The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (23 page)

• • •

The pastors themselves were not above doing a bit of people smuggling work. Édouard Theis made several trips, escorting parties of refugees, as did André Morel, the pastor of Devesset. Max Liebmann, whom we last saw being reunited with Hanne Hirsch in Le Chambon in August 1942, was one of the first to make it to Switzerland. He managed to cross the border in September 1942, escorted by André Morel. He was promptly interned in a Swiss work camp at Sierre, in the central-south Swiss canton of Valais. It wasn’t a bad life: there were no guards, and no barbed wire, and you were actually paid for work done. However, there was no Hanne, and he missed her.

Hanne, for her part, grew increasingly restless. She was lonely, she missed her family and she missed Max. By early 1943 she’d had enough.
She spoke to Auguste Bohny, the manager of The Wasps’ Nest, saying she wanted to leave the country. She was lucky: she had an aunt who lived in Switzerland, and the aunt arranged an entry visa for her. But that was only half the battle. She would also need an exit visa to leave France. She was given a set of false papers for the journey from Le Chambon to the Swiss border.

I went by myself. Most of them went two or three together. I was alone. Between Annecy and Thonon, which is a tiny little place, I walked along the highway. There was a French customs office, and I passed it [without going in]. A customs office? Wartime? What traffic could there be? Naïve reasoning. Before I knew it, I was called back.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To Thonon, to the priest.’ That was the plan, the arranged thing.

‘Papers?’ So I showed him my phoney papers, all the papers, and everything that goes with it. He was a young man, the customs officer, and he looked at me and said: ‘Are you Jewish?’

Oops! A question I didn’t think of, okay. And within a second I caught my breath and said: ‘I’ve got nothing to do with that dirty race.’

‘Okay, you can go.’ And he gave me a little smile, and gave me my papers back. Had I said yes, if I hadn’t been so quick with my answer—well! Also I wasn’t carrying any luggage, anything. All I carried was a briefcase, which I still have.

Hanne made it to Switzerland, where she was again united with Max.

• • •

By the time he had completed about twenty missions, young Pierre Piton was full of confidence, and that probably contributed to his undoing. He had got his party, consisting of a husband and wife and
a German nurse, as far as the barbed wire. The husband and wife both got through. The German nurse was next. The top 50 centimetres of her made it into Switzerland but the rest was still in France when the Italian soldiers sprang out from behind the poplars, blinded Piton with torchlights, yelled at them and fired a warning shot.

The nurse prudently went into reverse, and she and Piton were both standing on the French side of the barbed wire when the Italians arrested them. Two soldiers with fixed bayonets guarded them on either side, and marched them to the guard post in Collonges-sous-Salève. There, two specialist interrogators bombarded them with questions, while a stenographer took notes. The German nurse’s fake papers said she was French, from northern France, but she spoke French very badly and with a heavy German accent, so that story didn’t convince anyone.

The Italians then ordered them into a military transport. With the pair still guarded by two armed soldiers, the vehicle set off without anyone telling the two captives where they were going. As they drove, Piton tried to work out where they were heading. He recognised Annecy, and that was ominous. Could they be headed for Lyon, where the Italians would hand them over to the Gestapo? But they were lucky. Just outside Annecy the military transport turned left. They stopped briefly at Chambéry, then continued on. Finally they drove into the courtyard of a military barracks and were marched into an old armoury, where they found themselves locked up with about fifteen others, men and women.

I warned the nurse not to talk to any of the others, in case there were spies planted among the prisoners. One of the prisoners told me he was a primary school teacher from Annemasse imprisoned for no reason. He started to ask me questions, and I restricted myself to telling him: me too—I’ve no idea why I’m here. Then I
asked him where we were, and he told me Grenoble. The next day he was released!!??

I still don’t know why, but neither the nurse nor I were interrogated. My one fear was that we would be handed over to the Germans. We were kept there for about three weeks, then released. A  soldier with fixed bayonet marched us out to the guard post where, to my great surprise, two French gendarmes took charge of us. They asked us plenty of questions, all done very properly and politely. Then, I think on account of my age, they let us go. There we were, on the street, free.

