The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (41 page)

28
This was, of course, well and truly offset by the arrival of the Germans with their tried and tested apparatus of repression, notably the Gestapo and the SS. If the French bureaucrats were running at half-throttle, the Germans had their heavy boots flat to the floor.

29
La Peste
is generally regarded as the book that clinched the Nobel Prize for Camus in 1957.

30
The Armée Secrète (Secret Army) was the widely used name for the merged forces of armed French resistance led by Jean Moulin. It first appeared in 1943 after the merger of Combat, Libération-Sud (Liberation South) and Franc-Tireur (roughly ‘French Gunman’).

31
The word
maquis
is frequently used by English speakers as though it had no meaning other than armed resistance fighter. But in French it is simply the word for scrub or undergrowth. So the maquis were those who went off into the bushes to hide. Of course, many of the STO-dodging maquis quickly joined the armed Resistance, while those members of the Resistance who lived in hiding in forests and in the countryside may properly be called a maquis.

32
As indicated in the Prologue, there are endless problems converting 1943 francs to modern currency. However, if 500 francs was the going cheap rate for a month’s room rental, then five francs was surely a trivial sum.

33
Hard grains from a local plant mostly used as animal food. The grains had to be boiled for hours before eating.

34
Author’s note: Magda was nothing if not a born storyteller.

35
Le Forestier’s slightly confusing reference is to André Trocmé, pastor of a parish with 1200 members and father of four children; Édouard Theis, headmaster of a school with 400 students and father of eight children; and Roger Darcissac, who was also headmaster of a school and father of three children.

36
Société d’Histoire de la Montagne,
Les Résistances sur le Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, 1938–1945
, Éditions du Roure, Polignac, 2005, p 81.

37
Jeanne Merle d’Aubigne, Emile C. Fabre, Violette Mouchon,
Les clandestins de Dieu: Cimade 1939–1945
(‘God’s Underground: Cimade 1939–1945’), Labor and Fides, Geneva, 1968.

38
I was in the Boy Scouts and we spent a lot of time learning to make bush shelters from trees using only string and an axe, learning to light fires without matches, and learning about using a map and compass to find our way around the Australian bush. We learned to leave secret signs on the ground to mark out a trail, and we could do a bit of first aid. I don’t think this was Lord Baden-Powell’s intention when he set up the Boy Scouts, but the skills we learned certainly would have made us better-than-average people smugglers.

French Boy Scouts (
éclaireurs
) were curiously divided along religious lines. There were
éclaireurs unionistes
(Protestant scouts),
éclaireurs israélites
(Jews) and
Scouts de France
(Roman Catholics). This religious division seems to have
made not a jot of difference to the Plateau rescue mission, though the sheer demographics of the situation meant that Protestant and Jewish scouts did most of the guiding work.

39
Author’s note: I doubt this.

40
Piton’s exact words were
passaient en manteaux de cuir et chapeau mou parmi une foule monstre
, which translates literally as men who ‘went about in leather coats and soft hats in a massive crowd’. ‘Men in leather jackets and felt hats’ was French slang for the Gestapo.

41
Abbé Folliet was, of course, a Catholic priest. In Annecy and the surrounding area, which had a largely Catholic population, Catholic priests and not just Protestant ministers carried out much of this underground pipeline work.

42
‘Noël’ is, of course, ‘Léon’ spelled backwards. It’s fair to say that the Resistance often lacked sophistication in the early days.

43
Daniel Trocmé had lived and worked in Switzerland for seven months, then in Austria for five months. He was completely fluent in German.

44
Throughout this account, Magda refers to the Germans as Gestapo, but that should not be taken as proof.

45
Fresnes was used by the Germans during World War II to hold captured SOE agents and members of the Resistance. Royallieu-Compiègne held mostly Jews but also some Resistance fighters. Some 40,000 inmates of Royallieu-Compiègne were deported, mostly to Auschwitz.

46
These BBC messages are a study in themselves. They were broadcast by the BBC French Service (
BBC Londres
) alongside the evening news and were referred to as
messages personnels
. An SOE agent in Occupied France would radio a request, heavily coded, for supplies. The message would include map coordinates for the drop field, a recognition code consisting of a single letter of the alphabet to be flashed in morse code to the arriving pilot, and a
message personnel
to be broadcast on the night of the drop. Most drops took place in good weather with clear moonlight.

