.5 It would be unique in that it would be privately owned, coeducational, Protestant, and international in character, with a strong thread of pacifism. The school would be open to boarding students from all over Europe—indeed from all over the world—as well as from the Plateau. The teachers, too, would be drawn from around the world. Guillon had a suggestion. The school would need a headmaster (in French, a directeur). How about Édouard Theis? Theis could also act as Trocmé’s assistant at the church. André jumped at the idea.

  So both projects went ahead. Charles Guillon built his UCJG camp, known as Camp de Joubert, and André and Magda set up the New Cévenole School. The school opened its doors to its first eighteen pupils in October 1938. Three languages were included in the curriculum: Édouard Theis’s American-born wife, Mildred, taught English, Magda Trocmé taught Italian, and Hilde Hoefert taught German. Hilde was an Austrian Jewish schoolteacher who had fled Vienna in the wake of the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938). In Vienna she had taught Latin. When she arrived on the Plateau, sometime in the summer of 1938, there was no work for Latin teachers. So she took a job as an au pair at the Salvation Army refuge Les Genets. She continued to work there even after accepting the German teaching job at Cévenole, because the first teachers at the school were unpaid.

  Hilde Hoefert has some claim to being Le Chambon’s first specifically Jewish refugee. She would not be alone for long.

  2

  War

  By 1936 the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was almost perfectly poised for its future role as a refuge. It had two things going for it: people and position. The Plateau itself spread across two French departments, the Haute-Loire and the Ardèche, in the French region known as the Auvergne. There were seventeen communes,6 thirteen in the Haute-Loire and four in the Ardèche, with a total population across both departments of about 24,000. It was largely a rural community, with the population scattered widely in isolated farmhouses and small villages rather than concentrated in large towns. In the Haute-Loire the key communes were Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, population 2721, of whom 2600 were Protestant; Le Mazet-Saint-Voy, population 2221, with 2087 Protestants; and Tence, population 3662, of whom only 300 were Protestant. The figures for the key communes of the Ardèche are less precise: suffice to say that more than half the Ardèche’s Plateau dwellers lived in the commune of Saint-Agrève, around 3000 in all, of whom about 1500 were Protestant. The total Protestant population of the Plateau came to around 9000, heavily concentrated in the communes of Le Chambon, Le Mazet and Saint-Agrève. The Protestants were mostly Huguenots, fundamentalist followers of John Calvin, the austere French priest who carried forward the teachings of Martin Luther. Some were Darbyists, a splinter Protestant group, who believed, among other things, that Jews were indeed God’s chosen people. Thus the Plateau came well stocked with determined people, hardened by centuries of religious persecution, and all of them armed with a profound tradition of frugality, silence and sticking together.7 The persecuted Huguenots had also developed a tradition of sheltering other victims, whatever their background. After the French Revolution of 1789 and the establishment of a determinedly secular society in France, Catholic priests came to be seen as part of the Old Order, to be hunted down where possible. The Protestants of the Plateau took them in.

  Geographically, too, the Plateau was an ideal sanctuary. It was totally isolated. It straddled no strategic route from anywhere to anywhere. It housed rural communities with no heavy industry worth grabbing, and no natural resources like coal or precious metals to interest an invader. Anyone who set about conquering the Plateau would not have much to show for his efforts when the job was done. So, in general, people left the Plateau alone.

  Last but not least, it had a strong tradition of hospitality. Since the late nineteenth century, the Plateau had played host to huge numbers of tourists and visitors, particularly children. Farmers took in poor children from the cities and offered them a healthy summer in the clean mountain air. The farmers received a nominal subsidy from an organisation called Les enfants à la Montagne (The Children on the Mountain), while the children did small chores around the farm to earn their keep. Special holiday homes catered for unaccompanied children. In 1935 some 3500 children spent their summer holidays in and around Le Chambon. The whole Plateau was littered with houses and apartments to let, guesthouses, B&Bs and even a few hotels.

  Miraculously for a small and isolated rural community, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon also enjoyed the leadership of some remarkable men and women. Charles Guillon, the mayor, had at his disposal an international network of political, religious and youth organisations. André Trocmé
brought with him a separate group of international contacts, as well as an unshakeable vision, huge charisma and a powerful intellect. Trocmé’s efforts were rendered all the more effective by the tirelessly unsentimental, practical, sceptical Magda, who made sure her husband’s feet made regular contact with the ground, and who attended to many of the details. Édouard Theis provided enormous intellectual and practical support, as well as doing his own independent work both as headmaster of the New Cévenole School and as a protector of refugees. He also turned out to be a dab hand at forgery.

