The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide
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By June of 1941 the Plateau was ready for a serious influx of refugees. It was just in time. On 2 June the Vichy government passed a new law to replace the statutes of 3 and 4 October. This time they really piled on the pressure. As well as all the previous restrictions, Jews were now barred from banking, stockbroking, money lending, gambling, real estate, advertising, radio, publishing, art dealing, the movie business (including, bizarrely, working in cinemas), show business, even forestry. Any Jew who attempted to earn a living in any of these professions could be imprisoned for six months to two years and faced a hefty fine. If he or she lied or used false papers to get a job in the forbidden areas, the prison sentence rose to between a year and five years, and the fine doubled to between 1000 and 20,000 francs.
Almost two months later, on 22 July, the Vichy government passed its ‘Aryanisation’ law. This allowed for the confiscation of all Jewish property, most notably Jewish-owned businesses, but also private property. Jews now found life and work next to impossible. That was the whole idea.
• • •
From May 1941 onwards, the refugees arriving on the Plateau were made up of two groups. The first consisted of people (mostly Jewish) who made their own way there. For some it was only a staging post on the way to what they hoped would be total security in neutral Switzerland or Spain, or less dangerous parts of France like the Cévennes. Others were happy to sit out the war in the comparative safety of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. Some chose to retain their real names and identities. Others felt more secure with false names, false papers and false backgrounds—non-Jewish backgrounds, naturally. In one way or another, all of these arrivals were outside the law, so they all needed to be kept hidden. Those who needed false papers turned mostly to headmaster and forger-in-chief Roger Darcissac. The illegals were not all Jews. Some were French men and women who had fallen foul of the authorities in one way or another. Later, they were joined by members of the Resistance on the run.
The second group consisted of people (mostly children) freed from the camps by the Cimade, the Quakers, the Red Cross or the OSE. They were almost all Jews, but they came to the Plateau with the full knowledge of the Vichy authorities. They only became illegals if they assumed a false identity or tried to leave the Plateau, for instance to escape to Switzerland. In the language of the day, they were ‘transferred’ to the Plateau, mostly to Le Chambon. They did not need to be quite so hidden, and they provided good cover for the illegals.
From the point of view of those doing the hiding there was some danger, but things could have been worse. In Germany, and in the occupied countries, the Germans regarded as criminals those networks that organised ‘pipelines’ and forged papers to help Jews or Allied airmen escape, and there were dire penalties. In the Unoccupied Zone of France, under the Vichy authorities, things were different. A pre-war French law, passed on 2 May 1938, required everybody to inform the prefecture if they had ‘foreigners’ staying with them, and it was an offence to fail to declare them; however, this law was rarely used against foreign Jews, or anybody else.18 In general, Vichy law took a dim view of people who made or carried forged papers, but it was not nearly so ferocious when it came to hiding Jews or even Allied airmen. In theory, the penalty for ‘harbouring an escapee from an internment camp’ was three months to a year in prison, but it was a threat that was very seldom carried out—possibly never. If you were caught with false papers, or could be accused of making them, you were in big trouble. If you were caught sheltering Jews, particularly Jews with false papers, then the Jews were certainly in trouble, but nobody much bothered the shelterers. As we shall see, this all changed at the end of 1942. But for the time being, sheltering Jews on the Plateau, even Jews who arrived illegally and had false papers, was not a high-risk occupation.
• • •
When the Jews of the Palatinate in Germany—including Max Liebmann and his mother—were rounded up and deported on 22 October 1940, it took more than one train to hold them. There were between 6500 and 7500 of them to be transported in a single day, so no fewer than seven trains formed a convoy headed for Gurs in southern France; in theory, next stop Madagascar. Also among them was fifteen-year-old Hanne Hirsch. She travelled with her mother, three aunts, an uncle, a few cousins and her 91-year-old grandmother. They went three days without food or water, but at least they were in proper passenger cars, with seats. Later, Jews were transported in cattle cars.