The question was: where to next? Piton decided that he couldn’t simply dump the nurse and leave her to fend for herself. He would have to try again to get her under the wire. He knocked on the first door he came to, and asked where he could find the local Protestant church. At the church they were taken in, given a bed for the night, fed well and given enough money to buy two rail tickets from Grenoble to Annecy. The Grenoble pastor telephoned Pastor Chapal in Annecy and, in heavily coded language, told him to expect two arrivals around noon the next day.

The next morning they boarded the train to Annecy. As they approached Chambéry there was the usual inspection of papers. The gendarmes looked at the nurse’s papers then demanded to know if she knew Piton. Yes, said the nurse, breaking all the rules she was given before leaving Le Chambon, before adding: ‘I’m not Jewish, I’m Protestant, the young man will confirm it for you.’ The gendarmes clearly weren’t persuaded, and hung around in the corridor between Chambéry and Annecy, keeping an eye on them. Just before Annecy, they handcuffed them both, one to each gendarme. Piton knew that Pastor Chapal would be waiting for them at the station exit, so he stood as tall as he could, in order to be easily spotted. Chapal was
quick-witted enough to size up the situation, and made no move towards Piton. Instead he called Abbé Folliet and told him what he had seen.

Meanwhile, the gendarmes escorted their two prisoners to the gendarmerie, where the pair waited on a bench for about an hour. Finally they were led into the room of a senior officer, a captain or commander, who ordered the two escorting gendarmes to release the prisoners from their handcuffs. He then said he wanted to talk to the prisoners alone. ‘He was brief. “I don’t know what you’ve done that’s brought you in front of me. I  congratulate you. I’m going to release you, but I’m also telling you never to come back here, and you must stop doing this kind of work.”’

Once they had left the gendarmerie, Piton and the nurse went straight to Pastor Chapal. They agreed that Piton would remain just long enough to have something to eat, then he would catch the next train back to Le Chambon. The nurse would be handed over to Abbé Folliet, who would arrange her crossing using a different route and with a new guide.

Back in Le Chambon, Piton went to Mireille Philip for the usual debriefing. They agreed that Pierre was now well and truly
grillé
and that he had better make that his last mission to the Swiss border. He could concentrate instead on setting up a network of safe houses for the young Frenchmen now arriving on the Plateau to dodge the STO forced labour laws. In this role, he would report to Pierre Brès, the scoutmaster.

Piton appears to have accepted this new role with good grace. However, in one of his accounts, he adds a postscript. ‘It so happens,’ he wrote, ‘that later on I managed to do one or two trips with Jews for the Cimade and Madeleine Barot.’ You can’t keep a good smuggler down.

• • •

The young
passeurs
were sometimes pressed into service at the last minute. Catherine Cambessédès remembers the story of a friend from the New Cévenole School, Didier Moulin. ‘Theis arrived one night and said to him that Mireille Philip had been arrested. Could he take some people across to the border? A  teenager! The school principal is asking him to do that! That’s how desperate things sometimes got.’ Didier agreed. And returned safely.

The number of German soldiers arriving on the Plateau increased a little from the beginning of 1943 onwards. The convalescing veterans from the Eastern Front who took over the Hôtel du Lignon in December 1942 must have flourished, because the German Army now commandeered a further three of Le Chambon’s seven hotels: the Hôtel Central, the Hôtel du Commerce and the Hôtel du Midi. They didn’t use them much, or for long, but all were available to them. More importantly, they arranged to billet some soldiers in Tence. The highest-ranking officers reserved a chateau that boasted six bedrooms, two reception rooms and some storage space. They booked 80 beds in hotels for lower-ranking officers, and 90 beds in the schools for ordinary soldiers.

As before, there was little or no contact between the German soldiers and the local population. They simply ignored each other. It was better that way. However, the presence of the Germans could not be dismissed entirely. The managers of the various children’s homes smelled trouble. At The Flowery Hill, the staff dusted off an old plan to find alternative shelter for their guests on farms in the immediate area, and asked André Trocmé and Édouard Theis to be on the lookout for suitable farms and willing farmers. It was not going to be easy: with the arrival of the German soldiers, the farmers were more cautious.
After all, they were the ones being asked to run the greatest risk. In December 1942, Pastor Lhermet, from The Flowery Hill, wrote to Madeleine Barot of the Cimade: ‘In September [1942] the danger for the Jews was insignificant, but in the light of what the Germans have been doing lately, the storm could hit us any day.’

