The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (36 page)

Catherine Cambessédès
enrolled at the Sorbonne after the war, then won a scholarship to Mills College, California, where she studied American Civilization and Anthropology. In California she met her husband, David, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. She taught French privately at home, then at Stanford University. She is still funny and pert and good company. At the end of 2013 she wrote to me: ‘I live near San Francisco, but haven’t forgotten Le Chambon. For all that California sunshine is wonderful indeed, but so are the steady, sturdy people of Le Chambon.’

Roger Darcissac
continued as headmaster of the primary school in Le Chambon after the war ended. He became a rather austere figure, much admired but not always loved. He was inclined to dismiss the events on the Plateau as unremarkable: the people of Le Chambon had simply followed the dictates of their consciences, and that was that. He died in 1982. In 1988 he was recognised by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Pierre Fayol
was absorbed into the regular French Army, the FFI, and became a career army officer. After a brief period as deputy head of the FFI in the Haute-Loire, he was sent to join the occupation forces in Germany, first to Baden-Baden, then to Berlin. Fayol was an engineer by training, and at the end of 1946 he moved to Morocco, where he remained until 1957. He died in 1994.

Charles Guillon
was re-elected mayor of Le Chambon when the war ended, and served as president of the General Council of the Haute-Loire from 1945 to 1949. He rose in the hierarchy of the YMCA and YWCA until he was world secretary. He continued to divide his time between the Plateau and Geneva until his death in 1965. He was late to receive recognition for his wartime work, but in 1991 Yad Vashem declared him one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Virginia Hall
returned briefly to the United States when the war was officially over. However, she was quickly back at work. From 1945 to 1947 she worked for Voice of America, but as soon as the CIA was set up she joined, and worked in Paris as a political analyst. In 1950 she married a Franco–American former OSS agent, Paul Goillot, whom she had met during the war. She left the CIA in 1966 and retired to the small village of Barnesville, Maryland, not far from Baltimore,
where she tended her beloved garden. After the war she received the American Distinguished Service Cross, the only one awarded to a civilian woman in World War II, as well as the French Croix de Guerre with palm, and the British civilian award the MBE (Member of the British Empire). She died on 18 July 1982. Right up till her death she refused all requests from authors and journalists to interview her about her exploits. ‘Too many of my friends were killed because they talked too much,’ she would reply.

Hanne Hirsch
was reunited with Max Liebmann (see below) very soon after her arrival in Switzerland in February 1943. At first they both helped to run refugee camps there. They were married in Geneva on 14 April 1945, and Hanne gave birth to a daughter in March 1946. After the war, she learned that her mother had died in Auschwitz. The Liebmann family moved to the United States in 1948, with only $70 to build a new life. They succeeded. She and Max now live in comfortable retirement in a suburb of New York and keep in regular contact with friends from Le Chambon.

Max Liebmann
learned after the war that both his parents had died in Auschwitz. Living in Geneva, and with a small child, he and his wife, Hanne Hirsch (see above), decided to look for a better life in the United States. There they quickly prospered. Max found work straight away. Later he went to business school to learn accounting, and made even more rapid progress. He retired as vice-president of his company, but that was not his only vice-presidency. At the time of writing he was senior vice-president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors.

Pierre Piton
disappeared from view after the war, and I have had real difficulty establishing what happened to him. When he first came to the Plateau and the New Cévenole School, he had intended to train as
a missionary. He appears to have at least partly fulfilled this ambition: he left for Africa after the war, where he is thought to have helped to set up businesses in local communities. He did this, not as a colonial entrepreneur, but as a kind of one-man Peace Corps. If anyone reading this knows more, please write to me care of the publishers of this book, and I will expand this entry in future editions.

Oscar Rosowsky
’s story has one of the happiest endings of all those who took part in the Plateau adventure. When the war was over, he fulfilled his lifelong ambition to become a doctor. He went on to become president of the General Medical Council of France. He lives with his Italian wife just south of Paris, not far from Orly airport. One room of his apartment is devoted to his medical books and equipment, while another contains memorabilia of his career as a forger. He is still funny, mischievous and a joy to know.

