The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (18 page)

I borrowed a bicycle and set off into the countryside. I took the road leading to Le Mazet. About four kilometres from Le Chambon, there was a girl sitting knitting in a window. I said to her: ‘You wouldn’t happen to know of a room to rent?’ She said: ‘Yes, four hundred
metres up the hill, go to my father’s place.  He might be able to arrange something.’ I  told the farmer I was a student at the New Cévenole School. And that’s how I moved to the Héritiers’ house. They had this minuscule room that had the advantage of having their cows behind it, giving plenty of heat, and lots of straw on the floor. There was a bed, a stove, and a sink for water, but no water. No problem. There was an excellent source of water ten metres away, in the courtyard. So we rented it for a ridiculously small amount. The forgery workshop started up straight away.

Klimovitsky and de Juge stayed on at Beau-Soleil, dropping out of the day-to-day forgery business, although they remained in regular contact with the forgers and were active in the Resistance. Another young Protestant, Sammy Charles, the son of a local blacksmith and his primary-school-teacher wife, replaced them. He and Rosowsky became a team of two. They both lived with the Héritiers at La Fayolle. Says Rosowsky:

For two years we ate at their table, and Madame Héritier washed our clothes, all for a token price (when we could pay them). There were seven of them, and two of us. I  was given a bicycle belonging to one of the small daughters, so I extended the saddle rod, while Monsieur Héritier registered me as his farm worker at the Bureau of Agriculture. This was one of my protections in my travels outside the department, since farmers were still exempt from the STO.

Rosowsky may have been naturally skilful, but he came to the forgery business with very little practical experience. For just two months, in Nice, in September and October 1942, he had done a little forgery work with Charles and Georgette Hanne, and a young Jew
named Anatole Dauman. Then he had altered Jean-Claude Pluntz’s papers on his own behalf to allow him to travel, and he had successfully forged his mother’s residency permit to get her out of Rivesaltes camp. Finally, he had created a set of papers for his mother that had cleared the way for her to move from Nice to Fay-sur-Lignon. That was about it: he was not an absolute beginner, but close to. However, he was knowledgeable about the inner workings of typewriters and duplicating machines, in particular the machines used in prefectures. He also turned out to have a singular skill at what might be termed artwork: copying signatures, tracing official stamps and seals, and matching papers and materials.

Whenever we could, we filed away a sample form of genuine papers that served as models for the signatures, stamps and seals. After we made our copies, the originals were destroyed so that the beneficiaries could not possibly be tempted to have two sets of papers on them, one genuine and one false. That mistake led to more than one victim during the occupation.

Most of all, Rosowsky had a keen brain and street know-how well beyond his years. Some of his forgery techniques were almost comically simple. Men who had been prisoners of war and who were released on medical grounds naturally arrived back in France with no papers other than a single, scrappy and hastily prepared discharge document. It was usually a single sheet of paper with an indecipherable signature, which had been sealed and approved by a blurry rubber stamp. Creating a false version was all too easy. As Rosowsky explains: ‘These papers gave ex-prisoners of war the right, on simple presentation at the town hall or police station, to a complete set of papers necessary for their return to civilian life: identity card, food ration coupons, clothing rations, tobacco rations, everything.’ For men of military age who needed
new papers, this approach was perfect; in particular, Rosowsky often used it to create new identities for Resistance fighters. Just run up a scruffy POW discharge and let the bureaucrats do the rest. Who was going to challenge a hero soldier, someone who had already suffered enough as a prisoner of war, and who was now so ill that he had to be sent home? Here are your papers,
monsieur
. And may I take this opportunity of wishing you a speedy return to health?

Some papers didn’t need to be forged at all. Blank versions of the ubiquitous
carte d’identité
could be bought at any bookshop or tobacconist. The idea was that, having bought a blank card, the owner took it along to the local town hall or prefecture together with a passport photograph and supporting documents such as a birth certificate. The officials mounted the photograph, and signed and stamped the card: job done. Rosowsky simply spared the officials the trouble. All he needed was a suitable photograph, and he could do the rest. He and Charles even had that rarest of luxuries, a thoroughly convincing typewriter. ‘Our typewriter came from a Protestant missionary friend of Sammy Charles’ parents, who brought it back from Lambaréné in Gabon, an old German colony [in central Africa].’

