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

by Peter Grose

  • • •

  Anyone looking into the story of the Plateau inevitably faces a further question. Surely, common sense dictates, someone in authority must have been turning a blind eye to what was going on there. Otherwise, how did the people of the Plateau get away with it for so long? The two most popular candidates for secret protectors are the prefect Robert Bach, and the German commander Major Julius Schmähling.

  The case for Schmähling is interesting. He had been a history teacher back in Germany, at Aschaffenburg in Bavaria, so he may have had liberal instincts. He served in the German Army in World War I and remained in the Army Reserve afterwards. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1937. When war broke out, he was called up from the Reserves. He was comparatively old for a middle-ranking German officer: when he took command of the Le Puy garrison in December 1942 with the rank of major, he was 58. So he was no young hothead. It is a matter of record that during this period the synagogue in Le Puy remained open, and Jews were able to attend school openly. We also have the testimony of a young French Jew, Serge Klarsfeld,59 who fled with his mother and sister from Nice to Le Puy in September 1943. They had been told that Jews were safe there because ‘the German commander isn’t interested in them’. When Serge and his mother arrived in Le Puy, they met a rabbi named Poliatchek who told them that up until then the German commander had not mounted any operations against the Jews. It is also claimed, by those who propose Major Schmähling as the protector, that only thirteen per cent of Jews in the Haute-Loire were arrested and deported, compared with 22 per cent in France as a whole.

  The same thirteen per cent statistic is invoked in support of Robert Bach. The case for Prefect Bach really comes down to whether he deliberately set out to deceive his Vichy government masters with a series of letters and reports claiming that the Jews had left the Plateau, or whether he was covering for his own failure to seize them, or, finally, whether he actually believed what he wrote. Having ploughed my way through endless manila folders of Bach’s letters and directives, held in the Haute-Loire departmental archive in Le Puy, I have no sense of a man on a rescue mission. His style is rather that of a middle-ranking public servant doing and saying what he thought he had to do and say to keep his job. If that was the plan, it didn’t work. The Vichy government sacked him in October 1943.

  My strong feeling is that nobody in authority—not Robert Bach and not Julius Schmähling—sustained the rescue mission on the Plateau. I think the major force protecting the Plateau was geography. If Schmähling had had 30,000 men under his command, and if Prefect Bach had had 10,000 gendarmes willing to do his bidding, then between them they might have been able to station enough people on the Plateau to control it. But with the sparse numbers available to them, they had no chance. So whatever their views, if they wanted to impose their will on the Plateau, resources and geography were against them.

  However, the Haute-Loire should probably be grateful to Schmähling for not being worse. I don’t believe he was an active protector of Jews, but I’m sure he could have made their lives worse than he did. After the war, Schmähling made two trips back to Le Puy. On the second trip, in September 1967, he was welcomed at the town hall and generally well received. As this was at the height of Franco–German rapprochement while they jointly ran what was then called the Common Market, it was certainly in keeping with the spirit of the times.

  • • •

  There was a revealing incident in Le Chambon on the evening of Sunday, 2 June 2013. The brand-new Memorial Museum was due to open its doors the next day. As part of the lead-up to the opening, in the tiny cinema opposite the Le Chambon railway station, Pierre Sauvage showed publicly for the first time the remastered version of his documentary Weapons of the Spirit. At the end of the screening, which was warmly applauded by the audience, Pierre and a group of local historians fielded questions.

  Suddenly a middle-aged man stood up from the audience and began denouncing the whole Memorial project, saying it was a waste of public money and that it made the perennial mistake of giving all the credit to Le Chambon and not enough to the surrounding villages or to the Plateau as a whole. The very fact that the Memorial was situated in Le Chambon was an example of this distortion of history. There was a rumble of disagreement from the cinema audience and the odd suggestion that the angry man either sit down or shut up, or preferably both. In the end, he stormed out.

