The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (33 page)

‘Like all those who resisted the Germans,’ notes Philip Jacobson, who had just interviewed her for the
Sunday Telegraph
, ‘Mrs Gineste was in constant danger of being denounced by an informer and interrogated under torture, but her profound faith never wavered.’
¹⁹

At the Convent of Aubazine, near Brive in the Corrèze region, the Mother Superior, Sister Marie-Gonzague Bredoux, provided Sabbath candles—taken from the convent chapel—and set aside special Passover dishes, for the twelve Jewish girls between the ages of six and twelve, and one pregnant Jewish woman, under her care.
²⁰

In Paris itself, Mother Maria—Elizabeth Skobtsova, a Russian Orthodox nun—made use of her small convent to hide Jews who were on their way to more secure hiding places. This was only a small portion of her multifaceted rescue operation. Working closely with a fellow Russian émigré, the Russian Orthodox priest Father Klepinin, she collected food and clothing for Jews who were interned in the housing complex at Drancy, in a Paris suburb, where Jews were brought from all over France before deportation. She connived with the French garbage collectors to smuggle several children out of Drancy in garbage bins. She also supervised the production of false documents, and established contact with other groups to facilitate rescue. Father Klepinin issued false baptism certificates for those seeking new identities as non-Jews.

On 8 February 1943 Mother Maria and Father Klepinin were arrested by the Gestapo. Maria readily admitted to the charge of helping Jews elude the round-ups. She was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died from exhaustion on 31 March 1945, a few days before the camp was liberated. Father Klepinin had perished earlier, in February 1944, in the Dora-Mittelbau slave labour camp.
²¹

Like Mother Maria, Sofka Skipwith was also an émigré from Russia. Married to an Englishman, she had lived between the wars in both England and France. During the war she was interned as an enemy civilian in the spa town of Vittel, in one of the resort hotels. Some 250 Polish Jews, brought from Warsaw early in 1943, were also interned there, in much harsher conditions, although they held passports and visas for various Latin American countries: among them were the Jewish poet Yitzhak Katzenelson and his son Zwi.

On one occasion Sofka Skipwith was asked to help save a baby boy whose parents had just been taken away in the first deportation of Vittel Jews, on 18 April 1944. ‘We had been told’, recalled Madeleine White, her friend and fellow internee, ‘where we should take the baby and we cut the barbed wire the day before as usual. It was a place away from the hotels, quiet, among bushes and trees and we knew the time schedule of the sentinels. Sofka had fetched the baby at the last minute from the hospital asleep in a cardboard box, which had contained food sent by the Red Cross. I never knew whether it was a boy or a girl. At the appointed place we saw a woman hiding behind a tree; she gave a signal. I crawled under the wires (because I was smaller than Sofka) and over the space in between the three rows of barbed wire, pushing the box in front of me. I pushed it towards the waiting hands. After the war Sofka received news through the Red Cross that the baby had safely arrived and was being brought up in a kibbutz.’

Madeleine White recalled other cases where Sofka Skipwith was active in rescue work. One concerned a child of ten who was ‘smuggled out and hidden in Paris until the liberation; her upkeep was paid for; her father managed to jump from the train in which he was being taken with the others to Drancy and later joined her.’ Another was a baby only weeks old, ‘taken out through the barbed wire and entrusted to a person outside. Later the child reached Israel. (For these exits through barbed wire Sofka had a pair of wire cutters hidden in her mattress.)’ Then there was Felix Eisenstadt, who was officially sent by the Germans to the American hospital in Paris to be operated on. ‘With the help of a French doctor we knew in Paris, he was hidden after the operation and awaited the liberation in hiding.’
²²

Another of those whom Sofka Skipwith helped to survive was a Polish Jew, Hillel Seidman, who, Madeleine White recalled, ‘never slept two nights running in the same room between the second deportation and the liberation of Vittel camp in September 1944. Sofka, myself and others did what we could to save him and his friends.’
²³

