by Margi Preus
After the patrol left, he told the group his idea, but only one other person was willing to try it. The others returned to France, but Max and his new friend reentered Switzerland safely.
HANNE’S FALSE IDENTIFICATION CARD
In February 1943, it was Hanne’s turn to try for Switzerland. Thanks to her Swiss aunt, she had an entrance visa, but it was not possible to procure an exit visa from France. She was given false papers, and, dressing herself in layers of clothes rather than taking a telltale suitcase, she set off by train and eventually by foot to cross into Switzerland, where she was able to reunite with Max.
After the war, Hanne learned her mother had perished in Auschwitz. Max’s parents also perished there.
Hanne and Max married in Switzerland, had a daughter, and moved to the United States in 1948. They still live in a suburb of New York City, and Hanne has spoken often about her experiences. Max and Hanne also contributed to the 2017 exhibit Conspiracy of Goodness: How French Protestants Saved Thousands of Jews During WWII at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College, Queens, New York.
They tell their own stories here: http://khc.qcc.cuny.edu/goodness/reflect/hanne-and-max/.
And here: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn506661.
PAUL MAJOLA
Jules “La Crapule” (the scoundrel) is an entirely fictional character, although there was a young shepherd boy (aged ten to thirteen) named Paul Majola who delivered forged papers for Oscar Rosowsky (Jean-Paul) at night and in all types of weather.
Plainclothes officer Leopold Praly (Perdant) was a young policeman assigned to “maintain positive relationships with the locals,” as well as to report their doings to the Vichy government via the regional prefect. Although he was probably less of a nuisance than Inspector Perdant in this story, he did make some arrests, including Jakob Lewin and his brother, Martin. Perdant’s recollection of this event—of the young people surrounding the bus, singing, the gift of chocolate—is based on the recollections of those involved in the actual arrest as recorded by Renée Kann Silver, who was also sheltered as a child on the plateau.
Inspector Praly was shot and killed by maquisards on August 6, 1943, a scant eight months into his job in Le Chambon.
The events transpiring at the château on June 30 are entirely fictional. However, it is true that an escape route used in one of the guesthouses was through a secret door in the cellar into a tunnel that led to the forest.
THE ESCAPE ROUTE AT ONE OF THE HOUSES THAT SHELTERED JEWS
OTHERS IN THE STORY
Madeleine Dreyfus (Madame Desault) was a Jew from Paris, living in Lyons, who worked tirelessly rescuing children from French concentration camps through the OSE. She often brought two or three groups of children from the camps every week and took them to the farms and villages herself. At first the children were brought legally to the villages, but later they had to be brought clandestinely, already with false papers.
Eventually Madeleine was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Although many people she worked with and many others working in the resistance died, Madeleine survived and returned to her husband and three children.
Mireille Philip (Madame Créneau) was sometimes referred to as “the Boss.” She helped make false papers or arranged for people to get them. Official-looking stamps were carved into the bottoms of spools of thread she kept in her sewing basket. She and Pastor Theis established a rescue organization to help refugees get to Switzerland. Sometimes she took groups herself, traveling in the cabs of trains disguised in a coverall, her hair tucked up under a cap—everything covered in coal dust. She helped find safe places for refugees and eventually went to help the maquis, the armed French underground. “Be frightened, but keep going,” she told her replacement. She did this while also raising five children by herself—her husband, André, was working for the French resistance in England with Charles de Gaulle.
Virginia Hall (“the American spy lady,” as Claude describes her) is perhaps the unlikeliest character in the story. She was an American who worked for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine organization. She was sent to France and spent some time in the Haute-Loire region of France, which included the area around Le Chambonsur-Lignon, organizing the resistance and coordinating parachute drops. She was a radio operator, who, when electricity was in short supply, rigged a bicycle to a generator to power her “suitcase radio.” Jean Nallet, who joined the maquis while still a student at L’Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, told of powering her transmitter by pedalling a stationary bicycle. Messages regarding parachute drops would come in codes like “the soup is hot” or “the shark has a soft nose.”
VIRGINIA HALL
As a result of an earlier hunting accident, she had a wooden leg with an aluminum foot. She named the leg Cuthbert and called the foot, in which she sometimes stored documents, her aluminum puppy.
Sometimes she disguised herself as an old French peasant woman with a herd of goats, which allowed her to limp about unnoticed on the plateau, making contacts and scouting parachute drop locations.
The Germans knew Virginia Hall as “the woman who limps” and considered her “the most dangerous Allied agent in France.”
After the war, she married one of her maquis friends, returned to the United States, and joined the CIA. She retired at age sixty to a farm in Maryland where she raised, among other things, goats.
The Farmers
Most of the farms on the plateau were poor. Those farmers who sheltered children were given a small amount of money to help pay for doctor visits and incidentals. Often the real parents of the hidden children didn’t know where their children were—it was safer that way. Madeleine Dreyfus would bring letters if she could when she visited to check on the children. Although in general the children were fed and cared for, not all of them had pleasant experiences at the farms, and all of them lived with fear and uncertainty. As one survivor said, “We were never children.”