  It is only fair to say that he spoke for a lot of people. I have struggled in the preceding pages to avoid this very trap. Yet the facts cannot be escaped. Yad Vashem, the Israeli-based organisation charged with the task of singling out those who gave outstanding help to Jews during the Holocaust, has created an award called ‘Righteous Among the Nations’. To qualify for this award, a person must be non-Jewish and have saved ‘one or several’ threatened Jews, at risk to his or her own life and safety or the lives and safety of his or her family, without seeking or receiving any reward. In 1990 Yad Vashem declared that ‘the residents of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and neighbouring communes’ should be recognised as Righteous Among the Nations. Le Chambon is the only French village so honoured, and one of only two villages in the world to join the list of the Righteous. The other is Nieuwlande in Holland.

  By 1 January 2001, Yad Vashem had recognised 67 individuals from the Plateau as Righteous Among the Nations. Of these, seven came from Le Mazet-Saint-Voy, four from Fay-sur-Lignon, three from Tence, two from Saint-Agrève, and one from Freycenet. The remaining 50 came from Le Chambon. So it is hard to tell the story of the Plateau without singling out the village and referring to it continually.

  André Trocmé presents a similar problem. What exactly was his importance? The first thing to say is that his trip to Marseille was surely the beginning of the large-scale rescue operation on the Plateau. Yes, there were refugees in Le Chambon before, but until Trocmé’s meeting with Burns Chalmers and the Quakers in Marseille, the Plateau was giving shelter to a mere handful of individuals who had found their way there largely by chance. By the middle of 1941 there were funded homes ready to accept children ‘transferred’ from the camps, and a well-organised system for moving them to the Plateau. That would not have happened without Trocmé’s drive and initiative. Myriad others across the Plateau and elsewhere were important too: Auguste Bohny, Édouard Theis, Mireille Philip, Madeleine Barot and Georgette Barraud, to list some of the more obvious names. But André Trocmé’s energy and intellectual gifts played a special role. It is true that the rescue operation continued unchecked when Trocmé went into hiding, but it was his involvement at the beginning that set everything else in motion.

  That brings us to Charles Guillon, the forgotten man of the Plateau saga. As we have seen, he moved to Geneva straight after the Armistice in June 1940, and was based there for the rest of the war. Some extravagant claims are made on Guillon’s behalf, including the suggestion that he organised teams of saboteurs to wreak havoc in factories supplying the Germans. He is also credited with organising teams of spies in French ports, within the French railway system and among French pilots, to report on German movements and activities. All of this may or may not be true. What is beyond doubt is that, from his base in Geneva, ‘Uncle Charles’ was a key figure keeping the funds flowing into the Plateau and thereby sustaining the rescue efforts of the Quakers and the Cimade. He made repeated trips himself from Geneva into Occupied France, almost certainly carrying money with him. He was on a Gestapo wanted list, but that did not deter him from risking his life crossing the frontier.

  According to the admirable and reliable Plateau historian Gérard Bollon, Uncle Charles worked with the Resistance network ‘Gilbert’ and its leader Colonel Groussard, feeding information to British intelligence. His sabotage efforts were conducted in partnership with an old friend, Fred Harrison, a Paris couturier, who in turn organised volunteers from the Boy Scouts and the UCJG. Asked about it after the war, Guillon said: ‘Thanks to the extreme caution of Harrison, we didn’t lose a single man, to my knowledge.’ D
etails are scarce on all of this.

  There are those who would diminish Guillon’s efforts by saying, in effect, that he led a comfortable life in Geneva, with plenty of food, while those who stayed behind on the Plateau suffered all sorts of dangers and deprivations. However, there is good evidence that this was not a view widely shared by the voters of the commune of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. On 19 May 1945, Guillon was again elected mayor of Le Chambon, a job he held until 1959. He seems to have gained the respect of the whole of the Haute-Loire as well: in 1945 he was also elected President of the General Council of the Haute-Loire, and remained in office for four years. He continued to commute between Geneva and the Haute-Loire for his work running the world secretariat of the YMCA and YWCA.