  The pastors of the surrounding villages would also play a vital role: encouraging, organising, sheltering, planning, conspiring. It is all too easy to write the Plateau’s story as though it all happened in Le Chambon, and that André Trocmé alone carried the burden. That is far from the truth. Pastors like Daniel Curtet in Fay-sur-Lignon, Roland Leenhardt in Tence, André Bettex in Le Riou, and Marc Donadille, who worked for the Cimade refugee organisation, were all important, and all showed great courage during the testing times ahead. Dr Roger Le Forestier, who had worked with Albert Schweitzer in Africa, arrived in Le Chambon in 1936 and became a hard-working and much-loved presence. Roger Darcissac, the headmaster of the primary school, turned out to be a talented forger (which is beginning to shape up as a previously unremarked skill that goes with teaching), as well as a resourceful prevaricator when it came to telling the police who was and who wasn’t on the school roll. Other outstanding figures—like Oscar Rosowsky, the Resistance leader Pierre Fayol, the extraordinary American agent Virginia Hall, or the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Albert Camus—were still to arrive.

  • • •

  Despite all this promise and potential, the Plateau’s career in international rescue got off to a pretty shaky start.

  Just as World War II can be seen as a continuation of World War I, so the Spanish Civil War can be seen as the full dress rehearsal for World War II. In brief, on 17 July 1936 war broke out between the elected Spanish government of (left-wing, often communist) Republicans and the rebel (right-wing, often fascist) Nationalists, who were led by the Spanish military. Civil wars are generally noted for their viciousness and cruelty, and the Spanish Civil War set new standards in horror. The upshot was a defeat for the Republicans, by 1 April 1939, and the imposition of the military dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, which lasted in Spain until the old brute died on 20 November 1975.

  The war produced a flood of refugees, mostly Republicans, who headed for what they believed would be a sympathetic reception in neighbouring France. The bulk of the refugees congregated on the French side of the Spanish border, just across the Pyrenees, or in the French Basque Country around Biarritz, or along the Mediterranean coast near Perpignan. The numbers were enormous: perhaps as many as 500,000 Spanish Republicans fled to France. The French didn’t want them, and certainly couldn’t cope with them.

  The department of the Haute-Loire was instructed by the French government to do its bit to help out. Three waves of refugees were allocated to them: 200 in October 1936, 500 in the summer of 1937, and a massive 1115 in the spring of 1939, when the Republicans had lost the war. The prefecture had the task of finding refuge for them.

  The Spanish were not exactly greeted with open arms. The gendarmes spoke up early. They didn’t want any more ‘anarchists’ and ‘dangerous men’ on their patch. In the largely Catholic and conservative town of Tence, the local council simply barred the Spanish from entry. On 25 October 1936 the eighteen Tence councillors voted unanimously to keep them out, prompted no doubt by the thought that the Republicans were both left-wing and anti-clerical. There was the usual hand-wringing explanation of the ‘we’d like to help, but …’ variety. ‘The householders and hoteliers are refusing the refugees,’ the council informed the prefecture, going on to say what amounted to: ‘The council itself can’t help either, because we don’t have enough pots and pans, and bed linen. What’s more, there’s no work for the refugees. And in any case, the council’s first duty is to its own people’ (and not, by implication, to a lot of godless anarchists and troublemakers). The headline in the local Plateau newspaper, Yssingeaux Gazette, on 1 November 1936 gives some measure of the hostility. ‘Does the Spanish invasion threaten our region?’ the paper demanded. The answer seemed to be yes. So no refugees, thank you very much.

  Things weren’t much better in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Unlike the councillors of Tence, mayor Charles Guillon did not try to block the refugees. However, he made it clear that the council would do nothing official to help them. If they wanted to use their eight-francs-a-day allowance from the prefecture to pay for vacant holiday accommodation in and around Le Chambon, that was their business. Even this tepid response proved locally unpopular. Although the community could certainly use the money the refugees brought in, particularly in winter, they did not want them filling up the holiday accommodation in summer. They preferred their regular customers.

