The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (3 page)

Through the Russian and Jewish communities, Mira had a vast network of contacts, which happened to include a smuggler in Saint-Gervais, near the Swiss border. Oscar leapt at this possibility. ‘I’ll go to Saint-Gervais,’ he told his mother, ‘you meet me there.’ Meanwhile Mira organised some false papers for herself.

It was by now early October 1942. Oscar took the train to Saint-Gervais. No one challenged Jean-Claude Pluntz’s right to travel, and he arrived without incident. He met the smuggler, handed over 100 francs
¹
—a very fair price—and waited for his mother. Three days passed. No mother. It was widely believed at the time that the only targets for arrest were men, so his mother was probably okay. But as a young male Oscar was in danger, and he couldn’t hang around indefinitely—better to cross the border now, and come back for her if he had to. His Boy Scout training meant the mountains held no fear for him.

The smuggler drew him a map and took him to a drop-off point at Morgins Pass, east of Geneva, about five kilometres short of the Swiss border.

The smuggler set me down in a group of little huts, telling me: ‘You climb as far as the crest, and on the other side you’ll see lights. That’s Switzerland. Next day, don’t rush. Take it easy. Don’t stop at the first village. Keep going.’

I lay down in the sunshine and waited for darkness, reading Victor Hugo’s book of poems
The Legend of the Ages.
I had a flask of wine and some sweetened condensed milk. When it started to get dark, I got up. The smuggler stopped me: ‘You must wait until it’s completely dark,’ he ordered. So I waited for total darkness, then I set off.

I arrived at the crest. It was bitterly cold. [Morgins Pass is 1400 metres above sea level.] Happily, I was wearing every bit of clothing I owned. I waited for daybreak, then I literally tumbled down the other side. I knew I’d made it into Switzerland when I saw a piece of silver paper … a chocolate wrapper!

Then I came across a hiker, who said to me: ‘Listen carefully. Don’t go into the village, because they’ll send you straight back.’ So I went round the village. I was a bit tired by then. Having crept past the village, I  found a beautiful, sunny path that led gently down the mountainside. I followed it down, but there was a bridge with a sentry. He grabbed me and marched me into the village of Morgins. I  was furious. I  pointed to my papers, and said to the assembled soldiers ‘Listen, I’m a deserter from a group of foreign workers. You’re not going to send me back.’

I didn’t know anything about the laws of Switzerland. They soon put me straight. ‘Look,’ they said, ‘it’s not too difficult. If you keep on making up stories, we’ll just take you back to the border and hand you over to French Customs. Otherwise, you can have an Emmental sandwich, and you can go back round the same hill that brought you here. We’ll be at the bottom of the hill watching, and we’ll distract them, and that’s the last we’ll ever hear from you.’

Oscar Rosowsky accepted the inevitable and re-crossed the border into France. At Thonon-les-Bains he caught the train and headed for Nice, expecting to be reunited with his mother.

But when he got back to the apartment, Mira was gone. He learned the full story later. She had taken the train from Nice to Saint-Gervais. On the train, the gendarmes had taken one look at her clumsily forged papers and accused her of travelling under a false name. She managed to persuade them that the papers were genuine. Then she had a terrible thought: what if they were pretending to let her go but secretly keeping an eye on her? Oscar could be waiting on the platform for her at Saint-Gervais, and the police would arrest them both. So she ran after the gendarmes, shouting that they were right, her papers were false. She was promptly arrested, taken off the train at the next stop, and sent to the French internment camp at Rivesaltes, near Perpignan.

The first news of this came to Oscar in the form of a letter from his mother, addressed to him at the apartment in Nice. It contained the bare outline of the story: she had been arrested and interned in Rivesaltes. Oscar knew he would have to act fast, before she was deported to Germany and who knew what fate. Where to start? He turned to the best network he knew, the Boy Scouts. A meeting was quickly convened at the home of a Catholic Boy Scout, Jean Boucher, totem ‘Élan’ (Elk). As well as Oscar, the meeting included Jean-Claude Pluntz; Anatole Dauman, a young Polish Jew with a reputation for daredevilry; and two young Protestants, Charles and Georgette Hanne, whose mother lived in a remote village in the Haute-Loire called Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

Charles and Georgette told Oscar a little about Le Chambon. It was located on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, high in the mountains on the eastern side of the Massif Central, southwest of Lyon and about 200 kilometres from the Swiss border. The area was populated by farmers and small tradesmen. Most of them were Huguenot Protestants,
a  community whose isolation had helped them survive centuries of religious persecution in the rest of France. The Hannes had one more startling piece of information to pass on to Oscar: the people of the Plateau were willing to hide Jews.