The winter in Gurs proved too much for Hanne’s grandmother, who died in January, three months after their arrival. Hanne’s oldest aunt was over 70 and almost blind. She died the next month, in February. Conditions were terrible for Hanne and her surviving family, as she describes.
You vegetated. The food was no different from what they got in concentration camps. We got maybe half a pound of bread for 24 hours, and something that looked like coffee in the morning. For lunch we got some watery vegetable soup, mostly root vegetables, some stuff that you feed to animals but not to humans. We had some chickpeas and sometimes a tiny bit of meat in the evening.
However, there was some relief. A worker from the Swiss Red Cross, Elspeth Kassé, had talked her way into the camp and actually lived there. She was assigned one of the barracks, and she fed the teenage inmates in rotation.
Hanne continues:
I had a job in the office. I was the mail person. I went around the barracks. One morning I was waiting at the gate, and this slightly older boy was there, someone from the camp. We walked together up to breakfast, and back down. People thought we were brother and sister. They would ask him, after I left: ‘Where’s your sister?’ We were very good, very good teenagers.
Thus did Max Liebmann first meet Hanne Hirsch. Despite their chaste behaviour, not everyone was convinced of their virtue. People react to malnutrition in different ways. Some people become skeletal. Others swell up with an excess of fluid in the body. Hanne suffered from this condition, known as oedema.
I was really blown up. One day my mother was in the latrine and she overhead this lady, Frau Stein, saying: ‘I don’t understand Frau Hirsch’s daughter Hanne. She’s pregnant! She’s pregnant from this Liebmann guy.’ Frau Stein was in charge of some sort of social service thing that we’d invented for ourselves, and she would sometimes ask me in the office would I do this or that for her. After that, I did exactly nothing for her.
Nevertheless, Hanne Hirsch was in a nearly unique position in the camp. She was fifteen years old and she had a boyfriend. And Max Liebmann had a girlfriend.
• • •
Just as the word ‘camp’ has a sinister association in any story of the Holocaust, so does the word ‘train’. Jews were deported by train, they were taken to the concentration camps by train and they went to their deaths by train.
The train onto the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was quite a different matter. It was a narrow-gauge local railway, not part of the French national rail network, and it ran from Dunières at the foot of the Plateau, through Tence and Le Chambon to Saint-Agrève on the Plateau itself, then on to La Voulte-sur-Rhône in the Rhône Valley. The national rail network connected Dunières with the major cities of Saint-Étienne and Lyon, and from there to the rest of France. The Plateau railway line was originally built with two purposes in mind: it could carry loads of timber from the forests of the Plateau to be used as pit props in the mines around Saint-Étienne, and it could bring tourists from the industrial cities of the plain up to the clean air of the Plateau. The train, known affectionately to the locals as La Galoche (The Clog19), chuffed its way up the mountainside with some difficulty. Sometimes it would stop halfway, having literally run out of steam. Passengers would step down from the train to the side of the track while it built up steam again. Then the whistle would toot, everybody would climb back on board, and The Clog would gamely resume its daily battle with gravity.
Now it had an additional source of passengers. Refugees, mostly Jews, made their way from all over Europe to Dunières, then gratefully clambered on to the little
train headed for the Plateau. The refugees also came by bus: two buses a day arrived from Saint-Étienne. Sometimes the refugees were expected. Mostly they arrived unannounced. In general, they knew only two things: shelter was available on the Plateau; and the Protestant pastors were the people to see.
5
Fun
In 1941 the rescue operation on the Plateau began to assume its final shape. There was still no formal organisation. No one was ever in charge, there was still no plan and there was still no reward. Yet every day at least one person, usually a woman, waited at the railway station, or at the bus stop, in case refugees appeared. The person might be Magda Trocmé. Or Simone Mairesse. Or Alphonse Dreyer, husband of the maths teacher at New Cévenole School. The train could arrive any time between eight o’clock at night and two in the morning, depending on the state of the track and, in winter, the depth of the snow. If it came late, new arrivals were put up temporarily in guesthouses like Beau-Soleil or Les Airelles (The Blueberries), or else taken straight to a farmhouse where the farmer had let it be known that there was a spare room going. There were no fewer than 38 guesthouses, eleven children’s hostels and seven hotels around Le Chambon that could be called into service.
