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

by Peter Grose

  • • •

  Throughout this period, it was still possible to send letters to and from the internment camps. Hanne Hirsch stayed in touch with her mother, still in Gurs, and with Max Liebmann. The first news she received was good. Max had been transferred from Gurs to a farm near Lyon, not too far from Le Chambon. The farm was run by, of all unlikely organisations, the Orthodox Jewish Boy Scouts. Then came the bad news. Hanne’s mother was ill. The OSE and the Swiss Red Cross arranged for Hanne to be allowed to travel from Le Chambon to Gurs to see her. She set off unescorted, arriving in Gurs on 5 August 1942.

  My mother had been very sick for some time but nobody told me about it. Eventually I was told I had better come and see her. On my way to Gurs, since you have to pass through Lyon, I went to see Max. The mail worked, you see! Then I went on to Gurs but I couldn’t get into the camp. It was under lockdown. I found out that after lockdown, the next day was deportation.

  I saw my mother in the camp from a long distance. We had a shouted sort of conversation. Then, with the help of the Organisations [the OSE and the Swiss Red Cross], they arranged that I could be in the freight yard. So I went down to Oloron on foot.24 I slept in the street during the night. About five in the morning I walked over to the freight yards. The trains were standing there. They had already been loaded. Where was my mother? There were 1000 people there. I was sort of standing there when a French gendarme said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘I’m looking for my mother.’ He said: ‘Do you know where she is?’ I said: ‘No.’ How could I know among 1000 people? He said: ‘I will find her for you. What’s her name?’ Then he asked me, like a good Frenchman, would I like a drink out of his hip flask? I said: ‘No, thank you,’ and he went off. Before he went he said: ‘What goes on here tears my heart out.’ He had to be there, he was there, but he did as little as possible. But he did find my mother, and I had about an hour with her. Then the trains left. These were freight trains, standing room only, cattle cars. Some had straw on the floor, some did not. There was a pail in the corner. People took whatever luggage they still had on the train. The Quakers had supplied some food. That was it!

  That was the last time Hanne saw her mother. On her way back to Le Chambon, she went to see Max Liebmann again, near Lyon. When Max told her about the round-ups then going on in the Lyon area, it was the first time she had heard the word ‘round-up’.25 She told him: ‘If you’re not safe here, come to Le Chambon.’

  A couple of weeks later, Hanne was walking to school with a group of other girls. At that time of the morning the boys from New Cévenole School tended to mill about in the village, ogling the girls. Suddenly there was the familiar sound of a wolf whistle. Hanne kept her nose determinedly in the air, but one of the girlfriends couldn’t resist taking a look. What she saw was not the usual grinning Cévenole schoolboy. She shrieked to Hanne: ‘Turn around!’ Hanne wasn’t having it. Her friend, who had been in the Gurs camp with Hanne, was insistent. So was Hanne. The friend grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around. The whistler stood a few yards away, smiling. Max and Hanne were back together again.

  • • •

  By August of 1942, the mood of the Plateau towards the Vichy government had well and truly soured. The newly arrived refugees came with tales of persecution and injustice. With rationing and shortages, life was uncomfortable for everybody. So there were few reasons to be cheerful, or even grateful. The pinpricks of the likes of the LFC were a constant irritation. For the very few who could afford it, the need to top up everyday items like petrol and food on the black market simply made things worse. The government blamed the Jews for the black market and, as we have seen, there were some Jewish black marketeers who did their fellow Jews no service. But the population wasn’t fooled. The problem was not the Jews: it was the war, the defeat and the Occupation. And the government seemed incapable of doing anything about any of it.

  The sheer frustration of it all is illustrated by this conversation in Le Chambon, remembered by Catherine Cambessédès. ‘I heard the lady in the grocery store say to a customer with coupons that she was out of (one at a time) sugar, also flour or coffee or eggs. The customer then asked: “Well, what do you have for sale then?” Answer: “Baking powder.”’

