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

by Peter Grose

  Things took a turn for the better when they arrived in Le Chambon. They were taken to a large house just outside the centre of the village, located in the street called Côte de Molle (roughly ‘Molle Way’).

  We had dinner there. I remember we had beef broth, or whatever it was. But it was definitely with noodles, and they poured milk into it. Heaven! I don’t know what the rest of the meal was, but I remember that soup! I’d never seen that before. It tasted wonderful! After dinner they took us to La Guespy [The Wasps’ Nest], our new home.

  Hanne’s boyfriend Max was still stuck back in Gurs. His turn would come soon.

  • • •

  While I was researching this book, I interviewed as many survivors from the Plateau as I could find. There was an extraordinary and recurring plea. These were people who had spent their childhood on the Plateau, either because that was their home or because they went there as refugees. They all made the same point. Don’t make it all sound terrible. A lot of the time, we had fun.

  The first time I heard this, it sounded preposterous. These were adolescents living on so-called J3 rations, which meant 350 grams of bread a day, 180 grams of meat per week, and 500 grams of sugar per month. The bread was grey and hard, and rumour had it that it was bulked up with sawdust. They wore loden capes made from greasy mountain wool, which never fully dried and made them smell like wet dogs. They were restricted to one pair of shoes a year, so they wore wooden clogs. None of this sounded like the ideal conditions for fun. But as I got deeper into the research, I realised that this was almost the masterstroke of those involved in the rescue operation. Their avowed intention was to give the children now on the Plateau as normal an upbringing as possible, and they went a long way towards succeeding.

  Nonetheless, the pain of those days lingers. Many of the refugees were teenagers, an age group not noted for its easy ways. These were young people just beginning to discover their sexuality, and learning the painful process of living in an adult world. Refugees from the camps had been torn from their parents, whom they might never see again. ‘You were just children,’ I said to one of the interviewees after hearing some particularly awful story. ‘We were never children,’ she responded flatly—not angrily, just correcting me.

  • • •

  Helping the neighbours is one of the great traditions of rural communities. At harvest time in particular, everyone pitches in. Hanne Hirsch remembers a certain Madame de Félice who owned the Wasps’ Nest building and lived nearby. She visited the hostel in the autumn of 1941, only a few months after Hanne arrived in Le Chambon. Madame de Félice wanted to know if the young guests would like to help out picking fruit in her orchard.

  The children duly assembled, and were given a stern warning not to eat while they were picking. There would be time enough for that at the end of the day when the job was done, they were told. To children who had been close to starvation in Gurs, this sounded more like an invitation than an admonition. They fanned out into the orchard and simply sat down under the trees, munching their way through as many ripe apples and plums as they could handle. Madame de Félice had rather less to show for the day’s labour than she was expecting. The children, on the other hand, could begin to see that life in this strange new world of the Plateau had its advantages.

  • • •

  The garde champêtre (roughly ‘country policeman’) is a unique institution in rural French villages, combining the roles of general busybody, town hall enforcer, snoop and town crier. In Le Chambon, the garde champêtre was in the habit of taking up station at strategic points around the village, beating on a drum and shouting: ‘Avis! Avis!’ (‘Hear ye, hear ye!’) until enough people had gathered around to hear the latest public pronouncements. In winter, when the streets were covered with snow, he fought a losing battle with the village kids, resident and refugee alike, over sledding. He would whack his drum and proclaim: ‘It is forbidden to slide down the village streets on sleds.’ Realising that mere words wouldn’t do the job, however, he would wait until dusk and then spread ashes on the streets to make them less slippery and therefore less suitable for a mini Cresta Run.

