by Peter Grose
For Trocmé it was a bolt from the blue. ‘These children, will we have to house them, feed them, educate them?’ he asked Chalmers. ‘Who will be in charge of them?’ Chalmers was blunt. ‘Find the houses, and the carers,’ he told Trocmé. ‘The Quakers and the Fellowship of Reconciliation14 will find the money.’
• • •
Every month the twelve Protestant pastors from the parishes of the Plateau met. The meetings were known as pastorales, and they were pretty informal—the pastors would discuss the events of the world, any problems they had, and any issues they felt like sharing. Nobody kept minutes, so it is an educated guess that at the next meeting Trocmé reported to his fellow pastors the reaction of the Quakers to the possibility of using the Plateau as a place of refuge. He would surely have told the assembled pastors that here was something they could all do to help, and subsequent events suggest that they were unanimous in their support.
For the devout Huguenots of the Plateau, there was a startling precedent. In the Bible, Numbers 35:9–34, God gives Moses a very specific set of instructions, which Moses is told to pass on to the children of Israel. The Israelites are to set up six cities of refuge which would offer protection to people in trouble. Later, God spelled out the details to Joshua, the leader of the Israelites: ‘And when he that doth flee unto one of these cities shall stand at the entering of the gate, and shall declare his cause in the ears of the elders of that city, they shall take him into the city unto them and give him a place, that he may dwell among them’ (Joshua 20:4).
So the Plateau had its marching orders. There would be more than six cities—or, rather, villages—of refuge, but that was all to the good. In each of those cities, according to the rules, someone in danger must be automatically taken in and looked after. It was all in the Bible.
Part II
• • •
REFUGE
4
Jews
There is simply no reliable way of knowing when Jews first began arriving on the Plateau in significant numbers. No records were kept, official or unofficial; nobody asked questions; nobody gossiped; nobody was in charge; nobody had a policy, or a plan, or a piece of paper laying down the rules. The process was haphazard, spontaneous, clandestine, burgeoning and unstoppable.
Looking at likely dates, we know with some certainty that Jews came to shelter on the Plateau soon after the Armistice of 22 June 1940. We even have quite a detailed account of the arrival of the first Jew on the Trocmés’ doorstep. In her unpublished memoir, Magda Trocmé says the first Jew was a German woman who simply rang their doorbell unannounced one evening. Magda gives no date for this unexpected arrival. Other elements of the story demonstrate that it was winter, and that the Armistice had already been signed. So that locates the event somewhere in the winter of 1940–41. It is clear from what follows that, although she may have been the first Jewish refugee to ring the Trocmés’ doorbell, by the time she arrived other Jews were already sheltering in the village. Nelly Trocmé knew of at least one other Jew, Elizabeth Kaufmann, who had arrived in Le Chambon, encouraged by Hilde Hoefert, the German teacher at New Cévenole School. Certainly Magda Trocmé’s account suggests that the new arrival had some clue that the Plateau was already acting as a shelter for Jews.
Magda’s story is both touching and revealing. The Jewish woman told her that she had made her way from Germany, that she had wandered all over France, first in the Occupied Zone and then in the Unoccupied Zone, not knowing where to go. Then she had heard that in Le Chambon there was a pastor who might be able to take her in. So there she stood, soaking wet and frozen on the doorstep of the presbytery, wearing only summer sandals on her feet, with snow pouring down outside.
Magda invited her in. There was a fire in the kitchen. She could warm up, dry her sandals, have something to eat. Magda would make up a bed for her. Then, tragedy. The woman was so tired and distressed that she put her sandals too close to the fire. They suddenly burst into flames. Like everybody else, the Trocmés were rationed to one pair of shoes each a year, so they had no shoes to spare. Magda began a frantic search in the village, knocking on doors and asking if anybody could spare shoes about the right size. Finally a Madame Monnier came to the rescue with a spare pair.
