The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (40 page)

That symposium occupied a central place in my research. There is endless controversy over the events on the Plateau. Who did what? Who mattered? Who didn’t? A lot of the uproar was triggered by the publication of Philip Hallie’s 1979 book
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed
, the first attempt to tell the Plateau story. The book was translated into
French and published as
Le sang des innocents (The Blood of Innocents
). It was widely and disapprovingly read by some French survivors from the Plateau. Hallie was a moral philosopher, not a historian or a journalist, and he got a lot wrong. (He got a lot right, too, let it be said!) The symposium set out to put the record straight. The beauty of it, from my point of view, was that everybody who took part had to stand up in front of their contemporaries and fellow survivors from the Plateau to tell their story. If they strayed from the path of truth or righteousness, there were people on hand to pull them up. So in general I preferred to accept the version of events set out in the symposium, simply because each story in there had survived the scrutiny of an army of live fact-checkers.

Pierre Sauvage’s documentary
Weapons of the Spirit
had an important role in the creation of this book. My friend Winton Higgins lectures in, among other things, genocide prevention, at the University of Technology, Sydney. His work led him to Pierre’s film and to the Plateau’s story. Winton in turn suggested the subject to me. So Pierre’s documentary began the chain of events that led to this book. I must have watched the documentary 50 times or more. Again, it was crucial to my research, because it contains interviews with Magda Trocmé, Édouard Theis, Pierre Fayol, Henri and Emma Héritier, Madeleine Barot, Georgette Barraud, Roger Darcissac and others who appear in the preceding pages. It enabled me to visualise them as people, not just as names. Further thanks to Pierre for patiently answering my endless requests for information and sometimes for reassurance. We don’t always agree, particularly on rescue numbers, but he has been an important and generous ally in the creation of this book.

The staff at the departmental archive of the Haute-Loire were tirelessly helpful as I ploughed through police reports, departmental directives, pleading letters, arrest warrants and all the other trivia that adds up to collective repression. It makes for sorry reading.

The staff at the Mémorial de la Shoah (Holocaust Museum) in Paris were equally helpful, digging out old press cuttings and pointing me in the direction of helpful books and articles. I  spent some time in the National Archive in Paris where the staff were, again, endlessly
helpful. It was wonderful to read old issues of
Combat
, the Resistance newspaper edited by Albert Camus.

My wife Roslyn’s French is fluent, unlike mine, and I could not have conducted the original interviews with Oscar Rosowsky and Gérard Bollon without her help.

That leads me to thank my two French teachers, Alain Bohée and Christelle Dubois. With Alain, I  practised storytelling and dialogue in French. Christelle set about drumming the complexities of French grammar into me. A lot of this book was written as part of my French homework for Christelle: I translated from French, and Christelle (who normally teaches English, not French) checked my translation. Such infelicities and inaccuracies as survived this process are all my own work, and Christelle shall remain totally blameless.

I received a lot of encouragement from the engaging mayor of Le Chambon, Eliane Wauquiez-Motte. Her fluent English made communication simple, and her warmth and generosity are outstanding. The people of Le Chambon are lucky to have her. Her son Laurent is a deputy in the French National Assembly and was Minister for Employment in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy. He is spoken of as a future leader of the Gaullist UMP. We shall see.

My thanks to those who gave me a place to rest my head while I was conducting this research. Nelly Trocmé Hewett took my wife and me in for two nights in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a city I’d never visited before but would certainly go to again. Further thanks to an old friend, the writer Cyra McFadden, who kept us dry externally (but not internally) in her Sausalito houseboat while I was researching in the San Francisco area.

My friend Tom Keneally, who has some experience in these matters (he is the author of the remarkable
Schindler’s Ark,
filmed by Steven Spielberg as
Schindler’s List
) gave me a lot of advice on post-publication problems. Tom’s words of wisdom remain untested at the time of writing, and will remain so until the book is actually out there, but I am the better armed for having received them.