  • • •

  In general, victory in war goes to the side that outdoes the other in violence. World War II was no exception. André Trocmé was a pacifist. I am not. André Trocmé believed that men can always be persuaded away from evil. I do not. In particular, I do not believe that the likes of Klaus Barbie can be persuaded to mend their ways by talk alone. Ultimately, they will be deterred only by a superior show of force.

  That is not to say that Trocmé’s pacifism was a failure. On the contrary, it must have saved innumerable lives. If the Plateau had resorted to violence in 1941 or 1942, it would have attracted a violent response from the Vichy government or from the Germans. That, in turn, would have spelled the end of the rescue operation. So the pacifism preached by André Trocmé and Édouard Theis played a significant part in keeping the rescue effort going, particularly in the early years. When the emphasis switched from protecting refugees to expelling the Germans, then it became a contest in violence, and pacifism was bound to be sidelined.

  I have often wondered what André Trocmé made of his years after the war. He was not the complaining or self-pitying sort, so he kept his thoughts to himself. He visited the United States in 1945, largely to raise funds for the New Cévenole School, and while he was there agreed to work part-time for the MIR, the International Movement for Reconciliation, as its European secretary. At this point he was quite an international figure. The European MIR had its main office in Paris, so he was able to return to Le Chambon and continue part-time as pastor.

  However, the Regional Council of the Reformed Church eased him out of the Le Chambon job as senior pastor, and even out of his home in the presbytery, in 1948. They claimed they needed a full-time pastor, who would need somewhere to live. The Trocmés moved to a long-empty rented house in Le Chambon village, near the railway station. This must have been a miserable and humiliating experience for Trocmé, and may have revived memories of his early years as an outsider. Could this be the reappearance of Trocmé the troublemaker, the André Trocmé who couldn’t be found a parish? Trocmé hurled himself into fund-raising for the school, as well as his MIR work, but it was evidently not enough to satisfy him. After four years, he left Le Chambon for good, and agreed to work full-time with Magda as co-secretaries of the European MIR. Together they travelled widely, including attending an audience with Pope Pius XII in the Vatican, and taking part in a peace conference in India which led to a meeting between Magda and Indira Gandhi. In 1958, André attended a second papal audience, this time with the newly elected Pope John XXIII.

  Throughout all this, the Trocmés must have faced a problem which is long forgotten today but which overshadowed all peace movements in the 1950s and 1960s. There were prominent and independent-minded peace activists and pacifists aplenty in Europe and the United States at the time, including world figures like the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. But the issue that dominated all talk of peace in the 1950s and 1960s was nuclear disarmament.

  Quite simply, the Soviet Union was a late starter in the nuclear arms race. Britain and the United States had first tested an atom bomb in July 1945. The Soviet Union carried out its first nuclear test four years later, in 1949. By 1950 the Cold War was well and truly under way. The Soviet Union, four years behind in the arms race, set about discrediting the nuclear arms program of the west. Somehow ‘peace’ and ‘nuclear disarmament’ became irretrievably bound up together, and Russian-led communists often succeeded in hijacking the word ‘peace’ for their own purposes.60

  For André Trocmé, a long-standing and principled supporter of peace, it must have been a nightmare. Every time he spoke, he risked being seen as a communist dupe. Here was a man whose pacifist beliefs had literally been tested under fire and found not wanting. He should have been a world figure, not someone sidelined as a bit of a crank. How he must have hated it.

  • • •

  According to the latest numbers from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, there are over 11 million refugees in the world today, fleeing from an alphabet of troubled countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. At the time of writing, the country hosting the largest number of refugees is Pakistan, with 1.6 million people having crossed the border from Afghanistan. The Iranians have over 800,000 Afghan refugees as well. Next comes Jordan, with over 600,000 refugees, mostly from Syria, and Lebanon, with just under 600,000, again mostly Syrian. Kenya has some 550,000 refugees from Somalia.