However, Magda now had a serious problem. What should she do with her refugee? She usually had a bit of extra food on hand, so she could feed an extra mouth for a day or two. But food was rationed, and two or three days were her limit. She went to the town hall for advice. The official she spoke to was totally unhelpful.15 ‘He told me it was impossible,’ Magda recalled. ‘He already had French Jews [in the village] and if I was going to bring in German Jews, the whole village would be in danger. He insisted that I send her back to wherever she came from. Send her back? Where? I was desperate.’
Magda knew there was a prominent Parisian Jewish woman staying in the village, sheltering there because the cities were too dangerous. She tracked her down. ‘I explained to her that I had this Jew at the house, that I didn’t know what to do, and that I needed her help. She was exactly like the man at the town hall. Not only did she refuse to help me, but she grabbed hold of me and told me that a flood of foreign Jews would endanger the French Jews already in place! So I was pretty discouraged.’
She discussed the problem with her husband. The conversation led the two Trocmés to cross a tiny but important line. As pacifists, they were determined to remain neutral, to love their enemies, to avoid the entanglements of war. But the imperatives of saving this refugee’s life took top priority. They told her in detail how to get in touch with a group of Catholic priests in Annecy, near the Swiss border. They might be able to help. So the woman moved on alone, leaving behind a troubled Magda.
That was a turning point. As Magda wrote in her memoir: ‘This is what pushed us into the clandestine world; now it would be up to us to come up with forged photo identity cards made by Monsieur Darcissac, give false names to people, and tell lies. But they were “legitimate” lies, told to save the persecuted.’
• • •
In fairness to the town hall official (and to Magda’s unnamed ‘prominent Parisian Jew’), it is worth looking in more detail at the law as it stood in France at the time. The new Vichy government had wasted no time in passing anti-Jewish laws. Since 1789 and the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man had guaranteed French citizens equal rights under the law. Not anymore. Within a month of the Armistice, the Vichy government passed ‘denaturalisation’ laws, granting the right to strip naturalised ‘foreigners’ of citizenship. The law may have talked about foreigners, but it was aimed most pointedly at Jews. So who or what was a Jew? On 3 October 1940 the Vichy government passed a law requiring all Jews to register with the police or the prefecture, and defining a Jew as either someone with three grandparents ‘of the Jewish race’, or someone with two grandparents ‘of the Jewish race’ and married to someone ‘of the Jewish race’. This was a wider definition than the one used in Hitler’s Germany. The 3 October law then went on to bar Jews from serving as officers in the army, navy and air force, and from the press, the public service, the teaching professions and private sector management. The same law excluded Jews from practising the liberal professions like medicine, dentistry, law, architecture, and even veterinary science. The Mémorial de la Shoah (Holocaust Memorial) in Paris holds a draft copy of the law. It is covered with handwritten scribbled amendments, all of them making the various anti-Jewish provisions even harsher. For instance, the clause granting an exception for Jews born in France or Jews who had been naturalised in France before 1860 is crossed out. Handwriting experts are in no doubt about the identity of the scribbler: Pétain himself wrote all the notes and toughened up the legislation.
On 4 October, the Vichy government piled on a particularly vicious new law. ‘Foreign nationals of the Jewish race’ could be interned in special camps on the say-so of the prefect of the department. No charge, no trial: just a nod from the prefect and off you go. Th
ey could also ‘at any time be assigned a forced residence’. So by early October 1940 all Jews were, in effect, outlaws. These Vichy laws were harsher than anything passed by the Germans in Germany or proclaimed in the Occupied Zone up to this time.
Although the Vichy law did not spell this out, those Jews rounded up into camps could be and were then deported to Germany, where the German government would know how to handle them. The first train, packed with Jews, left France for Auschwitz on 27 March 1942. The Germans ‘noted the rapidity and scope of French legislation with bemusement, opportunistic glee and even occasional annoyance’.16
At this point the most ferocious Vichy laws were still aimed at ‘foreign’ Jews. While there was any amount of legislation directed at Jews generally—some 28 laws and nineteen regulatory orders over the years—in the early days of the Vichy regime, Jews in the Unoccupied Zone with no ‘foreign’ connection were marginally less vulnerable. So French Jews who made their way to the Plateau were less likely than foreign Jews to trigger raids and reprisals. It is for the reader to decide where his or her sympathies lie: with the town hall official and the unnamed ‘prominent Parisian Jew’, who were already quietly sheltering French Jews in Le Chambon and who feared this program might be derailed by the arrival of foreign Jews; or with Magda Trocmé, unconcerned by whether the refugee was French or foreign, simply concerned to help someone in trouble.