  Sourness turned into open hostility on 9 and 10 August 1942. The Vichy government’s Minister for Youth, Georges Lamirand, decided to pay a visit to Le Chambon to see for himself the admirable ways of France’s young Protestants. He had heard good things about the New Cévenole School, about the UCJG’s Camp de Joubert, about the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and even about the hostels for young refugees. What better way to show his appreciation of all this cheerful adaptability than with a bit of on-the-spot head-patting, cheek-kissing and palm-pressing, personally congratulating the youth of the Plateau for the fine example they were setting the rest of France? Prefect Bach wrote in advance to André Trocmé: ‘I’m sure that in your heart you will want the visit to be a brilliant success.’

  It was nothing of the kind. The whole enterprise was pretty much doomed before it began. The Vichy government had tried to merge all French youth movements into one large organisation called the Compagnons de France (Companions of France). But with their fascist salutes, their flag-waving and bugle-blowing, their parades, their work camps, their uniform blue shirts and their wild-eyed zeal for Marshal Pétain, the Companions looked too much like Germany’s Hitler Youth for comfort. So the government’s attempts to corral the youth of France produced the opposite result: the various youth movements clung tenaciously to their independence, and generally resented government attempts to talk them out of it. The youth of the Plateau were stroppier than most. The various pastors of the Plateau had all been preaching against totalitarianism, with a strong dose of pacifism to accompany it. The young people knew what to do about visits by government ministers. And they were about to show it.

  Perhaps sensing trouble, the authorities tried to make sure everything went smoothly. On 8 August, the day before Lamirand’s arrival, nine gendarmes from Tence descended on the town and set about sanitising it. It was a Saturday, and therefore market day, so the town was crowded. The gendarmes set themselves up at the bus stops, the railway station, and in the market place, demanding to see papers and identification. They checked out the hotels and bars. Two gendarmes guarded the main road south of the town, while two others blocked the route to Le Mazet. Nobody was going to escape their keen scrutiny. The official records of this particular operation have long since disappeared, but as far as anyone remembers, nobody was arrested, no false papers were found, and the town could safely be declared ‘clean’. The gendarmes drove back to Tence, presumably congratulating themselves on a job well done. After that thorough sweep of undesirables, what could possibly go wrong tomorrow?

  When Lamirand arrived by car the next day, wearing a splendid military-style uniform with more than a hint of the German Army about it, the streets were deserted. No flags flew. No bunting hung from windows. Nobody waved. Nobody smiled. There was nobody there. Lamirand had been promised a ‘banquet’ at, of all places, Camp de Joubert. Instead he was served a thin meal of typically rationed food. The minister tried to make the best of it. ‘It’s better this way,’ he said. ‘It’s what the marshal would want—it’s more patriotic.’

  Lamirand then moved on to the sports ground, accompanied by the prefect, the sub-prefect and the deputy mayor. The various pastors refused to join them, though they had been around for the ‘banquet’. About a hundred curious children had turned up at the sports ground to take a look at the minister. These were small numbers, far from the cheering, enthusiastic crowds of two thousand or more that Lamirand had addressed elsewhere.

  ‘Bonjour, m’sieur,’ a couple of the bolder children said, trying to take the minister’s hand. This is more like it, Lamirand must have thought. ‘Bonjour, bonjour,’ he replied jovially. That was about as affable as things got. Pierre Brès, an athletics teacher at the New Cévenole School and the head of the loc
al Boy Scouts, made a brief and grumpy speech taken from Romans 13, saying that Christians had a duty to obey the laws of the state. Lamirand had planned to follow up with a long, rousing speech praising the wonders being performed by the Protestant youth of the Plateau. This clearly wasn’t the moment for it, so he contented himself with a few words before heading to the Protestant church for a service, the next scheduled stop on the itinerary.