  The kids were not to be denied. Minutes after the garde champêtre’s ash-spreading spree, an army of them would arrive and get to work with their brooms, which they kept hidden around the village. Then the ‘sled trains’ could go into action. One of the two most satisfying runs was along the Côte de Molle, which included a fairly steep slope running straight down to the centre of town. The big attraction of this run was that it involved sledding across the railway lines at high speed, which produced a very satisfying shower of sparks. The other run began near the town hall, and involved a road down an even steeper hill and across the town’s main intersection, where the roads to Saint-Agrève, Tence, Le Mazet and Les Barandons met. It then led past the school and the Protestant church to a stone bridge over the River Lignon. Fortunately there were no cars about, so the road crossing was less hazardous than it sounds. However, the stone bridge was another matter. One older boy was killed when he lost control of his sled and slammed into the bridge.

  • • •

  Christmas in Le Chambon was, of course, a major event for the children. Every year the Protestant church featured a massive Christmas tree. It was so big that it had to be dragged into position by a horse, which came snorting through the big double doors and heaved its way down the aisle with the enormous balsam tree in tow. The church elders removed one of the flagstones from the church floor and the tree rested in the hole it left behind.

  The French traditionally eat their Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. But the biggest event for the children began with the ringing of church bells in the afternoon of 25 December. The kids would race down to the church and sit in assigned places, dazzled by the hundred real candles lighting the tree, and tinsel dangling from the branches. André Trocmé and Édouard Theis led the singing of Christmas carols, accompanied on an old reed organ. Then each child would receive a bag of gifts, including an orange or a tangerine. This was no mean feat. Fresh fruit was hard to come by in wartime France, especially exotic fruit not grown locally. There would be some dates to go with the fruit, and some sweets. Each bag contained bonbons (candies or sweets) wrapped in paper, with an exploding cap inside, which detonated when the two paper ends were pulled, a forerunner of the modern Christmas cracker, but with sweets inside instead of a feeble joke and a paper hat. (Not to be pulled in church, of course; they had to be saved for later.)

  Finally, Pastor Trocmé told a story, which he would have written himself.21 He would tell it entirely from memory, acting it out as he went. Meanwhile, Roger Darcissac operated a ‘magic lantern’, which projected the story’s illustrations onto a large screen. Trocmé would pace up and down beside the tree, a born showman, laughing at his own funny bits and ad-libbing a few embellishments. For the kids, it was pure magic.

  • • •

  Catherine Cambessédès, as we have seen, always liked the New Cévenole School. One of its previously unsung attractions was its mixed classrooms.

  The classes were co-ed. That might seem like nothing to you, but to us it was a new world. We came from separate girls or boys schools, and suddenly having these different creatures sitting right next to us in the classrooms was amazing. I had four brothers, but they were brothers, not boys! We were, no doubt, quite uptight about boy–girl relationships, with our Huguenot upbringing. Result? We were ‘good’ girls and boys, except the wilder ones who disobeyed. At Le Chambon there was no hanky-panky, so it was safe to laugh and go out in a gang of girls and boys, even for ‘good’ girls. And that was sure fun. Egged on by the presence of girls, boys dared to make jokes in class, or even play small pranks. We girls were such a good audience!

  Music was permitted in the Trocmé household, but dancing was out. Nelly Trocmé, who was in her early teens during the war years, remembers:

  My father had principles: no drinking, no dancing. Music was fine, but dan
cing was no good, especially locally. The young people went dancing in a bar near the town hall, and then they went to sleep in the hayloft and produced babies.

  It’s very difficult to be a minister’s daughter or son, because you are supposed to live by the standards of your parents and be an example. You can’t disobey your parents. But I danced! Not in bars. I had a friend who had an old-fashioned wind-up record player, and we went to her place on Sunday afternoons. There were American jazz records. That’s where I first heard Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’. We were girls only, a bunch of six or eight girls getting together. We turned on the records and we danced! Dad didn’t know that. I told him later.

  The dancing may have been girls only, but boys were included in swimming parties in the icy River Lignon. There is what is still optimistically called a ‘beach’ just outside the centre of the village, near the House of Rocks, and a second ‘beach’ nearer the village, called Tata Zoé (Auntie Zoe). ‘It was all very innocent,’ explains Nelly. ‘We had a special little friend, but we didn’t even hold hands. We would try to sit together, maybe. There was nothing happening … it was all silent vibes. It was cold, but we swam. And there was no hanky-panky, at least none at our level.’