  All was not lost. As early as 1936, the first glimmer appeared of the Plateau’s role as a refugee shelter. Marguerite de Félice, a Swiss resident of Le Chambon, joined forces with Juliette Usach, a Spanish refugee, to set up La Pouponnière (The Creche). She followed this up with ‘a call to the people of Le Chambon’ to create an orphanage. The local population responded well, and the orphanage opened its doors in 1939. Meanwhile, the Salvation Army opened one refuge, Les Genêts d’Or (The Golden Brooms),8 then a second, Les Barandons,9 in the hills to the northeast of Le Chambon. There was also a youth hostel opened at La Bruyère, and another hostel, named rather mysteriously Fraternité d’Hommes (Men’s Brotherhood).

  The Spanish did themselves no favours. Some 90 per cent of the refugees were women and children, and little was expected of them. But the men were not exactly dynamic in their search for work. They preferred to live on their allowance, and were generally regarded as useless layabouts. Nor did the children endear themselves to the local population. On 18 February 1939 three young Spanish boys aged between nine and eleven, all of them residents of The Golden Broom, went to the small village of Le Crouzet, less than two kilometres from Le Chambon, and set about trying to derail the train. Happily, they failed, but they all finished up in court anyway, and there was no shortage of volunteers to keep a close eye on them afterwards. A local newspaper reported, more in sorrow than in anger: ‘This attempt has produced a strong response in Le Chambon, where the refugees had all recently been given a warm welcome.’

  By September 1939, most of the Spanish had left the Plateau, either returning to Spain or moving elsewhere. The few that remained now played a memorable if unexpected role. First, the prefecture in Le Puy-en-Velay, the capital of the Haute-Loire, decided that about twenty ‘undesirables’ should be moved to their own camp, about two kilometres from Tence. The prefect commandeered an old paper mill known as La Papeterie,10 and the Spanish were rounded up, housed there, and told to stop idling and do some work. Some moved on, but a few of them organised work permits and moved to Le Chambon. As we have seen, Charles Guillon had long wanted to build a UCJG camp on the Plateau. He now gave free rein to his old ambition to become an architect, and designed it himself. Called Camp de Joubert, it was built about two kilometres outside Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, with Spanish refugee labour. Now at last the Spanish had some useful work, and the Plateau had a purpose-built UCJG camp (which could also come in handy if unexpected visitors arrived). The camp had nine wooden chalets, seven of them identified only by number, and two of them given names: Williams, after Sir George Williams, the founder of the YMCA; and Espérance (Hope), the name of the newspaper of the French UCJG.

  At the end of 1939, the Papeterie camp, which had briefly housed Spanish ‘undesirables’, stood empty. Not for long: it would shortly have a vastly more sinister job to do.

  • • •

  While the refugees from the Spanish Civil War were on the hunt for somewhere to stay, ever more menacing storm clouds were gathering over the rest of Europe. The sense of impending calamity was stron
g, and there was justified fear that a rerun of the horrors of World War I was both unstoppable and imminent. On 29 September 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the French prime minister Édouard Daladier met Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini in Munich to see if they could reach a deal and avert war. The result was the Munich Agreement, signed on 30 September 1938, which cynically abandoned Czechoslovakia and gave Hitler what he wanted, all in the hope that he was a man of his word and would make no further territorial demands. Neville Chamberlain flew back to Britain and, on his arrival at Heston aerodrome, brandished aloft the piece of paper signed by himself and Hitler setting out ‘the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again’. The crowd there to greet him roared its approval. Later that day, from 10 Downing Street, he went further, saying the Munich Agreement had delivered ‘peace for our time’.

  Hitler may have fooled the prime ministers of Britain and France, but he did not fool the mayor of Le Chambon. Two weeks later, Charles Guillon wrote in the Plateau newsletter: ‘Keep your spare rooms free, stock up with provisions, we are going to have a flood of refugees.’

  More cynicism was in evidence on 24 August 1939, when Germany and the Soviet Union, despite their mutual animosity, signed a non-aggression pact. Hitler was now safe from attack from the east, and he lost no time pressing his advantage. World War II duly began eight days later, on 1 September, when Hitler invaded Poland. Britain and France had warned that if Poland came under attack, both countries would declare war on Germany. This they both did, on 3 September.