Clara Finlay did an extraordinary job copy-editing the manuscript. As well as her excellent trimming of my wayward prose, she submitted
no fewer than 1003 entirely sensible queries (Microsoft Word counts them), and the whole book is much the better for her painstaking fact-checking and incisive questioning. My regular editor, Angela Handley, has done her usual stylish job of converting my word mountains into a book. Richard Walsh agreed to read the early chapters as a work-in-progress, a request which all publishers sensibly resist, and was a vital source of encouragement when the burden of the research threatened to overwhelm me.

My final thanks must go to the people of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, whose unfailing decency and sheer courage give hope that the human race might be capable of good as well as evil. When I began researching this book, I often asked myself whether the people of the Plateau would behave the same way today. In the years 1939 to 1944 they were a community of farmers, living simple lives in rural isolation. Now they have television and broadband to bring the outside world into their homes. Might this new sophistication mean that those old values have gone, squeezed out by the secular embrace of the global village? If they were asked to do it all again today, could they?

Let me tell a story. On the night of the preview screening of the remastered version of
Weapons of the Spirit
in Le Chambon in June 2013, I found myself seated next to an old woman from the village, a total stranger, perhaps in her eighties. She asked me over and over when the film would start, and each time I did my best to explain to her. Finally, her daughter leaned across her and apologised to me, saying that her mother was a bit forgetful these days and had a habit of asking questions again and again. I  murmured that it was no problem, and we waited. The film finally began. At several points in the film, a community group of villagers sings an old Protestant hymn, ‘La Cévenole’. The old lady sang along with them, in a clear voice, remembering every word. It occurred to me then that the old values were still alive, and would be passed on. So if the question is: ‘Could they do it again?’ I would answer yes, they can.

1
France has undergone so many currency changes since 1942, beginning with a string of devaluations between 1945 and 1959, then a switch from old francs to new francs in January 1960, then a further switch from the franc to the euro in 1999, that it is a mind-numbing task to try to come up with an accurate reflection of this sum in contemporary money. One ‘authority’ put it at as high as US$3600 in today’s money, but that makes no sense at all. At the time, a dirt-cheap room could be rented for 500 francs a month, so 100 francs is less than a week’s rent at peppercorn rates.

2
Most English–French dictionaries translate the English word ‘church’ as
église
. However, this is not strictly accurate. An
église
is the term for a Catholic church; a Protestant church is a
temple
. In the same way, a Catholic clergyman is a
prête
(priest), while a Protestant clergyman is a
pasteur
(pastor). In most French towns you will find somewhere a
Rue du Temple
—in other words, the street of the Protestant church.

3
This quote is absolutely irresistible to me. I live on the Île d’Oléron, only a few kilometres from Domino. I wonder what André Trocmé would make of the island today, with its two discreet nude beaches, topless women spending their summer stretched out in the sun, and some very tempting bars and restaurants not far from Domino.

4
In French, the word
bled
means something like ‘remote place’. It is a pejorative term, implying that the remote place is also a bit of a dump. André was headed for the Sahara Desert region of southern Morocco.

5
The Cévennes, a mountainous area of southern France near the town of Nîmes, is important in Huguenot history. In 1702 a group of Cévennes Protestants known as Camisards rose up against the French king Louis XIV (the Sun King). Fighting continued until 1710, and there was no official peace until
1715. The word Cévenole, meaning ‘of the Cévennes’, thus invokes memories of Huguenot courage and stubborn resistance, as well as of their persecution.

6
In France, a
commune
is simply a rural local government area, centred around a town or village. The head of the commune is the
maire
(mayor).

7
The full history of the Plateau is dealt with in some detail in Appendix 1. Any reader who cares to read the appendix now rather than later will have a fuller understanding of what follows. The main body of the book tells the story of what happened and when in the mid-twentieth century. I would hope that the appendix goes some way towards answering the much more difficult question: why?

8
Les genêts d’or
refers to the golden-flowered plant usually called Scotch broom. The local peasants regularly tied
genêts
together and used them as brooms of the sweeping variety. They referred to both the plants and the homemade brooms by the regular French word
balai
.