  There were other activities: cycle rides and camping trips in the mountains, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, school plays, a basketball team, cross-country runs. In other words, the kids of the Plateau, locals and refugees alike, shared and played and flirted and danced and sang and couldn’t wait for Christmas, just like kids everywhere. And that is one of the many miracles of this story.

  6

  Rebellion

  By the summer of 1942, the two streams of refugees were in full flow. As mentioned, there were the ‘unofficials’—mostly French and foreign Jews who had been displaced from their jobs, their houses and their businesses, and who had made their own way to the Plateau in the hope of sheltering there—and the ‘transfers’, mostly children released from the camps. These children were in Le Chambon and other Plateau villages with the full knowledge of the Vichy authorities.

  The ‘unofficials’ could be divided into two groups. The first of these were better-off Jews. Towards the end of 1941, when the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy government began to bite—particularly those laws leading to the confiscation of businesses—some Jewish people simply sold up while they still had something to sell. A significant number moved into hotels or rented villas away from the large cities, where there was less risk of raids and round-ups. On the Plateau, they favoured hotels on the eastern side, in Ardèche towns like Saint-Agrève, Le Cheylard and Lamastre, although some did settle on the Haute-Loire side, the most significant group in the Hôtel Placide in Tence. A few found their way to Le Chambon.

  The second group of unofficials were the ‘illegals’, the poverty-stricken and desperate who simply came to the Plateau from all over Europe because they had heard that people there were willing to help. They were generally placed with sympathetic farmers and scattered in remote houses all over the Plateau. They were inevitably well and truly outside the law. If they were Jewish, they naturally did not register themselves as Jews, though the law required it. And they were often using false papers, which was a serious crime.

  The poor Jews were generally well received and made welcome. Sometimes the ‘illegals’ arrived alone. Sometimes they came as whole families. Nobody asked who they were, why they were there or if they could pay. Above all, nobody kept a tally. Some of the refugees needed fresh papers before they could move on. Roger Darcissac could oblige, as could Pastor Édouard Theis, Simone Mairesse, Mireille Philip and others. Mireille Philip in particular took huge risks. She was the wife of André Philip, the deputy who had joined de Gaulle in London, so she was very much a marked woman. Although she was on her own in Le Chambon with five children to look after, she played a hugely active part in the rescue operation and in the Resistance, and was an active forger.

  The rich Jews were a different matter. The behaviour of some who settled in the hotels and villas did not exactly endear them to the local population. Apart from resenting their wealth, local people often blamed them for either controlling or creating a black market. The principal source of resentment was their frequent demand that the hoteliers provide them with extra food beyond their rationed allowance.

  On 30 April 1942 the mayor of Saint-Agrève wrote to the prefect of the Ardèche complaining that he seemed to be facing an endless succession of ‘Jewish summers’ and asking the prefect to ban Jews from the commune of Saint-Agrève for the forthcoming holiday season. ‘Their presence,’ he wrote, ‘risks encouraging the hoteliers to feed them illegally, as happened to one hotelier from Lamastre, who was arrested this week on the streets of St. Agrève with 32 kilos of sausages bought without ration coupons.’ The mayor continued: ‘Their presence also risks the number and scale of direct purchases from farms at uncontrolled prices, which would gravely compromise the already difficult task of feeding the community.’ Someone, presumably from the prefect’s office, had added a handwritten comment at the bottom of the letter: ‘Of course!’

  Nor did the Jews in the hotels show much sympathy for their poorer fellow Jews who came to the Plateau looking for shelter. Magda Trocmé went on the rounds of the hotels to ask some of the more prosperous Jews if they would contribute to the support of their co-religionists, particularly those from outside France. She was told: ‘These foreigners that you bring to Le Chambon will be the ruin of us. We French Jews are not going to get mixed up with them.’