  If what had gone before was bad, things now got worse. Both Theis and Trocmé had refused to preside over the service, so a Swiss pastor, Marcel Jeannet, spoke instead. His message was not what Lamirand wanted to hear. Jeannet echoed Pierre Brès, saying it was the duty of Christians to obey the state. There was, however, a gigantic but: it was the duty of the state to make sure it didn’t bend the laws of God.

  When the service ended, Lamirand walked out of the church to be confronted by a dozen senior students from New Cévenole School. They handed him a document that began:

  Minister, we have been informed of the scenes of terror which took place three weeks ago in Paris, when the French police, under orders from the occupying power, arrested at their homes all the Jewish families of Paris and dumped them in the Winter Velodrome.

  This was a reference to the notorious round-up and deportation to Auschwitz of some 13,152 Parisian Jews on 16 and 17 July 1942. The students then drove their point home. ‘We know from experience,’ they told the minister, ‘that the decrees of the occupying power are, after a brief delay, imposed in Unoccupied France, where they are presented as the independent decisions of the French head of state. We believe that these deportations of Jews will soon start in the south.’

  Then came the sting. ‘We want you to know,’ the students continued,

  that there are a certain number of Jews among us. We can’t tell the difference between Jews and non-Jews. If our friends, whose sole fault is to adhere to a different religion, receive deportation orders, we will encourage them to disobey those orders, and we will do our best to hide them.

  Lamirand knew when to retreat. He brushed the students aside. ‘These questions don’t concern me,’ he said. ‘Ask the prefect.’ He then stomped off to his car and drove away.

  Prefect Bach was furious, and clearly blamed Trocmé for the disaster. He turned to him and snapped: ‘This should have been a day of national harmony. You create division.’ Trocmé snapped back: ‘It’s hardly a question of national harmony when our friends are threatened with deportation.’ Bach was adamant: ‘The plain fact is I’ve received my orders, and I’ll carry them out. The foreign Jews living in the Haute-Loire aren’t your brothers. They’re not part of your church, and they’re not part of your country. In a few days, we’ll have a list of names of every Jew in Le Chambon.’ Trocmé was sceptical. ‘Even we don’t know if someone is a Jew,’ he offered. ‘We just know they are people.’ At this, Bach turned threatening. ‘Monsieur Trocmé,’ he warned, ‘be very sure to take care. Seven of your fellow citizens write to me regularly to keep me up to date on your subversive activities. I haven’t kept count of their letters up until now, but I’m well informed. If you aren’t careful, it will be you that I’m forced to intern. So, a word to the wise … watch it!’

  • • •

  What Bach knew—and Trocmé did not—was that on 3 August 1942, a week before the calamitous Lamirand visit, the Vichy government had instructed the prefects of all departments in the Unoccupied Zone to come up with a register of all Jews in their area, and to arrest all foreign Jews. The list of names Bach referred to was part of this Vichy operation.

  Trocmé may not have known about the specific order, but he sensed looming trouble. On 14 August he went to the prefecture in Le Puy and spoke to the chief of police. He told him (entirely speciously!) that three children’s homes in Le Chambon had diplomatic immunity: these were The Flowery Hill, the House of Rocks and The Shelter. The three were under the protection of the neutral Swiss, the neutral Swedes and the United States. They could not be touched.

  Whatever the chief of police made of this, it did not stop the authorities from pressing on. At four thirty on the morning of Tuesday, 25 August, Auguste Bohny, who ran The Shelter, was woken by a fearful pounding on his front door. Gendarmes, eight of them, had the house surrounded. With them was a police Inspector of Security from Le Puy. At the time, Bohny was looking after a group of children from The Wasps’ Nest, but they were sleeping in the communal dining room and the games room rather than in the bedrooms.

  Bohny made his way to the front door by way of the cellar, as he normally did. What did the gendarmes want? They wanted to see a Monsieur Steckler, to check his papers. Monsieur Steckler was at The Wasps’ Nest, not The Shelter. Bohny would take them there, if they would give him a minute to get dressed. He dressed ‘at speed’ and they duly covered the few hundred metres between the two houses. At The Wasps’ Nest, the gendarmes told Steckler to pack his bags (but not his shaving gear).

