The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (26 page)

André Trocmé suffered from a bad back, so he was not fit for active service. The same did not apply to Édouard Theis, who remained
active  in the Resistance. He went into hiding at the same time as Trocmé, in his case somewhere near the Swiss border. He has never given precise details of where he went or how he got there, but it is generally thought that he used one of the Cimade routes, and that he headed for the area around Annemasse on the French side of the border, not far from Geneva. He did not settle anywhere, but stayed constantly on the move. Despite his nomadic existence, he remained active with the Cimade, smuggling Jews to safety in Switzerland. After all, changing profession from
pasteur
to
passeur
didn’t sound like too big a jump.

So in one move the Plateau lost the two strongest voices supporting pacifism and passive resistance. If the Resistance now chose to take up arms against the Germans and the Vichy, there would be no attacks from the pulpit by Trocmé and Theis to give them pause. For the rest of his life, André Trocmé agonised over whether he had done the right thing.

• • •

On 6 August 1943, the Resistance shot Inspector Praly, Le Chambon’s resident police spy. Three men came to the Hôtel des Acacias at about nine in the evening. One of them, Jacques Bellin, shot the policeman twice with a 7.65-mm automatic pistol. The three men then fled, Bellin on a bicycle that lost its chain about 60 metres from the hotel. Bellin abandoned the cycle and the three men disappeared on foot into the nearby woods.

This was not a Le Chambon operation, nor was it approved by the Resistance in Le Chambon. The plan in Le Chambon had always been to do nothing that would put the rescue operation at risk. The three assassins—the other two known only as ‘13.206’ and ‘13.216’—came from the tiny village of La Bataille, about thirteen kilometres west of Le Chambon, at the foot of a mountain called Pic du Lizieux. Many accounts say the shooting of Praly was revenge by the Resistance
for the raid on the House of Rocks, but that is not Bellin’s version: according to Bellin’s report to Jean Bonnissol, the head of the maquis in Yssingeaux, Praly was shot for ‘treason’. It was the first assassination carried out by the Resistance in the Haute-Loire.

Understandably, there was uproar. Four brigades of gendarmes fanned out into the countryside around Le Chambon. They came up with nothing. The three men were back home in La Bataille within 23 hours of the shooting, well beyond the range of the searching gendarmes. At one point the police circulated a description of a Jean Brugière, a nineteen-year-old apprentice butcher from Montpelier, but he proved to be equally elusive and probably was not involved anyway. The crime remained ‘unsolved’.

Praly was a Protestant, so his funeral service, on 9 August, took place in the Le Chambon temple. Prefect Bach attended, and spoke witheringly about the scourge of terrorism. He made the same point a few days later, on 18 August, in his regular report on affairs in the Haute-Loire.

The population of the Haute-Loire has learned with astonishment of the assassination of Inspector Praly at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Many different explanations have been put forward as motive for this crime, but there has been unanimous condemnation of this act, which can justifiably be described as ‘terrorist’. The public strongly supports the investigation now taking place, and hopes it will lead to the arrest of the assassins.

Bach may or may not have been right about universal condemnation of the assassination, but that was not the main preoccupation of the Plateau. The biggest fear was some sort of reprisal against the whole village. The fact that the victim was French rather than German
might
save them. If a German had been killed, then his compatriots were
perfectly capable of lining the men of the village up against a wall and shooting the lot of them. Still, the assassination was the equivalent of sticking a burning stick into a hornets’ nest: a lot of angry hornets come bursting out, spoiling for a fight. The Plateau held its breath.

A few days later, the Resistance received their second parachute drop. The first drop, back in December 1942, had been more of a test run. The BBC French service had broadcast the message
La soupe est chaude
(The soup is hot), which told the Resistance to go to a place called Le Pin (The Pine), near Freycenet. That brought ten containers of guns, eagerly snapped up by Resistance forces from the distant Loire region.

The second drop was originally due on the night of 10 July. The message was the same—
La soupe est chaude
—pointing to the same field near Freycenet. However, the Gestapo had intercepted the first message and lay in wait, slightly in the wrong place. Happily, the RAF plane didn’t make it—a frequent problem—and both Resistance and Gestapo went home empty-handed. Nevertheless, that marked the end of the hot soup.