Meanwhile, the German high command grew more and more restless. It was clear that young Frenchmen in significant numbers were going into hiding rather than agreeing to be packed off to German factories under the STO order. Many of them hid in the forests, maquis in the more literal sense of the word. They tended to link up with the maquis of the armed Resistance, who were now beginning to make their presence felt all over France (though not yet on the Plateau).

To add to the German high command’s problems, their soldiers were deserting in worrying numbers. Among the Le Puy garrison, desertions were in part attributable to the bizarre method of recruitment of the troops themselves. Basically, the Germans had told large numbers of Russian prisoners of war that they faced a simple choice: either they joined the German Army and fought alongside the Wehrmacht, or the Germans would shoot them. Unsurprisingly, the Russians opted overwhelmingly to join the Wehrmacht. However, they were hardly dedicated Axis soldiers.

The German garrison in Le Puy included large numbers of these Russian conscripts. Joseph Bass, leader of the resistance ‘Network André’, set about exploiting this weakness. Bass was a Jew from Marseilles, who worked closely with a Catholic priest, Père Marie-Benoît, to move Jews in safety in less risky regions of France, including the Plateau. He later moved himself and his network to the Plateau. At great risk to everybody involved, Network André produced leaflets in Russian, which they posted in cafés and bars around Le Puy. A typical leaflet read:

COMRADES

Those who address themselves to you are your comrades who have been forced to wear the shameful German uniform. We have concluded that it is our duty to switch to supporting the French Partisans in order to continue the struggle for our country, for our families, for our children.

So far, so straightforward, you might think. However, Bass’s men now issued a none-too-subtle threat.

Don’t think that your country has forgotten you. The high command of the Red Army knows what has happened to every combatant. Our information service has been told of each prisoner who has been forced to join the ranks of the Fascist army, and what everybody has done.

The time has come for you to recognise the great shame you have brought on yourself and on your family. Switch to the French Partisans, who are struggling against Hitler’s Germany and thereby supporting the Red Army.

THE FRENCH PARTISANS DO NOT SHOOT THOSE FORMER SOVIET SOLDIERS WHO JOIN THEIR RANKS VOLUNTARILY.

You can go to any French farmer for more information.

WE ARE WAITING FOR YOU.
YOUR COMRADES.

No record of precise numbers exists, but there is general agreement that the Russian-language leaflets met with some success, particularly in 1944 when deserting Russian soldiers thoughtfully brought their German weapons with them.

The first uncertain moves towards forming an armed resistance on the Plateau were taken at about the same time as the Germans began arriving in increasing numbers. There is little doubt that the village of Yssingeaux and Jean Bonnissol were the first to take active steps in this regard. Although comparatively young for a Resistance leader, the 30-year-old Bonnissol was a stalwart opponent of the Vichy government, and had consistently argued against defeatism. On 1 March 1943, he joined the departmental committee of the MUR (Mouvements Unis de la Résistance, or United Resistance Movements), which brought together the groups Combat, Franc-Tireur (roughly ‘French Gunman’) and Libération. He was quickly appointed head of the armed resistance for the whole of the Plateau. He took the name ‘Borel’, then ‘Dunbois’ and finally ‘Soumy’.

Pierre Fayol, who had been in contact with Combat back in Marseille, now entered the fray. As we have seen, he had set up home with his wife and son in the tiny village of La Celle, not far from Le Chambon. A local farmer, Alexis Grand, put him in touch with Resistance leaders in Tence. He was not exactly snapped up. The Resistance had investigated him in advance, and found that he had been in the French armed forces. Could he be a spy from the Vichy government? They were not going to rush things. Eventually they accepted him, and sent him to Jean Bonnissol. Fayol, now variously known as ‘Simon’ (the name on his false papers), ‘Rivière’, ‘Vallin’ or ‘Roux’, became head of the armed resistance in Le Chambon. Léon Eyraud (‘Noël’
⁴²
) remained in charge of civil resistance.