Pierre Sauvage
, born in the Saint-Agrève hospital on the Plateau in 1944, moved with his family to New York in 1948. He returned to France, where he fell in love with film at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. The director Otto Preminger brought him back to New York as a story editor. His most important work involved returning to Le Chambon with a camera crew, as a result of which he wrote, produced, directed and appeared in his remarkable documentary telling the Plateau story. In the course of his research, he discovered the original of Trocmé and Theis’s 23 June 1940 joint declaration, which led to the documentary’s title,
Weapons of the Spirit
. Released in 1989, it won numerous awards, notably the DuPont-Columbia Award in Broadcast Journalism (sharing it with Ken Burns’s series
The Civil War
). After its release, Pierre continued to fight for recognition of the Plateau’s World War II rescue activities. For five years he ran a memorial exhibition in the heart of the village of Le Chambon,
Expo du Carrefour
(Crossroads
Exhibition). He argued (ultimately successfully) for the creation of a proper museum and Place of Remembrance. In 1982 he set up the Chambon Foundation, based in Los Angeles, and later the Varian Fry Institute. He lives in Los Angeles with his entertainment lawyer wife, Barbara M. Rubin, and continues to make documentaries;
Three Righteous Christians
, to be released in 2014, is the source of the quotes from Abbé Glasberg (p. 77) and Madeleine Barot (p. 78).

Édouard Theis
remained headmaster of the New Cévenole School until his retirement in 1963. He is another of the forgotten men of this saga. He was overshadowed by André Trocmé (literally—Trocmé was slightly taller) and seldom receives the credit he deserves. Yet he was an active forger, he and his wife, Mildred, hid refugees in their own house, and he was an important
passeur
, working with the Cimade to smuggle refugees into Switzerland. He tended to be reserved—it is completely in character that he told nobody how or where he hid himself when he left Le Chambon in 1943. He died in 1984. Both Édouard and Mildred Theis were recognised by Yad Vashem in 1981 as Righteous Among the Nations.

André Trocmé
, as we have seen, must have regarded the years after the war as something of an anticlimax. His intellectual skills were never in doubt, but his political skills were sometimes lacking. His confrontational style ensured there was no shortage of enemies in high places, particularly ecclesiastical high places in France. Nevertheless, he had friends: he was twice nominated (by the Quakers) for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was quite an international figure, travelling widely, including attending the 1958 Hiroshima and Nagasaki Conference to oppose the development of the H-bomb. He was also a very public opponent of the Algerian war. He retired from the MIR at the end of 1959, and in May 1960 took up work as a pastor in Geneva, with his
own parish of Saint-Gervais. Again, his furious energy kicked in, and he raised funds for, set up and managed the Saint-Gervais-Philippeville Diesel School, which taught local Algerians to repair and service diesel engines. He retired from Saint-Gervais in 1968, and died on 5 June 1971. Shortly before his death, he was named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. He refused to accept the medal unless it was awarded to the whole village and not to him alone. It was not his only distinction: he also received the
Rosette de la Résistance
, awarded for ‘remarkable acts of courage that contributed to the resistance of the French people against the enemy’. He must surely be the only high-profile pacifist ever to receive it.

Magda Trocmé
worked alongside her husband through their years as joint secretaries of the MIR in Europe. When they moved to Geneva, she taught Italian at the University of Geneva School of Interpreters, and at the high school in Annemasse, just across the border in France. After André’s death, Magda stayed on in Geneva for six years, then moved back to France, to Paris. She was much in demand internationally as a speaker, travelling in Europe as well as the United States and Israel. In 1981 she was awarded an honorary PhD from Haverford College, Pennsylvania, sharing the platform with Rosa Parks, hero of the American civil rights movement. In this period, she devoted herself to putting her husband’s memoirs into some sort of order, as well as making a start on her own. In 1986 she was named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, receiving the award at the Israeli embassy in Paris. She died in October 1996.