On the night of 22 August, the Resistance finally received their drop, this time a heavy shipment of arms destined for the Plateau itself. It followed the even more puzzling BBC message,
Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage
(roughly ‘He who drowns his dog accuses it of having rabies’).
⁴⁶
That pointed to a field near Mézères, about ten kilometres west of Yssingeaux, where eighteen containers bringing no less than three tons of guns and ammunition floated gently down into the field. Some 22 men rapidly dispersed the treasure trove. They buried some of it, but the precious guns, including around a hundred submachine guns, were hidden in a shed at the Château de Lavée near Yssingeaux. The Secret Army on the Plateau was now well armed.

They paid a price. The local mayor and the local president of the Legion informed the gendarmes that a farm worker had heard a plane
fly low over Mézères, and around five thirty in the morning had seen men handling heavy metallic objects. Two gendarmes set off to investigate, and found the breech of a submachine gun. That led to the arrest of René Garnier, one of Pierre Fayol’s team. He was shot on 13 November 1943.

• • •

As well as their regular work solving crimes and policing the roads, by mid-1943 the Plateau’s gendarmes faced trouble upholding the law on three further fronts. First, there were the Jews: unregistered, usually with false papers, not living at their assigned address. Then there were the
réfractaires
, the young Frenchmen dodging the STO forced-labour laws. They tended to disappear into the forests, where they linked up with the armed resistance. Finally there was the Resistance itself. Praly’s fate demonstrated that the Resistance was now up and running on the Plateau, and dangerous. The gendarmes would have taken note that it was a French policeman, not a German soldier, who had been assassinated.

As we have seen, the gendarmes dealt with the problem of Jews by doing as little as they thought they could get away with. But STO dodgers were another matter. The law was not discriminatory: it applied to all young Frenchmen unlucky enough to be born in the wrong year. The gendarmes were paid to enforce the law, so they set about doing just that. On 23 June 1943 the gendarmes raided the village of Araules, between Tence and Le Chambon, looking for
réfractaires
. They made two arrests. They came back to Araules on 8 and 9 July. Four arrests. Between 17 and 20 July, the government declared an amnesty and offered the
réfractaires
the opportunity to give themselves up without facing penalties. Abject failure. So the raids resumed.

Then there was the issue of the Resistance for the gendarmes to cope with. Some of them appear to have approached this problem with a combination of pragmatism and self-interest. They knew the war
was going badly for the Germans. The Russians were pushing them back in the east, and in July 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily, capturing the capital, Palermo, on 23 July. The Italians responded by deposing Mussolini and installing King Victor Emmanuel III as head of Italy’s armed forces. On 8 September, Italy surrendered to the Allies, and on 13 October they switched sides, declaring war on Germany. The message was clear: it could only be a matter of time before the Allies set about taking the rest of mainland Europe, including France.

The gendarmes had no particular wish to find themselves on the losing side. They also had to face the fact that they were increasingly outgunned by the maquisards. By the end of November 1943, the Resistance fighters on the Plateau around Yssingeaux had grenades, automatic rifles and submachine guns, as well as the usual collection of rifles and pistols. In general, the gendarmes were not particularly pro-German or even pro-Vichy. Put simply, some of them seem to have come to the view that, to paraphrase Churchill’s famous phrase, ‘jaw-jaw’ might be better for their health than ‘war-war’.

Given the gendarmes’ ambiguous attitudes, Jean Bonnissol thought it might be worth sounding them out. He asked Lieutenant Alfred Morel, the most senior gendarme in Yssingeaux, if he felt like joining Bonnisol’s Resistance network, ‘Zinnia’. Morel’s reply, according to Bonnissol, was: ‘I  can’t join any network. But I could pass on any information that might interest you.’ He meant information about Gestapo agents operating in the area and, again according to Bonnissol, he was as good as his word.

• • •

In the departmental archives in Le Puy there is a dossier of telegrams and other orders issued from Vichy to the Haute-Loire. It includes a list of those to be arrested, or somehow got out of the way. The names of André Trocmé, Édouard Theis and Roger Darcissac are there, of
course. However, there is a fourth name from Le Chambon: Charles Guillon. The Vichy government’s Commission for Jewish Affairs had issued a report on the Plateau in general, which saw Le Chambon not so much as a place of refuge for Jews but as ‘the starting point of a channel for Jews into Switzerland’. They were in no doubt as to who was behind it all: Charles Guillon was organising ‘the emigration of foreign Jews’.