• • •

Oscar now had somewhere to go. But first he had to get his mother out of Rivesaltes. He knew that the prefecture in Nice issued internment orders. It also issued residents’ permits (
permis de séjour
). Through his old job, he was a familiar figure at the prefecture, arriving on his bicycle with his boxes of brushes and tools. He could move around unchallenged. Who cared about, or even noticed, a skinny teenage typewriter serviceman doing his rounds?

Oscar knew exactly what to do. However fast his heart was pounding, a show of calm was essential. Above all, he must not attract attention. He pedalled gently down to the prefecture, clutching his toolbox and brushes. Still outwardly calm, he strolled through the door and headed for the prefect’s office. He knew what he needed, and he knew where to find it.

I was completely on my own at the back of the office, cleaning the machines. There was no one there to see what I was doing. I had no problems, none, none. I  pinched some letterhead paper, and the prefect’s official seal, and I made a permis de séjour using the prefecture’s Underwood typewriters
.

Ever considerate, he spared the prefect all the bother of having to sign the
permis
, which authorised a certain Madame Mira Rosowsky to leave Rivesaltes and travel to Nice. Instead, Oscar signed it on the prefect’s behalf, with a nicely convincing version of the real signature. Then, apparently finished his cleaning round, he pedalled off as serenely
as he had arrived, the precious paper and the prefect’s stamp safely tucked away in his toolbox. It was all too easy.

Next, the burning question was how to get the paper to Mira in Rivesaltes. At this time, in early November 1942, internees in the camps were still allowed to write and receive letters, so Oscar suggested simply entrusting it to the post. Charles Hanne was adamant: no, he had connections. He would see that it got to her. To be on the safe side, Oscar arranged for two German photographers, friends of his parents’, to make a good copy. Then he handed the precious original over to Charles Hanne.

Days passed. Nothing happened.

Oscar was getting desperate. Time was running out. His mother could be deported at any time. He posted the surviving copy of the permit off to the camp. Then he—and Mira—had a stroke of luck. On 8 November, ‘Operation Torch’ began. British and American forces struck fast and effectively, landing in the French territory of Algeria in North Africa, just across the Mediterranean from France. They quickly brushed aside Vichy resistance, and looked poised to launch an invasion of the European mainland. The Germans reacted quickly and decisively. On 11 November they ended the sham of ‘Unoccupied’ France by sweeping south, occupying the whole country.

With this sudden change of government, there was understandable confusion throughout the old Vichy zone. Who was in charge? Did the Vichy government’s word still count for anything? Who controlled Rivesaltes? Nobody knew. It was a good moment for Mira Rosowsky to present Oscar’s photocopy of her
permis de séjour
to the camp authorities. In all the chaos, they probably reasoned that one Jew less was one problem less. So they accepted the
permis
and, on 17 November 1942, they let her go. Oscar Rosowsky’s career as a forger was off to a good start.

Reunited in Nice, Oscar and Mira discussed the future. They couldn’t stay in Nice. They were already targets. It was clear that Switzerland was too risky. They had both already failed trying to get there. To Oscar, the only possibility was to find some way to merge unnoticed into French society, in some other part of France. The best bet looked like Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Oscar still had Jean-Claude Pluntz’s papers, so he could travel as Pluntz. He agreed with Mira that he should take a look for himself at the Plateau.

He set off alone, by train, from Nice to Le Chambon. Within hours of his arrival, he knew that this was the place. He returned to Nice to collect his mother. However, that left the problem of papers. His mother spoke French with a pronounced foreign accent. If she carried regular French papers, she would be under suspicion from the minute she opened her mouth. She needed papers that matched her accent. Again, Oscar had the answer.