47
The
Milice Française
(French Militia) was a paramilitary force created by the Vichy government in January 1943 to fight the Resistance. Known as
miliciens
, they were a bunch of brown-shirted right-wing thugs recruited initially from pre-war far-right movements. The Resistance feared them more than the Gestapo because they spoke fluent French and were generally well informed about local activities.

48
Indeed he does still own it. He showed me the battered box when I interviewed him in January 2012.

49
808 was another plastic explosive, properly called Nobel 808. It looked like green plasticine, and smelled distinctly of almonds.

50
Although Italy had changed sides and declared war on Germany, German troops remained in Italy, now as an occupying force.

51
Artemis was, of course, the Greek goddess of the hunt. The counterpart Roman goddess was Diana. So the Germans weren’t far off with their code name for ‘Diane’.

52
This type of force—two officers and a radio operator—was known as a Jedburgh team, named after a small town on the Scottish borders. Jedburgh teams wore military uniform, so they could not be classed as spies and shot out of hand if they were caught. They had the job of organising overt rather than clandestine activity.

53
The expression Secret Army typically refers to armed French Resistance fighters operating
inside
metropolitan France during the Occupation. As France was liberated, the armed Resistance was absorbed into the more official
Forces Françaises de l’Intérieure
(French Forces of the Interior), usually abbreviated to FFI. The FFI is not to be confused with Free French Forces, those remnants of the French Army, Navy and Air Force who chose to stick with General de Gaulle and fight alongside the Allies. In general, until the Liberation, Free French Forces fought
outside
metropolitan France, mostly in the Middle East, North Africa and Indo-China.

54
Planchon went on to become one of France’s most distinguished film and stage directors.

55
There have been suggestions that Neukirchen was a Gestapo officer rather than a regular soldier. That is incorrect: he was from the Feldgendarmerie, the German military police.

56
For French grammarians:
fichés
is, of course, the past participle plural of the French verb
ficher,
to file. But the literal translation ‘fileds’ is too horrible to contemplate.

57
Anybody reading this book and involved in modern law enforcement can take some comfort from an email Oscar Rosowsky sent me in November 2013. He wrote that the forgery results he achieved during World War II would be impossible in the digital age. ‘Each French citizen has a 13-digit identification number,’ he told me, ‘and within the almost infinite combination of numbers there is an almost infinite combination of characteristics. It is possible to extract instantly the information needed [to identify somebody] from this number.’

58
Lest the Swiss get too pleased with themselves over this performance, it should also be pointed out that they turned away slightly more refugees than they sheltered.

59
Serge Klarsfeld went on to become one of the most important historians of the Holocaust in France, as well as a doughty Nazi-hunter. So his testimony in favour of Schmähling carries a lot of weight.

60
As joint-editor in 1961 (with Richard Walsh, the publisher of this book) of the University of Sydney student newspaper
honi soit
, I can remember making very sure that any student peace organisations we supported were not
communist fronts. During this time, anyone calling for ‘peace’ risked being lumped in with ‘fellow travellers’ (inadvertent or unconscious communist supporters), or even regarded as one of Stalin’s ‘useful idiots’.

61
The Knights Templar enjoyed a certain recent notoriety after the 2003 publication of Dan Brown’s international blockbuster
The Da Vinci Code
. Anyone interested in a more historically accurate and less far-fetched account of their story would do better to read Clive Lindley’s novel
Templar Knights: Their secret history—The end of an epoch 1307–1314
, published in June 2012 as an ebook and available through Amazon.

62
The fact that St Bartholomew’s Day falls on 24 August every year is one of those little mysteries of history.

63
Some sources put the number at as high as 20,000, but 3000 is the most commonly quoted figure.

64
The French Nationality Law of 1889 laid down the same rules. It reaffirmed the right of return of those driven out of France for religious reasons, a right which extended to their descendants. The law continued in force until 19 October 1945, when the first postwar French government revoked it.

65
For the record, this solidarity has slipped a little in the twenty-first century. In the second round of the 2012 French presidential election, Le Chambon voted 56.5% for François Hollande, the Socialist candidate and eventual winner, against 43.5% for Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right Gaullist incumbent. In the first round, 183 Chambonnais (11.2%) even voted for Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the far-right National Front. In the election for the National Assembly held in June 2012, in the second round the UMP (Gaullist centre-right) candidate Laurent Wauquiez (son of the current mayor of Le Chambon) collected 59.3% of the vote, defeating the Socialist Party’s Guy Vocanson (40.7%).

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——
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