Some of the forgers’ work needed the cooperation of sympathetic local officialdom, and this was where the links with the Resistance came into their own.

There was the son of a town clerk who had been with us in Beau-Soleil. His father took care of public works, a man named Paya from Saint-Agrève. I went there by bicycle with the son. The guy was in the Resistance, and he said: ‘No problem.’ He had ration cards by the carton. He even had the necessary rubber stamp for the identity cards. We bought tax stamps at the tobacconist. We bought identity cards at the booksellers for five francs each.
³²
We could make ordinary identity cards by the hundred. We could make them wholesale!

Rosowsky graded his customers by degrees of difficulty. French Jews were the simplest. In general, all they needed was a new set of papers not stamped ‘Jew’. This would be enough for them to move to a new part of France. So it was important to steer well clear of Jewish-sounding names. Foreign Jews from countries allied to Germany were just as easy: Hungarian and Romanian Jews, for instance, simply needed a clean set of papers that did not brand them as Jewish.

Not all of his customers were Jews. Some were young Frenchmen anxious to avoid being packed off to Germany to work in factories under the STO. In the early days, the STO laws applied to those born in a particular year, although young men in certain professions—farming was one—were exempt. Thus avoiding the STO generally involved altering the man’s date of birth or changing his profession to an exempt category. ‘Some youths changed their age and profession several times in this way,’ says Rosowsky. ‘For myself, J.C. Plunne was born successively in 1925, then 1927, and was sometimes a farm labourer, sometimes a schoolboy, and sometimes a medical student.’

Among the non-Jewish customers, members of the Resistance needed the most attention to detail. Their false papers needed to be particularly well crafted, and their identities needed to be verifiable against official records.

It was a matter of coming up with a host of supporting papers that we thought could occasionally tip the balance our way in the event of a sudden identity check. Indeed, the opposition knew well that France was awash with false identity papers … Their technique consisted of closely watching the behaviour of the suspect while searching his wallet and so on. So it was a matter of looking the policeman right in the eye while remaining calm and not being aggressive, but also having in your wallet all sorts of supporting papers, the more varied the better: student cards, Boy Scout cards, social security cards,
driver’s licences, fines, certificates of employment, diplomas and other documents. It was sometimes these additional ‘plausibility papers’ that made the police let someone go.

Misfortune could even be turned to advantage. Rosowsky made delivery runs at night on his bicycle. That meant travelling without a light. One night he got caught. ‘I picked up a very lucky infringement notice for not having proper lights. It was issued under my false name of J.C. Plunne, and I kept it reverently among my other “plausibility papers”, which I always had with me.’

According to Rosowsky, the forgery workshop was soon producing identity and other papers at the rate of seven sets a day, 50 sets a week. Given the incredible detail involved, including the creation of library cards, trade union cards and the like, it was a remarkable achievement.

The forgers’ techniques were simple. Ration cards? Get a genuine set of coupons, wipe them clean with correcting fluid, re-stamp them, then scuff them up a bit to make them look older. Military service records? Same technique: clean a genuine record, and reuse it. No genuine originals available? Go to a friendly town hall and see if they can come up with some blanks. Demobilisation papers? No problem. ‘Demobilisation cards were fairly easy to forge, as many of the originals had been made on Roneotype machines at the various demobilisation centres in 1940.’ The ‘Roneo’ machines produced papers that were blurry and messy. The problem was not so much making papers good enough to pass inspection, but rather making them look bad enough to pass for the genuine article.