  You might expect that this would lead to a wave of sympathy and compassion around the world, with people lining up to comfort the oppressed and give shelter to the homeless. Not so. Around the world, political parties compete to see who can be ‘toughest’ handling desperate refugees. They are shipped off to remote islands or locked up in desert camps, in baking heat, and held there in appalling conditions, sometimes for years. In general, being ‘tough’ means being as inhuman as possible, in the hope of discouraging more refugees from arriving, or perhaps encouraging them to choose some other destination before they even begin their journey.

  It would be nice to report that the world learned lessons from World War II, that the universal relief at the end of the fighting and the defeat of Nazism led the world to say ‘never again’, and mean it. Yet among leaders all over the world today there are strutting buffoons who steal and cheat and lie and torture, and get away with it. The mighty still oppress the weak. There are millions of blameless people denied dignity, security and basic human rights in Syria, in Zimbabwe, in Palestine, in North Korea, in far too many countries and regions around the globe.

  I would hope that anyone who has read this book would approve of the actions of the people of the Plateau. If yes, then that leads to the question of whether there is anything any of us can do today to match their sheer decency and courage. Their story offers a ready alternative to selfish indifference, to the pitiless mantra of nothing-to-do-with-me. For those of us lucky enough to live in a liberal democracy, we can vote. If we followed the example of the people of the Plateau and vowed to be part of the resistance against injustice, we could do it. How? A vote against ‘toughness’, and a vote for anybody with a credible policy for let’s-do-something, would be a start.

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO … ?

  Rudi Appel was reunited with his mother after the war, in Grenoble in France. In 1946 they migrated to the United States, where they joined Rudi’s father and brother in Philadelphia. Rudi changed his name to the more American ‘Rudy’ and went to work as a furrier. Not content to remain an employee, he started his own successful company in New York. He still works. The company sells air-conditioning equipment, and some of its best customers are in Saudi Arabia. ‘They’re the ones with the money,’ Rudy says philosophically.

  Catherine Cambessédès enrolled at the Sorbonne after the war, then won a scholarship to Mills College, California, where she studied American Civilization and Anthropology. In California she met her husband, David, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. She taught French privately at home, then at Stanford University. She is still funny and pert and good company. At the end of 2013 she wrote to me: ‘I live near San Francisco, but haven’t forgotten Le Chambon. For all that California sunshine is wonderful indeed, but so are the steady, sturdy people of Le Chambon.’

 
Roger Darcissac continued as headmaster of the primary school in Le Chambon after the war ended. He became a rather austere figure, much admired but not always loved. He was inclined to dismiss the events on the Plateau as unremarkable: the people of Le Chambon had simply followed the dictates of their consciences, and that was that. He died in 1982. In 1988 he was recognised by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

  Pierre Fayol was absorbed into the regular French Army, the FFI, and became a career army officer. After a brief period as deputy head of the FFI in the Haute-Loire, he was sent to join the occupation forces in Germany, first to Baden-Baden, then to Berlin. Fayol was an engineer by training, and at the end of 1946 he moved to Morocco, where he remained until 1957. He died in 1994.

  Charles Guillon was re-elected mayor of Le Chambon when the war ended, and served as president of the General Council of the Haute-Loire from 1945 to 1949. He rose in the hierarchy of the YMCA and YWCA until he was world secretary. He continued to divide his time between the Plateau and Geneva until his death in 1965. He was late to receive recognition for his wartime work, but in 1991 Yad Vashem declared him one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

  Virginia Hall returned briefly to the United States when the war was officially over. However, she was quickly back at work. From 1945 to 1947 she worked for Voice of America, but as soon as the CIA was set up she joined, and worked in Paris as a political analyst. In 1950 she married a Franco–American former OSS agent, Paul Goillot, whom she had met during the war. She left the CIA in 1966 and retired to the small village of Barnesville, Maryland, not far from Baltimore, where she tended her beloved garden. After the war she received the American Distinguished Service Cross, the only one awarded to a civilian woman in World War II, as well as the French Croix de Guerre with palm, and the British civilian award the MBE (Member of the British Empire). She died on 18 July 1982. Right up till her death she refused all requests from authors and journalists to interview her about her exploits. ‘Too many of my friends were killed because they talked too much,’ she would reply.