• • •
The Vichy government’s treatment of Jews was well reported to the outside world. On 24 November the New York Post published a news item datelined Lyon and setting out the facts. The report quoted a ‘particularly qualified high personality’ who had reviewed the part played by Jews in the professions in France and then decided to lock them out. ‘It is better to prevent than to suppress,’ the particularly qualified source opined.
The report is interesting, but its author even more so. Virginia Hall is one of the most remarkable characters in this entire story. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied French, German and Italian at Columbia University. Tall and slim, with classical features and an aristocratic manner, she seems to have totally bewitched everybody who knew her. Late in 1926, she moved from New York to Europe to continue her studies in France, Germany and Austria, before landing a job as a consular clerk in the American embassy in Warsaw. She might have stayed in the American diplomatic service but for an accident: she shot herself in the leg while hunting in Turkey, with the result that her left leg had to be amputated just below the knee. The missing part was replaced by a wooden leg, which she named ‘Cuthbert’.
Thanks to Cuthbert, she was no longer eligible for a full career in the diplomatic service, so she moved to Paris and worked as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. When war broke out she briefly volunteered for the French Army ambulance service, and found herself in the Unoccupied Zone after the Armistice. She managed to escape to England. Winston Churchill had just created the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine organisation with orders to ‘set Europe ablaze’. She didn’t hesitate when they approached her. The so-called Baker Street Irregulars could see solid talent straight away, and put her on a ‘fast track’. She hardly needed any training in clandestine work, and in August 1941, they sent her back to the Unoccupied Zone, with a cover job as the New York Post’s correspondent in Lyon. America was not yet at war with Germany so, as an American citizen, she was able to enter the country legally and operate under her own name.
Hall’s orders were straightforward. She was to report on the situation in France, military and political. She was also to seek out likely recruits for a future resistance movement. At the same time, she was to act as a courier, passing on instructions from the SOE in London to agents in the field, and she was to assist those agents to obtain the correct false papers and whatever else they needed to allow them to function. She did all this with remarkable zeal and proficiency, while keeping up a steady flow of perceptive, whimsical and occasionally sarcastic reports for the New York Post on life in the Unoccupied Zone. Within the SOE it was said: ‘Whenever we need a new operator, or a new station, we ask Virginia Hall.’ Her base in Lyon was about 120 kilometres northeast of Le Puy, and she visited the town several times in 1941, presumably to look at the possibilities of the mountains of the Haute-Loire as a hideout for resistance fighters, as well as to carry out her usual work as a foreign correspondent. Subsequent events suggest that she liked what she saw.
• • •
During the winter of 1940–41 the number of Jews and other refugees finding their way to the Plateau went from a trickle to a gentle stream. Many of them arrived in the village of Le Chambon knowing only one thing: the pastor could help.
Magda Trocmé recalls her next arrival—Berthe Grünhut, known only as Madame Berthe—who offered to do the cooking and housework in exchange for lodgings. This slightly threw the normally unflappable Magda: the cooking wasn’t complicated, and in general there wasn’t much food to cook anyway. Furthermore, Madame Berthe proved to be a lousy cook. Magda still took her in, and she stayed with them throughout the war. She was given her own hiding place in the basement.
Madame Berthe’s story is a remarkable illustration of the level of secrecy that prevailed on the Plateau. In her memoir, Magda wrote of Berthe: ‘She was often very upset because she didn’t know where her husband and children were.’ In fact, as the Trocmés discovered after the war, Berthe’s son Egon was also living in Le Chambon, something she never told them. That was how closely secrets were guarded on the Plateau.
