Cruel World (65 page)

As it became clear that this quasi-legal method of rescue was too slow, the agencies took to adventuresome and dangerous methods not usually associated with Quakers, the YMCA, or men of the cloth. A group of teenaged boys was hidden behind the water tank on the roof of a camp for four days and fed by the camp cook until they managed to escape.
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At the Rivesaltes camp, a delivery man built a special compartment in his truck, in which he removed two or three small children on each trip. A group of young Protestants arrived with vans at the gates of a prison where forty children were being held for deportation and, using forged papers ordering the children moved to another holding area, loaded them up and simply
drove away.
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In another extraordinary operation, twelve teams of rescuers, including priests in their cassocks, cut the wire fences and main power cable at the transit camp at Vénissieux, crept into the barracks, and in the pitch darkness tried to persuade the doomed families inside to part with their children, some very small. The anguish of having to make such a decision in these chaotic conditions is unimaginable, but one by one, a hundred children were carried beyond the barrier and spirited off to two German military buses that had been purloined for the occasion. Both of these groups were first taken to convents and from there were scattered to farms and Catholic boarding schools. Some very young children taken from Vénissieux, who did not know their own names, were never identified; their parents, as far as is known, did not survive.
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News of the roundups and deportations soon spread abroad, doing little for Nazi public relations. Parisians, who had paid scant attention to the legal and economic exclusion of the Jews, were outraged by their public humiliation and the imposition of the yellow stars. Once again, the centrally located train stations were scenes of horror as human beings were jammed into filthy freight cars. A gendarme in charge of a train with 960 “passengers” reported as follows:

Many churchmen protested, including the French Protestant leader Marc Boegner, and Catholic Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse, never a Vichy supporter, issued a passionate pastoral letter:

Detailed news of the scenes of deportation was immediately flashed abroad by the international welfare agencies working in France and by diplomatic representatives of the nations accredited to the Vichy government. Even German officials in France fussed to Laval that the public separations of children and parents were bad PR. The uproar was double-edged: those objecting to the separation of families on humanitarian grounds led Laval to be ever more adamant that children should be sent to the “new settlements for Jews in the East” along with their parents, a stance that would help doom the first serious gesture by the United States to take in endangered Jewish children.

The precedent of exemptions to normal visa processing set for the British children in 1940 was now put to good use by the American State Department.
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Available quota numbers plus the ability to issue special visitor’s visas made it possible for the State Department to approve 1,000 visas for children in mid-September without approaching Congress. The number was increased to 4,000 in October. Mexico, Ecuador, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and Switzerland agreed to take several thousand more.
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The problem now lay with exit visas from France. The Vichy government, under pressure from the Germans, who did not want a propaganda extravaganza to surround the arrival of the children in America, insisted that the United States promise that there would be no publicity. This was actually fine with the State Department, which did not want to give Congress any excuse for new hearings. Alas, confidentiality foundered on the eternal problem of funding. The secret was revealed when the news that some $900,000 had been raised to save the first 1,000 children appeared in the
New York Times
on October 15.
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In the end Laval agreed to let 500 leave, but he continued to add ludicrous and time-consuming regulations. Undaunted, aid workers fought to deal with the red tape, and managed to charter a ship and to get an escort team of social workers and medical personnel under way from New York to Lisbon by November 7, so that all would be ready when the visas were issued. They need not have bothered. The next day, U.S. forces landed in North Africa and Pétain broke off relations. He need not have bothered either: on November 11, rubbing in his reversal of the Allied victory in World War I, Hitler took over all of Vichy France except for a small strip on the Mediterranean coast.

With the Germans in full control, French child-saving operations went further and further underground and became more perilous. The group homes had been convenient targets for arrests from the beginning, but at first only children over sixteen were usually removed. With the arrival of the Germans, these homes were “blocked” and all movement of children forbidden. In late January 1943, 800 children from the homes were deported. The welfare groups now began to move children out into the countryside. A number were taken to the part of France occupied by Italy, where the racial laws were not strictly enforced. This was a good stopping-off point for illegal entry into Switzerland, but was taken over by the Germans when the Mussolini government fell. In response, the OSE and its partners set up a complex rescue network in the south of France. Divided into four carefully compartmentalized zones, it came to be known as the Garel Network after the Resistance fighter who was in charge. The methods were much the same as those used in Holland: names were changed, children were sent to places where no one knew them, and they were supported by constantly traveling workers who supplied ration cards, clothes, and emergency transfers.
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Operatives of every denomination arranged foster homes; there was no dearth of offers to hide children. It soon became clear which departmental prefects were less inclined to enforce the anti-Jewish laws, and more children were sent in their direction. According to the organizations there were, eventually, some 6,000 unaccompanied children hidden in France. This number does not include those who were placed without reference to the organizations, which were surely many more.