The Pastors
As well as encouraging their parishioners to engage in nonviolent forms of resistance, the Protestant pastors on the plateau were involved in the resistance in a variety of ways. André Trocmé and Edouard Theis sheltered and helped find shelter for Jewish children and refugees. Theis and another pastor, André Morel, smuggled them to Switzerland. Some pastors forged papers. The pastor of Freycenet received coded messages on his radio for the resistance. Another hid fake ration cards in books in his library until they could be exchanged for authentic ration cards. The pastor in Le Mazet organized a group of Scouts to help him smuggle a group of Jewish boys to Switzerland disguised as Scouts.
LEFT TO RIGHT: ÉDOUARD THEIS, ROGER DARCISSAC (HEAD OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL), AND ANDRÉ TROCMÉ INSIDE THE INTERNMENT CAMP AT SAINT-PAUL EYJEAUX
André Trocmé and Edouard Theis, the pastors in Le Chambon, were outspoken in their encouragement of nonviolent resistance. When asked by the authorities for a list of all the Jewish refugees in Le Chambon, Trocmé refused, saying, “We don’t know what a Jew is. We only know human beings.”
The sermon that Céleste recalls on her nighttime bicycle ride are Trocmé’s and Theis’s words, delivered the day after the Armistice that Germany and France signed on June 22,1940. Trocmé was a charismatic catalyst, famous for his Christmas Day stories. The one delivered at the Christmas service in this story is paraphrased from one of his stories in the book Angels and Donkeys, translated by his daughter, Nelly.
Much has been written about Pastor Trocmé and his wife, Magda, also renowned as a courageous and tenacious advocate for Jewish and other refugees. She also taught Italian at L’Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole while caring for a family of four and giving room and board to four more people to support the family budget.
Their daughter, Nelly Trocmé Hewett, a resident of the United States, has been a champion of the story of the plateau, speaking at schools, universities, libraries, museums and synagogues all over the country.
She was an invaluable advisor in the telling of this story. (She is pictured as a teen with Catherine Cambessédès and Marco Darcissac on this page).
Both Pastor Trocmé and Pastor Theis, along with the director of the public school, Roger Darcissac (Marco’s father), were arrested by the Vichy police in February 1943. They were released in March of the same year. Shortly afterward, both pastors went into hiding.
Some of the pastors used coded messages to let one another know that refugees were being sent their way. “I’m sending you two Old Testaments,” a note might say, meaning two Jewish refugees were coming to the parsonage for help.
MANY OTHERS
Not only the area’s Protestants were involved in these activities. Many of the plateau’s Catholics, Jews, and agnostics were active participants, as well as its nonsectarian Darbyists (sometimes compared to Quakers or the Amish). L’Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole had many distinguished Jewish professors who had been ousted from their positions at universities in France, Austria, Poland, and Germany. With the aid of their colleagues, some continued to teach throughout the war, without taking false names.
Jewish refugees were also involved in the running of the children’s homes. Emile Sèches, along with his wife, Solange, were proprietors of Tante Soly, the house right next door to the hotel where recuperating German soldiers were billeted. Emile Sèches was Jewish; Madame Sèches was Catholic. Some Jewish adults also stayed at local residences, including a rabbi who lived for three years at Beau Soleil.
Although scores of French citizens, convents, and churches all over France, as well as the Grand Mosque of Paris, sheltered Jews and Jewish children, it is important to recognize that the plateau of the Haute-Loire was unusual in the sheer scale of its involvement, and in its universal commitment to this cause.
How was this possible? Were there no informants? Perhaps because of their background as Huguenots with a history of persecution, its citizens were sympathetic to other persecuted people. Aided by their taciturn nature, the inhabitants kept quiet. Even the children knew to be quiet. When two young Jewish girls who had once been friends in Germany ran into each other in the village of Le Chambon, neither girl said a word of greeting or acknowledged the other.
There were many, many remarkable and courageous people, both adults and young people, who were actively involved in resistance activities—I regret I can’t name them all. If you would like to find out more, please refer to the bibliography.
GURS INTERNMENT CAMP
CONCENTRATION CAMPS
During World War II, concentration camps rose “like mushrooms after a rain,” according to Himmler, Germany’s second-in-command. There were labor camps, POW camps, collection and transit camps, internment, and extermination camps—all of them different kinds of concentration camps.
Although we often think of concentration camps as being located only in Germany and Poland, there were dozens of them in France. Even though none of these were extermination camps, hundreds of people died in them from disease, starvation, exposure, or execution. Of the 340,000 Jews living in France at the start of the war, 75,000 were deported to extermination camps, where 72,500 were killed.