  • • •

  The functioning and financing of the various shelters for the transfers seems to have been largely undisturbed by America’s entry into the war in December 1941. On 11 December, three days after the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan,22 Hitler declared war on the United States. Under the terms of the Armistice of June 1940, funds could not be sent directly from an ‘enemy’ country to France, so they now had to arrive clandestinely via Switzerland. However, the Plateau had a staunch and resourceful friend in Geneva who saw to it that the money continued to flow. As André Trocmé wrote in his memoirs:

  Through the channel of the Ecumenical Council in Geneva, and with the help of Charles Guillon, we had the necessary money to keep our children’s and adolescents’ homes going, as well as receiving grants for young refugees at the New Cévenole School. Brave couriers crossed the frontier secretly, carrying the funds.

  It is highly likely that Guillon himself was one of the couriers. He made several clandestine trips to the Plateau in this period, and he was not the sort of man to arrive empty-handed.

  The terms of the Armistice also prevented the Vichy French government from keeping an army. To get around this, on 1 August 1940 the Vichy government created the LFC or Légion Française des Combattants, a quasi-military force largely made up of ex-soldiers who supported Pétain. They were hardly a formidable force, but they brought a good dose of right-wing zeal to the task of rooting out communists. Over the winter of 1940–41 they launched a succession of investigations on the Plateau in search of communist sympathisers. In December 1940 they latched on to Paul Charreyron, a cabinet maker working in Le Chambon. Charles Guillon, still acting as mayor despite his resignation, assured the legionnaires that Charreyon was harmless. On 20 January 1941 the LFC came up with the names of seven suspected Plateau communists, six of them from Le Chambon, including Charreyron again, and Roger Darcissac. Nobody followed up on any of this, and nothing happened as a result.

  Nevertheless, the creation of the LFC led to one of the first acts of petty rebellion on the Plateau. The Vichy government decreed that 1 August 1941 should be a public holiday to celebrate the LFC’s first anniversary. At noon, all the church bells in every village were to be rung for fifteen minutes at top volume. André Trocmé showed the government notice to his bellringer, but made it very clear that he wouldn’t be at all sorry if his bells failed to sound. On the appointed day, the Catholic church’s bells rang. The Protestant church’s bells stayed silent
. As Trocmé wrote afterwards: ‘It was the first time the parish openly said “non!”’

  The parish said non rather more stridently at the end of that month. Pierre Laval was a controversial figure throughout the Vichy era. The former foreign minister had been Pétain’s Minister of State in the first Vichy government until Pétain sacked him in December 1940. He hovered on the fringes of right-wing causes, a much-disliked and distrusted figure. Then, on 27 August 1941, a would-be assassin shot and lightly wounded him. He quickly recovered, to the dismay of his critics. However, on the night of 30 August, a Saturday, a group of young men from Le Chambon gathered noisily in the town and marched down to the bridge over the River Lignon, carrying a coffin-sized box with a swastika painted on the side. They proceeded to throw it into the river, chanting: ‘Laval is dead.’23

  Their actions did not go unnoticed. Four days later, on 3 September (the second anniversary of the declaration of war), a group of gendarmes arrived in Le Chambon from Tence. En route they had seen dozens of chalk signs proclaiming ‘V’—Churchill’s symbol of Allied victory—and the forbidden double-barred Cross of Lorraine, de Gaulle’s icon for the Free French Army. Alongside one of the chalk signs someone had written: ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ (‘Long live de Gaulle!’)

  All of this was brought to the attention of Robert Bach, the new prefect of the Haute-Loire. Bach was very much one for the peaceful life. He dismissed the defiant chalk marks as ‘a ridiculous nonsense’. However, the head of the gendarmerie in the Auvergne region took it all much more seriously. In his view it was clearly the work of Jews and Freemasons, and he blamed it all on outsiders. ‘Most of these people have left their homes and moved to the eastern Haute-Loire, where a lot of them have properties,’ he wrote in a report. ‘You can see it particularly in Le Chambon, Tence and Montfaucon, where these people are congregating. There are a lot of people wearing the Cross of Lorraine, and that’s where the propaganda is at its height.’ All this disloyalty was spoiling the area for law-abiding holidaymakers, in his opinion.