Sofka Skipwith also managed to smuggle out of Vittel an appeal for help to the British Foreign Office, with a list of Jewish internees. She wrote the list in tiny handwriting on flimsy cigarette paper, so that if the courier were caught he could swallow the list. As a result of her efforts the British government made ninety Palestine certificates available for Jews at Vittel, and asked the Swiss government to forward them. One of the Jews on her list was Katzenelson. Unfortunately, when the certificates arrived on 15 July 1944, the Jews had gone. The second and final deportation had been on May 16, back to Poland, and to Auschwitz.
²⁴

In a letter to Yad Vashem when her case for an award was being considered (it was finally granted, as a result of the persistence of a British Jewish scholar, Dr Oppenheim, after her death), Sofka Skipwith wrote: ‘Sadly my efforts in the internment camp of Vittel did not succeed in saving Jewish lives, but I feel proud to be among those who attempted.’
²⁵

A NUMBER OF
French villages acted collectively to take in Jewish children and to shield them from deportation. The story of these villages is a high point in the narrative of rescue. Following the round-up of Jews in Paris on 16 July 1942, more than forty children were given sanctuary in the village of Chavagnes-en-Paillers, in the northern Vendée. One of them, Odette Meyers, later recalled: ‘Although we kept our Eastern European Jewish names, we were passed off as children of Catholic prisoners of war, sent to the nuns’ school. We learned to say our prayers and not to pay attention to the many German soldiers in the priests’ seminary across the street. We were treated well and we had as normal a Catholic childhood as children separated from their Jewish parents could have. After the war, we were fetched back to Paris.’ She added: ‘It did not occur to us that we had not been the only Jewish children to be saved by local families.’
²⁶

The most remarkable of all the village rescues took place in and around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in south central France. Le Chambon is part of a group of villages, mostly Protestant, on the Vivarais-Lignon plateau. Most of the inhabitants were the descendants of Huguenots who had known long periods of persecution and massacre at the hands of the King of France and his compatriots; but devout Roman Catholics, and those whose Christian belief was minimal, shared with the Protestant majority in the acts of rescue. The three thousand inhabitants of Le Chambon, like those of the surrounding villages, were asked by two Protestant pastors, André Trocmé and Edouard Théis, to offer shelter to Jews even at the risk of their own lives. In those villages, whose own population together did not exceed five thousand, as many as three and a half thousand Jews were given sanctuary at different times, and survived the war.

An active and outspoken pacifist, Pastor Trocmé had been posted in 1934 to the remote region by his church, the Eglise Reformée de France, which hoped thereby to restrict his influence. A year before the outbreak of war he had founded the first secondary school on the plateau, based on principles of tolerance and internationalism, and had brought in Théis to be the headmaster.

Trocmé’s wife Magda, of mixed Italian and Russian parentage, whom he had met while studying theology in New York in 1926, gave immediate help to any refugees who came to their door, and then put them in contact with those in the village, and in other villages on the plateau, who could give them shelter.
²⁷

Several homes were set up on the Vivarais-Lignon plateau under the auspices of different Christian relief organizations for Jewish children, including four institutions run by Secours Suisse aux Enfants (Swiss Children’s Aid). Other children were placed in private homes and boarding houses in the villages, and on farms in the surrounding countryside.

Built in 1938 to accommodate fourteen local children, the College of Cévenol saw its student body expanding hugely with the arrival of 220 Jewish refugees fleeing from the internment camps to the south. The children, like their parents and other adults, were welcomed without hesitation. They were housed on farms or in hotels and were hidden in the countryside whenever the Germans came through. ‘As soon as the soldiers left, we would go into the forest and sing a song,’ recalled August Bohny, who ran a boarding house for Jewish students. ‘When they heard that song, the Jews knew it was safe to come home.’ Whenever possible, the refugees were sent by means of a well-organized underground network to safety in Switzerland or Spain.