Exotically, some of the material was literally parachuted in to the forgery team. Parachute drops of weapons for the Resistance are well known. What is less well known is that the boxes drifting down on parachutes from Allied aircraft occasionally included some rather less aggressive loads—fake ration cards, for instance. Explains Rosowsky:

One time … we had a batch of food ration cards and papers of all kinds, entirely made in free Algeria, which had been parachuted in to us. The reproduction pages copied from genuine originals didn’t cover the whole surface of the parachuted pages and we had to improvise the cutting-up ourselves.

Some high-risk strategies depended heavily on sympathetic officials.

For the women, it was essential to work with a cooperative town hall or police station where it was possible to lodge a declaration of loss of papers together with a false birth certificate to obtain a complete set of regular papers. When this was possible, we would choose an unverifiable place of birth where the archives had been destroyed.

The most perilous tactic of all in this regard involved appropriating a real identity: someone made a declaration on their own behalf that they had lost their papers and needed them replaced; at the same time, somebody else used the supposedly ‘lost’ papers. This put two people at risk: the borrower and the lender. Both were committing a serious crime.

A final trick wasn’t too different from the classic technique of appropriating an identity by searching through graveyards for people who had died young. In the case of the Plateau forgers, the resource was the
Journal officiel
of France, a unique French institution that contains a record of just about every official act that takes place in France. As well as recording new laws and the proceedings of Parliament, it records company results, wills, marriages, births, deaths and a mountain of other information, including civil events like naturalisations.

There was a final resort to the Naturalisation Decrees that appeared in old issues of the
Journal officiel,
by which we ‘naturalised’ those
who spoke French with a foreign accent. Thus my mother became Madame Grabowska, born in Turkey of White Russian parents and naturalised as a French woman on 30 December 1926 under the Presidency of Gaston Doumergue
(Journal officiel,
11 January 1927
).

• • •

As always, there are no reliable numbers for the forgers’ output, but Rosowsky’s figure of 50 sets of false papers a week is a good place to start. He estimates that roughly two-thirds of the papers were for Jews, with the rest mostly for young Frenchmen dodging the STO. This suggests that Jews were arriving on the Plateau at the rate of about five a day, with another two or three Frenchmen joining them.

Simone Mairesse continued to scour the countryside for spare rooms or barns that could take in refugees. Madeleine Dreyfus, a psychologist from Lyon who worked with the ‘Circuit Garel’, an organisation which placed Jewish children in isolated farmhouses all over the Plateau, now joined her.

There is a wonderful sequence in
Weapons of the Spirit
, Pierre Sauvage’s 1989 documentary about these events (which, of course, takes its title from the 1940 joint declaration by Trocmé and Theis), where Dreyfus explains how she worked. Against all security rules, she kept a small notebook with a list of farmers’ names and the number of children they might take in. It looks for all the world like a suburban housewife’s shopping list, with names crossed off as spare rooms are filled. She tells a particularly revealing story of the problem she had placing two fourteen-year-old boys. Young children were easy: they didn’t eat much, and they didn’t answer back. But teenage boys were a problem—they ate like wolves, and they gave cheek. Nobody wanted her two boys. Finally, in desperation, she blurted out to a farmer’s wife: ‘The truth is that these children are Jewish. They are being hunted. Their parents were arrested.’ The woman was dumbfounded. ‘Why
didn’t you say that in the first place?’ she demanded. Straight away, she took in the two boys.

When he could spare a minute from his forgery activities, even Oscar Rosowsky did a bit of placement work.

I had the great privilege of being able to consult constantly with the baker of Fay-sur-Lignon, Monsieur Robert, whose son was a prisoner in Germany. He was vice-president of our parish council and completely in touch with everything there was to know, someone with absolute discretion (his wife knew nothing of our discussions, for instance). He knew all the parishioners and always advised me well on how to find somewhere for families to stay.

By early 1943, the forgery team had become a key element in the rescue operation. Looking back on it now, it seems incredible that this onerous and crucial burden rested on the skinny shoulders of an eighteen-year-old Latvian Jew with no experience of or contact with the dark underworld of criminal forgery, and whose frustrated ambition was to become a doctor.