THE BOY SCOUTS IN FRANCE
JAKOB LEWIN ABOUT TO LEAVE FOR SWITZERLAND DISGUISED AS A FRENCH BOY SCOUT. HE AND HIS BROTHER, MARTIN, WERE ARRESTED BY OFFICER PRALY. JAKOB WAS RELEASED SHORTLY AFTERWARD. MARTIN WAS SENT TO GURS AND EVENTUALLY MADE IT BACK TO LE CHAMBON.
The German occupiers had a complicated relationship with youth sporting organizations, including the Scouts, which is what the Boy Scouts were called in France. These organizations were very popular before and during the war, with three million enrolled youths, ages fourteen to twenty. Scouting was forbidden in the northern occupied zone of France, as it was considered a way for young men to train for resistance activities. Even so, it was tolerated in the south, and a Scout uniform was thought to be a good disguise by the resistance.
Many of the young men who joined the maquis had been Boy Scouts, with helpful training in outdoor living and survival techniques. Often, they used their Scout names, such as Ostrich, Giraffe, Otter, and so on, as code names in the maquis.
THE SCHOOL AND GUESTHOUSES
SNOWBALL FIGHT OUTSIDE ONE OF THE HOMES RUN BY SWISS AID FOR CHILDREN
Young people from all over Europe came to Le Chambon both as students and as refugees. They attended the public school or the private high school, L’Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, founded in 1938 by Pastors André Trocmé and Edouard Theis with an innovative educational mission of teaching peace, nonviolence, internationalism, foreign languages, sports, and artistic expression. The school was coeducational, and the honor system prevailed. Students from out of town and refugees stayed in guesthouses in the village.
LE CHAMBON STREET (A POPULAR SLEDDING ROUTE), PROBABLY THE WINTER OF 1941–42
In its early years there was no dedicated school building. Classes took place in any available spaces: an empty hotel room, at the church, in an attic, in the basement of the pharmacy, in the kitchen of one of the teachers, and even in the large bathroom of Le Colombier, a residence for girls attending the high school.
A MIX OF LOCAL AND JEWISH TEENAGERS IN LE CHAMBON, WINTER 1943–44
The area attracted tourists and those seeking the clean air and healthy food of the high plateau. Thus, Le Chambon and the surrounding villages were well equipped to host children and other refugees, with thirty-eight guesthouses and eleven children’s hostels that could be called into service, as well as a number of hotels.
Even today, Le Chambon is still welcoming refugees.
Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center has awarded Israel’s highest civilian honor, the Righteous Among the Nations, to more than ninety individuals on the plateau. The Diplôme d’Honneur, awarded by Yad Vashem, “pays homage to the inhabitants of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and to the neighboring communes for coming to the assistance of Jews . . . from 1940–1944. Obeying their conscience, they put their own lives in danger by welcoming persecuted Jews into their homes and by providing for their needs thanks to their love for their fellow man.”
No one kept track, and so no one knows how many Jews were sheltered on or passed through the plateau. The most agreed-upon estimate is about 3,500.
A TRANSLATION OF THE LETTER WRITTEN BY STUDENTS TO GEORGES LAMIRAND, YOUTH MINISTER FOR THE VICHY GOVERNMENT
HISTORICAL TIMELINE*
1934
Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany, systematically begins eroding rights of Jews.
1938
NOV. 9–10
Kristallnacht—Jewish businesses and synagogues in Germany destroyed, 30,000 men arrested, at least 100 killed.
1939
Germany invades Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg.
Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia and France declare war on Germany.
1940
MAY
Geman army enters France.
JUNE 22
France capitulates; armistice (an agreement to cease hostilities) signed between France and Germany, Germany occupies the northern half of France. The southern half of France remains unoccupied but under the governance of French leader Marshal Philippe Pétain, who feels it is in France’s interest to collaborate with Nazi Germany.
JULY 1
Pétain’s government moves to Vichy in the southern, unoccupied zone of France and begins to enact policies copied from Nazi laws and ordinances, including those restricting the rights of Jews and others.
SEPT. 27
Germany starts census of Jews in occupied zone of France.
OCT. 3
Vichy enacts first Statut des Juifs, banning Jews from certain professions, including medicine, law, journalism, commercial and industrial jobs.
1941
MAR.–NOV.
The Vichy government enacts increasingly harsher restrictions on Jews, including authorizing confiscation of Jewish property.
MAY
/> Guesthouses in Le Chambon begin to take in children rescued from camps.
JUNE 22
Germany begins invasion of Russia.
DEC. 7–8
Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor; U.S. declares war on Japan.
DEC. 11
Germany declares war on the U.S.
1942
MAR. 1
Allies begin bombing of France
MAR. 27
First train of Jews leaves Drancy (internment camp in northern France) for Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland.
MAY 29
Jews in occupied zone, six years old and up, ordered to wear a yellow star.
JULY 16–17
Round-up of Jews in Paris and sent to the “Vel d’Hiv” stadium. Nearly 13,000 people, including children, were arrested and deported to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.
AUG.
First raids by French police on Le Chambon
AUG. 5
Start of deportations from southern zone of France to Auschwitz and other concentration and extermination camps in Poland and Germany.
AUG. 13