Producing false papers is no simple matter. They need to be checkable against other official records, and they need to match in every possible way the person using them. Oscar searched the
Journal officiel
, the official gazette of the French republic, for a suitable history. Then, using the stolen prefect’s official seal, and his newly acquired skills at forgery, he created the birth certificate and naturalisation papers of a real White Russian of a similar age to Mira, a certain Mademoiselle Grabowska, born at Samsun in Turkey. The White Russian existed, and the act of naturalisation could be verified in the
Journal officiel
. The Turkish–Russian background would explain his mother’s foreign accent.

The only way to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was by train. The fast trains were heavily policed, but the slow local trains were generally left alone by the authorities. Mother and son now caught the slow train north, travelling across lyrically beautiful countryside, to the town of La Voulte-sur-Rhône. There they boarded the narrow-gauge
departmental train that wound its way up the mountain, through Le Cheylard to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. The ancient train reminded Oscar of those he had seen in Western movies.

At this point it is worth standing back and considering the enormity of the decisions the pair had made. Ruben Rosowsky had been arrested, and neither his wife nor his son knew where he was. Mira and Oscar were foreign Jews, subject to instant deportation under Vichy law. They had already come to the attention of the authorities in Nice, so they could expect arrest at any moment. Now, on the say-so of a Boy Scout friend of Oscar’s, they were travelling to a place where they had no family or friends, trusting that the strangers at their destination would risk their lives by giving the Rosowskys shelter. The countryside may have looked peaceful as it slipped past the train window, but the journey must have been a nightmare of fear and uncertainty. Would the gendarmes or anybody else on the journey spot Jean-Claude Pluntz’s altered papers? Would Mira’s fake papers, produced by a typewriter repairman barely out of school, pass scrutiny by experienced and suspicious policemen? The journey lasted seven hours. Throughout that time they had to remain calm, despite their fears. Someone wants to see your papers? Look them in the eye and hand over the forgeries. Don’t let your hand shake. Then wait. And hope.

Finally they arrived at the tiny railway station at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. They went straight to the apartment of Marcelle Hanne, the mother of Charles and Georgette, and spent their first few days there. However, the apartment was tiny, and they couldn’t stay there for long. There was a woman who waited regularly at the station for refugees, Marcelle said. Perhaps she could help.

Sure enough, the woman at the railway station knew exactly what to do. Mademoiselle Grabowska could stay with Pastor Daniel Curtet in the village of Fay-sur-Lignon, about sixteen kilometres from Le Chambon. Jean-Claude could move into a guesthouse called Beau-Soleil
(Lovely Sunshine), which served as a dormitory for students at the New Cévenole School in Le Chambon. Nobody asked the two Rosowskys who they were, or why they had chosen Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Clearly, they needed help; that was enough. Later, Oscar would move to a little farmhouse at La Fayolle, where the farmer Henri Héritier and his wife, Emma, had a couple of tiny spare rooms in a barn.

• • •

There is an irresistible thought at this point in the narrative. Whoever devised the Vichy
numerus clausus
law, which kept Oscar Rosowsky out of medical school and diverted him into the world of printing, can’t have foreseen the consequences of his vindictiveness. France may have (temporarily) lost a good doctor, but the Vichy law had just launched the career of one of the finest—and most spectacularly successful—forgers in World War II history.

• • •

In 1935, the then French foreign minister Pierre Laval famously sought help from Russia’s Stalin. He wanted Stalin to join him in persuading Pope Pius XI to take a stand against Hitler and the Nazis. Stalin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘The Pope!’ he roared. ‘How many divisions has he got?’

It was a fair question, and it might have been equally well asked of the pastors of the Protestant churches
²
of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon.

• • •

Charles Guillon was born in Paris on 15 August 1883, in humble circumstances. He came from a family of
concierges
, that unique French combination of receptionist, porter and nightwatchman without which no French apartment building could function. His family was poor, but his parents believed in education, so Charles stayed in high school until he was seventeen. He was a bright student and wanted to become an architect. However, university was out of the question for someone from such a poor family, so architecture was put on hold while he looked for a job. Though he was an agnostic at the time, he nevertheless made a beeline for the UCJG building in the Rue de Trévise, near Montmartre in Paris. UCJG stands for Union Chrétienne
de Jeunes Gens, or Christian Union of Young People; in other words, he headed for what we call in English the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), Paris branch.