Nelly Trocmé Hewett
came to the United States in early 1947 as an
au pair
for a Quaker family in Pennsylvania. She attended Earlham College and graduated with a degree in English and French. In 1951 she married an American, with whom she had three children. They moved
to Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, where Nelly now lives. At first Nelly tutored French privately, then in the mid-1950s began teaching French in college-prep schools. She retired from teaching in the 1980s and has three grown grandchildren. She is a tireless communicator, and maintains regular contact with innumerable survivors of the Plateau, as well as taking a lively interest in Plateau affairs.

The preceding chapters tell the story of what happened on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon between 1940 and 1944. This appendix deals with the whole history of the Plateau and its Huguenot character. It is an attempt to uncover an answer to the most puzzling question of all: why did the Huguenots of the Plateau risk their own lives to save Jews?

For the better part of 2500 years, the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon stayed out of trouble by being off the beaten track. After the Stone Age, the first known inhabitants were four tribes of Celts calling themselves Vellaves (roughly ‘mountain people’) in the west, Ségusaves in the north, Helviens in the east, and Gabales in the south. They seem to have coexisted peacefully, an early example of the tradition of neighbourly live-and-let-live on the Plateau. The Celts and their prehistoric predecessors left very little behind: a couple of stone monuments known as
dolmen
and a scattering of basin-like sacrificial stones. Compared with the prehistoric treasure troves elsewhere in France, such as Brittany and the Dordogne, the Plateau is bare.

There are a few villages with telltale ‘-ac’ placenames, suggesting that Caesar’s Roman legions included the Plateau in their conquest of Gaul. There is Chavagnac near Saint-Agrève, Champagnac near Fay-sur-Lignon, Arnissac and Bronac between Le Chambon and
Yssingeaux, and more. However, other than these names and a couple of stretches of characteristically straight Roman road, the Romans also left no traces behind. There is no triumphal Roman arch, no amphitheatre and no bathhouse. The Romans left the Plateau pretty much as they found it.

As in so many parts of Europe, Christianity followed in Roman footsteps. The first Christian evangelists arrived on the Plateau sometime around the third century AD, and by 290 the town of Le Puy had its own bishop. But the Christians proved to be slow starters. Although Christian parishes were established on the Plateau sometime around the seventh and eighth centuries, the first known church buildings did not begin to spring up until around the ninth or tenth centuries, more than half a millennium after the first evangelists had arrived. This tardiness is more evidence of the Plateau’s remoteness and inaccessibility.

In general, skirmishers and invaders kept their distance. The Muslim Saracens, for example, began an invasion of France in 718  AD, sweeping up from the south along the Rhône Valley, and by 725 AD had fought their way as far north as Autun, about 300 kilometres beyond the Plateau; however, they left the Plateau to itself. It was too remote, too steep, too easy to defend … and there was very little to loot or pillage once you had conquered it.

By the end of the first millennium AD, the Plateau was functioning more or less indistinguishably from the rest of Europe. Agriculture continued to dominate the European economy, so wealth and land went together. The Roman Church, with the Pope at its head, was God’s earthly agent. It is not clear which ecclesiastical orders dominated the Plateau in the first millennium, though there are records of Benedictines from about the seventh century. In the second millennium, records show that the mysterious order of military monks known as the Knights
Templar
⁶¹
set up shop in Devesset and gradually expanded their parish borders through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The first 300 years of the second millennium were a time of intellectual and political turmoil all over Europe. Crusaders went off to the Crusades, inquisitors tortured and burned alive supposed heretics, a succession of popes squabbled with a multitude of kings over who was in charge on earth, and King John of England had his wings clipped by his barons, who pressed him into signing the Magna Carta in 1215. Kingships changed hands, either by succession or conquest, and the latter often led to a new set of lords and landowners in the conquered territories.