  When they got back to The Shelter, they found that the most senior gendarme had decided not to wait around outside and had marched into the house. He hadn’t got far. One of the staff, Joseph Godefryd, had bailed him up and harangued him non-stop until his boss’s return. At this point the gendarmes seemed uninterested in the boys, who were sleeping in the games room, but wanted to check the two girls, who were sleeping in the dining room. The girls turned out not to be on their list of names.

  Bohny now challenged the gendarmes. These young people were under his protection, this was Swiss government property, and he would not allow any further action without confirmation from the chief of police himself. There’s a mug born every minute, and Bohny was lucky enough to be surrounded by nine of them. The gendarmes accepted Bohny’s demand and all eight gendarmes plus the Inspector of Security left The Shelter at around 6.30 am.

  Bohny now woke the children, fed them a good breakfast and bundled them out the door. They headed straight for the woods. When the gendarmes returned at 9.30 am the place was empty. They were furious, and threatened Bohny with arrest. Meanwhile, they had brought a bus to the village—it would take more than a car to accommodate their expected haul of Jews, they thought—and in it sat the unfortunate Monsieur Steckler, alone. Well, not quite alone: the bus was surrounded by villagers wishing Monsieur Steckler well, offering him food, even a bit of precious chocolate. The sympathetic crowd looked on as the bus set off for Le Puy. That afternoon, Bohny received a letter from the Social Services in Le Puy. Monsieur Steckler was only quarter Jewish. He could go free, as he did the next day.

  Despite this setback, the authorities weren’t finished with Le Chambon. At five o’clock the next morning the gendarmes were back at The Shelter and The Wasps’ Nest. They kept coming back every day for the rest of the week, always leaving empty-handed. The children had all been dispersed. By Saturday the gendarmes were totally exasperated. They summoned André Trocmé to the town hall and demanded that he lead them to the hidden Jews. If he refused, he would be arrested, along with Édouard Theis and the directors of the three children’s homes. No deal. And no arrests.

  On Sunday, notices were posted all over the village announcing that anyone who sheltered foreigners without declaring them would be sent to a concentration camp or heavily fined. Nobody responded.

  On 3 September, private houses were searched for the first time. No result. On 10 September the village was given advance warning: the penalty for hiding a foreign Jew was two to five years in prison. Yet still no one came forward. Nothing happened.

  After three weeks the police gave up. They had searched the houses and the surrounding forest without catching so much as a single refugee. The story was the same all over the Plateau. Between 19 August and 13 September, French gendarmes based in Yssingeaux mounted no fewer than 35 raids, looking for Jews. They found one, whom they later released.

  The whole thing was a fiasco. In a document understandably marked ‘secret’, the company commander of the gendarmes, Squadron Leader Silvani, set out the results from the commu
ne of Le Chambon. They had checked the papers of 879 individuals on the roads, in buses and on trains, and a further 496 individuals in hotels and hostels, and had raided 625 private homes. The result: two arrests. The report shyly omits the fact that of the two arrested, one, Monsieur Steckler, had been released the next day. So 2000 searches had produced one arrest. Silvani concluded: ‘This proves that the Jews we were looking for have left the Plateau.’

  The commander of the group of gendarmes specifically targeting Le Chambon agreed. His report concluded:

  On the advice of people we can trust, all of them living in Le Chambon or the surrounding area, none of the foreign Jews we were looking for are still in the commune or living nearby. Nobody has seen these Jews. The Chaumargeais sector of the commune of Tence, rumoured to be sheltering Jews, was searched minutely, day and night, without result.

  By the prefecture’s own reckoning, three months of diligent raiding throughout the whole department of the Haute-Loire had produced not very much. Draft 6483(2) of the prefecture’s report dated 30 October 1942 states:

  In accordance with the instructions of 3 August (and subsequent):

  160 foreign Jews have been located—

  85 arrests have been carried out, 73 are still in custody—