At the time, Guillon was something of a Scarlet Pimpernel. He was still based in Geneva but continued to make highly dangerous trips into Occupied France, including to the Plateau. He turned up in Le Chambon on 5 June 1943, not long before the raid on the House of Rocks, and attended the meeting of the town council. He prudently didn’t sign the minutes, leaving that to his successor as mayor, Benjamin Grand. There is unfortunately no record of exactly what he was doing in Occupied France—people moving large sums of money clandestinely in suitcases from country to country tend to keep their mouths shut and their notebooks closed—but there is universal agreement that without Guillon’s efforts, the vital flow of funds to the Plateau might have dried up. He was the Cimade’s most important contact in Switzerland, their
correspondant
. The historian Pierre Bolle has estimated that a Guillon suitcase might contain ‘five or six million francs’.

And of course, through all that was going on—the departure of Trocmé and Theis, the new assertiveness of the Resistance—the rescue mission on the Plateau continued unchecked. Jews continued to arrive by train and bus, and all were taken in and sheltered. No one  was turned away, no one was asked why they were there, and no one was asked if they were Jewish. They were unquestioningly supplied with false papers, including ration cards. The children’s homes continued to operate, though the managers there were inclined to send the children off into the forest rather than keep them concentrated in the houses.

The story of Léo and Barbara Sauvage might have been told by any of the Jews who arrived unannounced on the Plateau. Léo was born in Mannheim, Germany, on 23 February 1913, as Léopold Smotriez. His family moved to Forbach in northern France, and somewhere along the line Léo changed his surname to the more French-sounding Sauvage. He met his wife, Barbara, in Paris, where they both moved in left-wing circles. She was a Polish Jew whose two brothers had already moved to Paris in the 1930s to escape Polish anti-Semitism. Léo and Barbara married in 1939.

Léo worked as a journalist and theatre critic in Paris. Both professions were banned to Jews, but he wasn’t going to let this bother him. In 1940, the year of the German invasion of France, he and Barbara decided to move south to Marseille in the Unoccupied Zone, where they hoped for better times. Léo taught German in a local school, and tried to save enough money to escape to America through the Varian Fry organisation. He even started a little theatre troupe, which toured the Riviera but never quite managed to make the Sauvages’ fortune. When the Germans swept south at the end of 1942, Léo and Barbara moved to Nice, which was occupied by the much more tolerant Italians.

In the summer of 1943, Barbara became pregnant. Then she developed complications. Peritonitis set in. The doctors advised that if she wanted to save her own life, let alone the life of her baby, she would need to rest, eat proper food and avoid stress. Where could that be done? Léo Sauvage talked to one of his left-wing contacts, Victor Fay, who suggested that the Sauvages take a look at Le Chambon. ‘They’re Huguenots up there,’ Fay said. ‘You never know.’ The Sauvages moved to Le Chambon, renting a room in a farmhouse in La Fayolle.

The rest, better food and lowered stress had the desired effect, and the peritonitis cleared up by the time Barbara went into labour in March 1944. She was taken to the hospital in Saint-Agrève, where Dr Roger Le Forestier presided over the birth. Le Forestier was not merely
a qualified surgeon; his work in Africa meant he was experienced as well as skilful. On 25 March 1944, Barbara gave birth to a healthy boy whom the Sauvages named Pierre. They could not have known it at the time, but they had just produced one of the Plateau’s most energetic (and grateful) champions, the documentary maker Pierre Sauvage, writer, director and narrator of the Plateau documentary
Weapons of the Spirit
.

The tolerance and hospitality of the Plateau at times went to incredible lengths. For example, Jewish religious ceremonies survived, with the active support of the Protestant establishment. Rudi Appel, a young refugee, remembers a Hanukkah party in December 1943. Rudi had taught Juliette Usach, the director of The Wasps’ Nest, to play the Hanukkah song ‘Rock of Ages’ on the piano, and the kids all sang along. They also lit Hanukkah candles. There was no synagogue in the village, so the Protestant church handed over a room for use by the Jews on Friday nights. André Hano, the classics teacher at the New Cévenole School and a Jewish refugee, conducted the services.