A Dr and Madame Mautner arrived, refugees from Vienna. As a foreign Jew, Dr Mautner had no chance of being allowed to practise medicine, so he became a househusband. For the rest of the war he did the cooking and housework at home while his wife worked as a dressmaker in Le Chambon. Magda Trocmé loaned her a sewing machine, which stayed busy throughout the war. Dr Mautner spoke in a thick Austrian accent, and he came to the presbytery regularly to borrow the Trocmés’ laundry boiler. His heavily accented request—the French equivalent of: ‘Can ve haf der boil-vasher, pliz?’17—provided the Trocmé children with endless amusement.
A desperate French woman fled to Le Chambon from the Occupied Zone to escape a possible death sentence. She had been caught giving help to English soldiers. From 24 August 1940, three months after Dunkirk, the Germans posted notices all over the Pas-de-Calais region announcing: ‘Any person who protects, hides or assists in any manner a soldier of the English or French army risks the death penalty or forced labour.’ Notices plastered all over the Paris Métro in October 1940 were even starker: people who sheltered anyone English without declaring them risked being shot. There were rewards for handing in or denouncing such people. The young woman stayed with the Trocmés a few days before moving on.
A certain ‘Monsieur Colin’ moved in. He had been in the furniture business in Berlin, and had prudently abandoned his real name, Cohn. He arrived in Le Chambon alone: he had no family left. He was understandably jumpy, and whenever anyone a bit suspicious arrived at the presbytery, Monsieur Colin always did a better than average job of hiding himself. This in itself was not without risk. When the Vichy police arrived to search the house one day, he hid in a notoriously rickety part of the attic, which miraculously held together while the police thudded about impotently below.
Monsieur Colin proved to be a major asset to the household. Because he had been in the business, he was an expert furniture maker and repairman. A fair bit of the Trocmé household was, according to Nelly, falling apart. She recalls:
Monsieur Colin could take a bunch of sticks and repair a desk, or create a new desk with some planks, or a folding desk. We were crowded and in our bedrooms we had folding desks against the wall so we could do our homework and then go to bed. Monsieur Colin did everything that needed to be done. He was silent and non-communicative, and rarely smiled. He was not a happy man.
Simone Mairesse arrived in Le Mazet with her mother and her sister Gabrielle and stayed with relatives.
She was amazed to discover that the Trocmés lived a few kilometres away in Le Chambon, as she had known the family since before the birth of Nelly fourteen years earlier, and had been Nelly’s first babysitter. Simone was pregnant, and her husband had gone off to war, so she knew he was in danger. She learned of his fate in the most terrible way. Sometime after her arrival at Le Mazet, someone wrote to the Trocmé family, enclosing a press cutting about a charming officer, Maurice Mairesse, who had taken a bullet wound to the thigh that had cut an artery. He was dead. It fell to Magda to break the news to Simone of her husband’s death. Devastated, she looked to the Trocmés for comfort and support. Then devastation turned to quiet fury. What could she do? The Trocmés had an answer: she could work with them saving refugees, most of them Jews. Simone was persuaded. She came to the presbytery with her sister every week to do some sewing. But she also took on a vastly more important role: she scoured the Plateau looking for safe houses. It would become a full-time job.
Not all of the new arrivals endeared themselves to their protectors. Magda recalls:
One day, a lady from Paris and her family were due to arrive. I said to Simone: ‘See if you can find somewhere.’ She found a place between Fay-sur-Lignon and Le Chambon, very high up on the mountain, near a water mill, very well hidden. That day the weather was bad, with drizzling rain. I went up to the railway station to meet the lady, who arrived with her son: her husband would come later. Imagine my surprise, after I’d given her all the directions to find the farm, when she became angry. ‘But Madame Trocmé,’ she said, ‘how do you expect me to go on foot in this weather?’ I said: ‘Madame, are you trying to tell me that it’s raining? My friend Simone spends her nights running up and down the mountain trying to find these houses for people like you. Do you think she does it only when the weather is nice?’ Happily, not all the Jews were like this one.