9
Les Barandons still exists. It is now a public campsite, trading under the slightly more impressive name Chalet des Barandons.

10
In France today, a
papeterie
is generally a stationery shop. This is an older usage of the word.

11
The full text of the declaration is reproduced in Appendix 2.

12
There is a curious resonance between this declaration by Boegner and Pétain’s belief that France needed to cleanse itself. The mood of the time in France was certainly self-critical. And, at this point, Boegner was generally supportive of the marshal.

13
The whole world has reason to be grateful to Bingham and Varian Fry. Among the rescued were the artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, together with the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt. It was Arendt who, reporting on the trial of her tormentor Adolf Eichmann in Israel 40 years later, came up with the haunting phrase ‘the banality of evil’.

14
The Fellowship of Reconciliation was an international and interdenominational organisation based in the United States and dedicated to promoting peace.

15
In her memoir, Magda names the official as Charles Guillon, the former mayor. Although Guillon had already resigned and moved to Geneva, he made repeated trips to Le Chambon between August 1940 and April 1941, and continued to preside over council meetings. So it is theoretically possible that Magda is correct. However, Magda’s account is so much at odds with everything we know about Guillon, that it seems more likely that she talked to somebody else.

16
Richard H. Weisberg,
Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France
, New York University Press, New York, 1996, p. 38.

17
Magda recalls his words as:
Matam’ la lessifeusse, s’il fous plait
? Dr Mautner’s accented version of:
Madame, la lessiveuse s’il vous plait?

18
This fatuous and paranoid piece of legislation seems to have survived the war and stayed on the statute books at least until the 1960s. I vividly remember the procedure for checking into French hotels at that time. As well as registering in the usual way, you filled in a little green card with name, passport number and so on. I was told the hotel passed this card on to the local prefecture.

19
It was also known as Ça File Doucement (roughly ‘The Slow Goer’), which became the name of the student newspaper at the New Cévenole School.

20
Faïdoli
is a nice-sounding nonsense word, the first word of a popular Swiss folk song. It’s a bit like ‘fiddle-de-dee’. There is no translation.

21
The stories are utterly charming, rather biblical in tone, and always with a moral. They are available in a collection,
Angels and Donkeys
, translated by Nelly Trocmé Hewett (Good Books, Intercourse, Pennsylvania 17534, 1998).

22
The Pearl Harbor attack took place on the morning of 7 December 1941, Honolulu time. Because of the position of the International Date Line, this was 8 December in Europe.

23
Laval returned to high office in April 1942, as President of the Council (prime minister) in the Vichy government, and continued in power until August 1944. After the war he was tried for high treason, found guilty and shot.

24
Gurs and the town of Oloron-Sainte-Marie are about nineteen kilometres apart.

25
Max and Hanne presumably spoke to each other in German at the time. However, the quotes above are from an interview conducted in English, and both Max and Hanne used the English phrase ‘round-up’. This needs explanation. The big fear of Jews in France was of
rafles
. The French word
rafle
can be translated as either a police ‘raid’ or ‘round-up’. It comes from the French verb
rafler
, meaning to ‘snatch’ or ‘snaffle’. I have retained ‘round-up’ here because in English a raid usually takes place at a single location while a round-up implies a sweep of an area. The events in Lyon and elsewhere were clearly round-ups.

26
The report author’s arithmetic clearly left something to be desired.

27
Italy occupied the southeast corner of France, including Provence and the important cities of Nice, Grenoble and Toulon. So the whole of France was occupied, but not all of it by Germany. There were differences between the two occupying powers. In the early part of the Occupation, the Italians showed exemplary courage in refusing to hand over Jews from their territory to the Germans, to the point where the German foreign minister Ribbentrop complained to Mussolini: ‘Italian military circles lack a proper understanding of the Jewish question.’ But Mussolini’s long-term Jewish mistress Margherita Sarfatti had helped Mussolini to launch his Fascist Party in Italy, and the party accepted Jews as members. Mussolini was not about to be browbeaten.