In these early days of the war, the mood on the Plateau was far from hostile to the Vichy government. On 2 May 1941 Marshal Pétain visited Le Puy, where he was well received. There was even a grudging respect from the puritanical Huguenots of the Plateau for the marshal’s program of rénovation. If the marshal was going to rid France of sin, as he promised, then who could object to that? For their part, the Vichy government even looked kindly on the New Cévenole School. Previous French governments had allowed the virus of secularism and anti-religion to spread its evil influence throughout France. If New Cévenole could bring the youth of France back to God-fearing religion, the Vichy government was all in favour of it.
There was a further factor at play. The new government’s repeated calls for a ‘return to the soil’ suggested that these were men after the hearts of the farming community, and this went down well on the largely rural Plateau. In May 1941 the UCJG magazine ran a whole issue dedicated to rural youth, which noted ‘the promises of Marshal Pétain for the land, farm work and the peasantry’. The issue contained an article by Charles Guillon.
• • •
From the arrival of the Germans in France in May 1940 until the end of 1942, there was no serious armed resistance in France, no clandestines hiding in the forests and planning sabotage, and hardly any Free French Army fighting under the command of Charles de Gaulle. Of the 140,000 French troops rescued from Dunkirk and taken to England in 1940, a mere 3000 agreed to join de Gaulle and continue the war. The rest opted to be repatriated to France and its Unoccupied Zone. The deeply unpopular Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) forced labour laws, whereby young Frenchmen were sent off to Germany to work in the factories, did not arrive on the Vichy statute book until 16 February 1943. The plain fact is that in 1941 and for most of 1942 the French population was understandably preoccupied with getting enough food to eat and with continuing to earn a living, in an economy dominated by rationing, shortages, black markets and disruption. Persecution of Jews had begun in 1940 and was getting worse, but for non-Jewish, non-communist, non-resistant French men and women in the Unoccupied Zone, the government of Pétain and his Vichy ministers was not savagely oppressive. Above all, although the war continued throughout this period, including the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain, for the French of the Unoccupied Zone the sound of gunfire was a far distant and inaudible rumble.
Nevertheless, the various pastors of the Plateau scented trouble ahead. At a meeting of the regional synod on 12 and 13 November 1940, André Trocmé warned of the danger of the Church losing its independence by getting too close to the state, although the problem ‘seems to be a long way off at the moment’. Trocmé was already worried about the authoritarian streak now apparent in the government’s methods. In October 1941, Édouard Theis wrote in the local journal Echo of the Mountain:
We must put an end to every man for himself. It’s up to us as Christians to lead by example, in accordance with the word of our Lord. We must be concerned for our parents, our neighbours, our brothers in faith, our compatriots, but also for total strangers, all of whom require that we care about them.
In other words, we’ll have to raise our game.
• • •
In May 1941 the Plateau’s role as rescue service finally came out into the open. The Quakers in Marseille had secured the release of nine Jewish children from the Gurs camp. All nine were delivered to Le Chambon. On 16 May 1941 the Swiss Red Cross had opened La Guespy (The Wasps’ Nest), a hostel specifically for children released from the camps. Located on the edge of the town, it had space for twenty children. It was soon full, with the arrival of seven girls and thirteen boys, eleven of them Jews released from Gurs. So the first nine released children almost certainly went straight to The Wasps’ Nest. The great rescue had begun.
It is almost impossible to put oneself into the shoes of parents, particularly Jewish parents, asked to make such heartbreaking decisions. At this stage, adults who ran foul of the authorities faced ‘deportation’, which they took to be a code word for slave labour in Germany. They could expect to be literally worked to death there; at this point, however, names like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen meant nothing. The mass murder of Jews did not really get under way until 1942, so while the fear of ‘deportation’ was widespread and well justified, the full horror of the fate of those packed onto trains and sent east was not yet known. Nevertheless, the proposition being put to Jewish parents by representatives of the Quakers, the Cimade, the OSE and the Swiss Red Cross was stark and devastating. There was very little the rescue organisations could do to save healthy adults in an internment camp, they were told; however, they had a good chance of saving the children.