When the Vichy police began rounding up Jews in August 1942, the hitherto legal assistance to refugees provided by relief workers and local residents turned swiftly into undercover resistance activity. Refugees were hidden during round-ups. False identification papers, birth certificates and ration cards were produced. Groups of Jews were moved secretly at night to the Swiss border and smuggled across.
²⁸

On one occasion, when the Vichy Minister of Youth came to the Cévenol school to urge the students to participate in Vichy’s Hitler-Youth-style student organization, the students refused, informing the Minister: ‘We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. But we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching. If our comrades, whose only fault is to be born in another religion, received the orders to let themselves be deported, or even examined, they would disobey the orders received, and we would try to hide them as best we could.’
²⁹

Hiding them was exactly what was done. ‘The Gestapo came looking for Jews,’ one villager later told the American writer Robert Daley. ‘They came with three buses, and the buses left empty. We told them there were no Jews here.’ The woman added: ‘Everyone participated. Everyone agreed they had a moral obligation to help. The Protestant pastors, about a dozen of them, played a very important role. They had a network. They used a code. They’d call each other up and say, “I’m sending you three Old Testaments.”’
³⁰

In January 1943, Trocmé, Théis, and the director of the Cévenol school, Roger Darcissac, were arrested by the Vichy authorities and interned at the St Paul d’Eyjeaux camp for political prisoners near Limoges. They were released four weeks later.
³¹

Mordecai Paldiel commented: ‘Almost all the people of the plateau were involved in saving these Jews, and no one said a word.’
³²
Juliette Usach, a physician, was in charge of La Guespy children’s home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Another medical doctor, Dr Roger Leforestier, and his wife Danielle, gave essential medical care to those in hiding who fell sick. Dr Leforestier had spent a year helping Albert Schweitzer at his leper hospital in central Africa. On 4 August 1944, only a few days before the liberation of the plateau, Leforestier was arrested in Le Puy and jailed at the Fort Montluc prison in Lyons. Three weeks later, on August 20, he was among the group of Frenchmen killed at St Genis-Laval on orders from Klaus Barbie.
³³

Henri and Emma Héritier gave shelter in their small farm on the plateau to a succession of Jewish children over four years. One of those children, Pierre Sauvage, later made a film,
Weapons of the Spirit
, about the plateau, and about his own rescuers. The Héritiers were among those taking the greatest risks, Pierre Sauvage noted, ‘for they knew full well that among the Jews they had taken in was a teenager who had become the village forger, spending his nights making false identity papers for all who needed them. Towards the end of the war, German soldiers were stationed smack in the middle of the village. Monsieur Héritier is a beekeeper. His response to the increased threat: he hid the forger’s paraphernalia in his beehives.’
³⁴

Among those running Le Coteau Fleuri refugee home near Le Chambon was Pastor Marc Donadille, who had earlier helped get Jews out of the Vichy internment camps and sent them to the plateau. On one occasion he foiled an attempt by the French Vichy police to round up the Jews in the home for deportation; and at his own home in the village of Saint Privat-de-Vallongue, in Lozère, Pastor Donadille and his wife gave shelter to a young Jewish girl, Eva Ahlfeld.
³⁵

Hermine Orsi, a Frenchwoman living in Marseilles, hid Jews in her own home, including a Polish-Jewish journalist, Benjamin Feingold. She also provided Jews with false papers, and arranged for a number of Jewish children to be taken to Le Chambon.
³⁶

In La Garneyre, a hamlet near Le Chambon, seven-year-old Hélène Federman and her twelve-year-old brother Henri were given shelter from the storm. They had been born in France, their parents in Poland. ‘Madame Mendon took me in’, she later wrote. ‘The Verillacs took care of my brother. There were two other farms in the hamlet. The Picots took in two of my cousins, Annette and Micheline Federman.’ Another Jewish child was taken into the third farm.
³⁷

Hélène Federman (later Resnick), who emigrated to the United States after the war, later reflected about her rescuer: ‘I’m not sure how much she knew of the danger she was risking by keeping me. Her pastor had asked for help in shielding children from the Germans and she, along with many others, opened her home and her heart to us. The Germans never got there. They did get to the nearest town and arrested many people, but as isolated as we were, with no roads that could accommodate cars or trucks, we managed to stay safe until the end of the war.’