The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (12 page)

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 Clog
¹⁹
), 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.

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!

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.