One of the rescuers was a Catholic priest, Abbé Alexandre Glasberg, a portly and avuncular figure wearing trademark horn-rimmed glasses. He would say with great gentleness to a parent in a camp: ‘Entrust your child to me.’ Then he would turn to the child and say: ‘If you come with me, you’ll have a good breakfast tomorrow.’ However slight that may sound to today’s ears, it had a different resonance for starving and frightened children, and they largely said yes. The unstated consequence was unbearable: the parents knew they would almost certainly never see their child again. Still, parents generally seized the chance to save part of their family. They might not survive personally, but at least the next generation would be spared.
So the setting up of hostels, mostly for children, became an urgent task. The Wasps’ Nest proved to be the first of many. In January 1942 the Maison des Roches (House of Rocks) opened its doors. This was more than a mere hostel. The Geneva-based European Student Assistance Fund paid for it, and it had the status of a mini-university. It could take in up to 50 residential students aged between seventeen and 35, housed in 32 rooms. The first principal was a Monsieur Pantet (nobody seems to have recorded his first name), but in August 1942 the role of principal was taken over by Daniel Trocmé, André’s cousin.
Next came Le Coteau Fleuri (The Flowery Hill), opened in the spring of 1942 and supported with money from the Quakers and the Cimade. It had room for 50 people between the ages of five and 87. Then came L’Abric (roughly ‘The Shelter’), with room for 30 children, funded by the Child Rescue Service of the Swiss Red Cross. The main body of the Swiss Red Cross then opened Faïdoli,20 with space for 23 children over the age of twelve. Finally, the pacifist MIR (Mouvement International de la Réconciliation) opened Les Grillons (The Crickets), with space for twenty children aged ten to seventeen. Eugène Munch and Daniel Trocmé managed it jointly.
Why Le Chambon and the Plateau? Madeleine Barot, who founded the Cimade, shed some interesting light in a 1982 interview with the documentary maker Pierre Sauvage. She told him:
We had to find a place where people would be safe. In Le Chambon
we felt quite secure about the population. We were very scared of a ‘fifth column’—people who could be bought off by the Vichy paramilitary or by the Germans. In Le Chambon we felt that a fifth column would be spotted immediately.
• • •
In the archives of Gurs camp there is a note dated 21 August 1942. One of Hanne Hirsch’s uncles, who lived in New York, had written to the camp authorities demanding the release of the uncle’s mother (Hanne’s grandmother, who had died in January), his sister-in-law (Hanne’s mother), and his niece, Hanne. The camp commander replied on 8 September 1942 that Hanne had been transferred to a Protestant children’s home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. These simple words conceal an agonising decision. In fact Hanne had moved to Le Chambon in March 1942. She takes up the narrative.
It was the OSE with the help of the Swiss Red Cross who got us through the gate. They had to get permission from our parents. It was a precondition that the parents allow us to leave. We were all minors, so no way could we have made a decision. Yes, the parent had to agree—and probably sign a paper—that said they would let us go, that it is okay to leave the camp and go to Le Chambon. Did we know about Le Chambon? No. We didn’t know anything. All we knew was that nothing good could come out of Gurs. So the parents said okay, maybe we will perish, or whatever’s going to happen to us, but the children might be safe. And we will try to save our children.
I don’t know whether the main idea was to save us, or to make sure we lived under more normal conditions and had better food. When you’re sixteen or seventeen, you start to move away from your parents, slowly but surely. My mother asked me if I wanted to go, and I said yes. Who wouldn’t? The OSE took us physically to Le Chambon. They accompanied us the whole way. There were seven of us—four boys and three girls. We stopped in Toulouse for lunch. I remember that we were walking in the old part of Toulouse and there was a kosher restaurant that was one flight up. After so many carrots in the camp, what did we get? Carrots!