The success of the sheltering of children required a high level of deception by all concerned. In many cases virtually all the inhabitants of a town united to hide the fugitives, nowhere more so than in the famous Huguenot village of Le Chambon sur Lignon, tucked away in the mountains of the Massif Central, southwest of Lyon. The Huguenots had themselves suffered terrible persecutions in the past, and quiet defiance came easily to them. It is estimated that the 3,000 residents of the village and its surrounding farms, using Boy Scouts, housewives, and dogs in their warning system, saved at least 5,000 fugitives. Funding for the hundreds of children lodged in “farm schools,” boarding houses, and the residences of the Cévenol boarding school was secretly funneled in by a plethora of international agencies. A benefactor, unknown to this day, regularly left blank official ID cards, which could be filled in to fit each new arrival, on a table at the entrance of the house of Huguenot pastor André Trocmé. The Chambonnais reveled in their ability to frustrate the Vichy police, who, at
the height of the roundups, arrived in the town with several buses and considerable manpower to take away the Jews they knew must be there. After three weeks of fruitless effort, during which the electricity mysteriously failed and Boy Scout activity strangely increased, the gendarmes withdrew with only one prisoner. The searchers did not give up, however. A year later, despite all the precautions, one of the residence houses at Le Chambon was taken by surprise. The children were lined up against the walls and interrogated, one by one. The Protestant head of the house and all but one Spanish refugee boy, who had saved a German soldier from drowning a few weeks before, were deported.
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The foster home system was augmented by a remarkable underground railway network that took children into Spain and Switzerland. The Swiss government, when asked by Nîmes Committee officials, who had set up offices in Geneva after the German takeover of Vichy, to take in some of the children who were eligible for American visas, never replied formally to the request, but the estimated 1,600 children who managed the harrowing trip across the border were well taken care of if they could get there. One route led through the small town of Annemasse, on the Swiss border, where local officials and partisans tried to provide warnings of Nazi patrols. Groups of twenty-five or so children would be taken to a small playing field, bordered by forest, where they would play soccer and other outdoor games. At dusk, they would melt into the woods with their guides and head for the barbed-wire fences at the frontier. They did not always make it. One report notes, with incredible understatement, that “there was a tragic mishap when the Nazis put their dogs on a small group of children being helped through the barbed wire on the Swiss frontier, and the whole group perished,” adding that the nearby grave of their “courageous young French woman guide” was found after the war.
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But the protectors in hundreds of locations could not compete with the deadly zeal of the Nazi racial agents and their frequently criminal informers, who never gave up searching for “deportables.” As late as April 1944, the SS in France ordered its operatives to step up arrests of Jews, regardless of nationality.
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“In order to save work and petrol,” operatives were exhorted to greater efficiency. All members of extended families were to be collected at one time. If “not all members of the Jewish family are found in the apartment, it should be occupied until the missing Jew returns.” Offspring who had been sent to children’s homes were included. To avoid unpleasant scenes, “when children are taken from these homes, it is advisable to do this, if feasible, in the presence of one Jewish parent.” In addition to these delicate measures, bonuses for informers (“not too
high, nevertheless … high enough to give sufficient encouragement”) were increased and the pretense of cooperation with the increasingly reluctant French police and the regular German forces was dropped in favor of the vicious and pro-Nazi paramilitary Milice.
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On the Thursday of Easter Week 1944, a holiday, one of the few remaining OSE group homes, hidden in the tiny farm town of Izieu, was raided while the children were at breakfast. It is thought that they were betrayed by a local farmer. The forty-four children, aged four to seventeen, unable to initiate their carefully rehearsed escape plans, were “thrown like packing cases” into trucks along with seven of their caretakers. Within ten days, with great efficiency, thirty-four had been processed through Drancy, transported to Poland, and killed in the gas chambers.
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This little group had been sitting ducks; for individual Jews and their children trying to live in the vast spaces of rural France, survival was often a matter of luck. Fifteen-year-old Stanley Hoffmann and his mother, worn down by fear, left Nice in late 1943 for the village of Lamalou, in the Hérault, three months after Stanley’s best friend had been arrested on his way home from school. Provided with false identity papers by Stanley’s history teacher, they traveled to Lamalou in a blacked-out train, hoping for peace and quiet. To their surprise they found that the village was being used as a training camp for 1,000 teenaged Wehrmacht draftees. Despite this, the Hoffmanns were taken in by the villagers, whose older children were, by now, also threatened by Nazi forced-labor roundups. It soon appeared that the mostly sixteen-year-old German soldiers had no interest at all in Jews, and Lamalou, where the SS seems not to have had serious influence, turned out to be quite safe.
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Little Isaac Levendel, aged seven, was not so lucky. His mother had continued to run her tiny shop in the town of Le Pontet, near Avignon, until the combination of Allied bombings, growing hostility to her in the town, and a new registration of Jews in May 1944 finally persuaded her to leave. On June 4, traveling by bus and donkey cart, the two joined another Jewish family on a cherry farm deep in the country. The next day Mme Levendel, rejecting the advice of her friends, decided she must return to Le Pontet to get some things from her store. She did not come back. Frantic, Isaac and one of the daughters of the other family also went back to Le Pontet to try to find out what had happened: