A Good Place to Hide

by Peter Grose

  I often hid two Austrian Jews, Lipschutz and Schmidt, who left the House of Rocks when they realised that Daniel Trocmé was being naively over-confident After the grilling of the House’s management around Easter 1943, the two Austrians were sent to me and I understand that they did not return but kept constantly on the move, changing their address all the time, and turning up at my house in the middle of the night. In June 1943 they were established at the parish hall, which was always open, and from which I heard them move out around five in the morning

  However, most of the residents at the House of Rocks remained in place. Daniel Trocmé was given plenty of warning that there was trouble ahead. ‘Oscar Rosowsky and Jacqueline Decourdemanche saw Daniel Trocmé in person and told him that the residents of the House of Rocks should be dispersed,’ Pierre Fayol wrote later. ‘Grouping them all in the one place put them all in danger, a danger which Daniel Trocmé didn’t want to accept.’

  Even after the arrest of Ferber, Daniel Trocmé continued to resist the idea of dispersing his residents. ‘Straight after this first alert, Daniel Trocmé was warned again,’ Fayol wrote. ‘Unhappily, he believed it was his duty to refuse. On the other hand, five of the residents of the House of Rocks pulled out despite the fact that they had no idea at the time whether they would be able to find another refuge.’

  In fairness to Daniel Trocmé, it should be said that he was doing no more than continuing an existing policy on the Plateau. The line taken by his prominent cousin, André Trocmé, together with Pastor Theis and the other champions of passive resistance, was simply to stand your ground. Do the right thing, whatever the law says. But do it openly. Our enemies are human beings, too. Reason with them. Show them a better way.

  Then, at about six thirty on the morning of 29 June, fourteen plainclothes German police burst into the House of Rocks. They were heavily armed, with submachine guns as well as the usual side arms beloved of police forces everywhere. They came in two front-wheel-drive Citroëns painted dark grey, together with a canvas-sided truck with bench seats. They clearly meant business: they arrived with guns drawn, and four policemen armed with submachine guns were posted around the house to make sure nobody got away.

  There is some doubt to this day as to which police force the raiders came from. All early accounts say they were Gestapo, but they may have been Kripo (Kriminalpolizei) or even German military police (Feldgendarmerie). Without uniforms, who could tell? They had come all the way from Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the large French region of the Auvergne, which includes the Haute-Loire. No matter who they were or where they came from, they were an unpleasant bunch of thugs.

  First they stormed all over the house, throwing open the bedroom doors and barking in German: ‘Raus! Raus!’ (‘Out! Out!’) Then they assembled the students in the large dining room and began the interrogations. At about seven thirty, they realised Daniel Trocmé was not there. Where was he? He’s at The Crickets, they were told. A party of policemen went off to arrest him. Daniel had enough warning and enough time to escape into the woods behind the house, but he chose to stay at The Crickets. He was the director of the House of Rocks, and he felt he had to be there with his students. He was promptly arrested and taken back to join the others. Magda remembers that Suzanne Heim, one of the staff at The Crickets, burst into the presbytery, shouting: ‘Madame Trocmé, run, they’ve arrested Daniel Trocmé.’

  I grabbed my bicycle and with Suzanne raced to the House of Rocks, where I went in while Suzanne rode back to The Crickets. Why did they let me in? I don’t know… the doors were open, but the doctor had tried to go in to see a child who was sick, and they blocked the way. As for me, I left the presbytery in such a rush that I hadn’t taken my apron off. Maybe the Germans thought I was one of the staff. I went in through the kitchen and what did I see in the big dining room? On one side of the room was a table with three or four men from the Gestapo44 plus the management of the House of Rocks, including the accountant. Each man from the Gestapo had a submachine gun. On the other side of the room, all the students were lined up against the wall At the very back was Daniel Trocmé. Did they know that Daniel was someone important?

  I tried to approach him, but a Gestapo man shouted at me … I stopped in my tracks then headed back to the kitchen. Nobody moved. They must have thought I was a cook or a chambermaid. I sat down. Time slipped away, then the students started to walk past me, one at a time, into a little storeroom at the back of the kitchen. There the Gestapo, who had a large directory list of names, demanded that they identify themselves. When they came back, some of them had black eyes and all of them looked badly frightened. Some of them gabbled: ‘I’ve got a bit of money in my room, go quickly and look…’ or Ï have the address of my mother, or my fiancée..! or ‘I have a gold watch, go and take it…’ The poor kids didn’t realise that the Gestapo had already searched everywhere and taken everything.

  By ten o’clock the Germans were hungry. Magda managed to rustle up a bit of food—two scarce eggs each, and a bit of bread. In the process, she was able to have a quick word with Daniel. He reminded her that a few weeks ago a Spanish student from the House of Rocks had saved a German soldier from drowning in the River Lignon. ‘Go to the Hôtel du Lignon,’ Daniel urged her, ‘and tell them that the Gestapo are arresting everybody here, and remind them of the rescue … Who knows, we might be able to save a life.’ Magda jumped back on her bicycle and pedalled for dear life into the centre of the village.

  The sentry at the Hôtel du Lignon didn’t want to let her in, but Magda spoke reasonable German and was a well-known figure in the village. Finally, the sentry relented.

  There were two or three officers sitting at a table by a window on the first floor. I approached them, and they asked me what I wanted. I told them I wanted to know which of them had been in Le Chambon for a long time. One of them said to me: ‘I’ve been here for weeks.’ I said: ‘Remember the German soldier who was about to drown in the Lignon?’ Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘I remember it very well.’I said: ‘It was one of the students from the House of Rocks who saved him.’ Yes, I remember it perfectly.’ ‘Well, this morning the Gestapo arrived…’

  Before Magda could finish, the Germans butted in. They had nothing to do with the Gestapo, they said. Magda was unfazed. It’s a matter of honour,’ she told the officer. ‘I am a woman. You are an officer. We are both people of honour. I’m simply asking you to tell the truth, to testify that the rescue took place during your time in Le Chambon.’ Two German officers reluctantly agreed to accompany Magda back to the House of Rocks. They walked, one on each side of her, while she pushed her bicycle. They had not gone far when Magda met two girls from her Christian Union, both on bicycles. Could the German officers borrow their bicycles? If it was important, yes. So this rather odd trio of cyclists, Magda and two German officers on girls’ bikes, pedalled back to the House of Rocks.

  This time it was not so easy for Magda to get inside. When she first arrived she had been dismissed as unimportant. But now it was apparent that she spoke German, and that she was talking to two German officers, whom she had brought back with her. She certainly couldn’t just slip past. She made the two German officers repeat their promise to tell the story of the rescue in the river. Meanwhile, she asked one of the police officers if she could talk to Daniel Trocmé. No, she was told. But come back at midday and you can talk to him then.

  She came back as ordered, with her son Jean-Pierre. This time an entirely different scene greeted her. The students were lined up in single file on the outside staircase, with Daniel Trocmé at the head of the queue. She went over to him. As she did so, she could see on the balcony at the head of the stairs two or three of the raiding policemen beating up a young Dutch Jew, shouting at him: ‘Pig Jew! Pig Jew!’

  Daniel tried to reassure Magda. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’ll go with my students. I’ll do my best to explain these things to them, and I’ll defend them for as long as it’s possible. Please write to my parents
and tell them what happened.’ He then offered a little wry humour. ‘You know I love travel,’ he told Magda. ‘I’m not afraid, and it’s my duty.’ Then, in dribs and drabs, the students climbed into the lorries, and were driven away.

  In all the horror of the situation, there was one happy moment. When Magda walked into the dining room after the lorries had gone, she saw Luis (’Pepito’) Gausachs, the Spanish student who had saved the German soldier from drowning. The two German officers from the hotel had kept their word.

  As well as taking Daniel Trocmé, the German police took away eighteen students: five Spanish, three French, two Dutch, two German, two Belgian, two Luxembourgeois, one Austrian and one Romanian. For inexplicable reasons, the Germans left five students behind, including Gausachs. Another eight students had either prudently made themselves scarce or were simply away for one reason or another. So thirteen avoided arrest.

  There was predictable uproar. Prefect Bach wrote to the staff officer of the German occupying force in Le Puy—presumably Major Schmahling—demanding the release of those arrested. He received a reply from a Captain Lange:

  In response to your letter on the subject of the imprisonments carried out by the security forces, the Staff Officer informs you that after communicating by telephone with the Head Liaison Staff Officer, he was informed that he could not be given any information, as the Security Service in Clermont-Ferrand knows nothing about it, and that this affair arose with Vichy. The Liaison Officer recommends that you get in touch directly with Vichy.

  On 30 July, Maurice Leroy, Inspector General from the French Ministry of Education, wrote to the head of the French military demanding that Daniel Trocmé be released, adding that Trocmé ‘does not have a single drop of Jewish blood in his veins but he has German blood—his maternal grandmother was German’. Others wrote along similar lines. It did no good.

  Under pressure from the French government, the Paris headquarters of the RSHA looked into the whole episode, and reported on it no fewer than three times: on 27 August, then on 1 September, and again on 18 November. Each time they came to the same conclusion: the House of Rocks was a nest of ‘loathsome undesirables’, a bunch of ‘German haters’ who hid German deserters, STO dodgers and Jews. These reports are quite revealing. Given that of the nineteen people arrested only seven were Jewish, it is clear that the Germans saw the raid as part of their struggle against the burgeoning Resistance movement, rather than as a simple round-up of Jews.

  The raid on the House of Rocks also marked the end of the Plateau’s reputation as a sanctuary. All sorts of things finished with it. When André Trocmé, Edouard Theis and Roger Darcissac had been arrested in February 1943, the uproar that followed was enough to convince the Vichy authorities that they would be better off letting the three men go. The raid on the House of Rocks demonstrated that the Germans were deaf to this kind of protest. In the past, passive resistance had worked. Not anymore.

  Clearly, the ‘safe’ houses were no longer safe. If machine-gun-toting German police could march into the House of Rocks unchallenged and arrest anybody they chose, then where did that leave The Wasps’ Nest, The Crickets, The Flowery Hill and all the other shelters? While courageous farmers scattered across the countryside might still offer their barns, outhouses and spare rooms to hapless refugees, concentrations of refugees in guesthouses and hostels looked increasingly dangerous. It made raids like the 29 June affair look all too easy, and all too tempting for the Germans.

  • • •

  Of the eighteen students arrested in the 29 June raid, four—all of them Spanish—were not deported. Pedro Moral-Lopez and Sérafin Marin-Cavre were released, from Fresnes prison on the eastern fringes of Paris;45 Félix Martin-Lopez and Jules Villasante-Dura were released from Royallieu-Compiègne internment camp, 80 kilometres northeast of Paris. All four survived the war.

  Less than two weeks after his arrest, Daniel Trocmé wrote to his family from the camp at Moulins, near the town of Vichy. He wrote fourteen letters and postcards in all, from various camps and prisons. Some were written on toilet paper. At Moulins, the Jews were separated from the rest of those arrested and sent separately to the camps in the east. None returned. Five of the arrested students are known to have been part of convoy 57, which pulled out of Paris-Bobigny station at nine thirty on the morning of 18 July, bound for Auschwitz.

  Two French Protestant students arrested in the raid on the House of Rocks miraculously survived the war. Jean-Marie Schoen lived through Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. Pastor André Guyonnaud emerged alive from Dachau.

  Daniel Trocmé was not so lucky. From Moulins, he was moved to Frontstalag 122 at Royallieu-Compiègne. He was then deported to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, and moved internally to Mittelbau-Dora. Dora was a division of Buchenwald camp, whose inmates worked as slave labourers in underground factories building secret weapons. Conditions were appalling. Around 60,000 prisoners passed through Dora, of whom 20,000 died there—9000 from exhaustion, 350 hanged, and the rest from disease and starvation. In January and February 1944, 2000 of the most sick and disabled Dora prisoners were moved to Maidanek camp in Poland, and Daniel Trocmé appears to have been one of them. On 2 April 1944 he was murdered at Maidanek. The Germans never stopped believing he was Jewish.

  Part IV

  • • •

  RESISTANCE

  13

  Violence

  There are two hotly disputed versions of a (relatively minor) event in the chain that led to André Trocmé’s departure from Le Chambon in mid-1943. Here is Oscar Rosowskys account, set out in his contribution to the 1990 symposium Le Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Accueil et Résistance 1939-1944.

  It was vital that Trocmé should leave and go into hiding. The idea came to me to invent the very real threat of a young Resistance fighter taken prisoner and ‘turned’, who could have undergone a change of heart and warned Léon Eyraud of the dangers of arrest by the Gestapo, of which the pastor would be the object. I headed back to the farm at La Fayolle to draft the main points of this letter, in which we decided also to name Dr Le Forestier. He was going to be asked to confess to his role in a minor anti-German provocation when he gave a fat German orchestra conductor a morning serenade with his car horn in the middle of Le Chambon after this bloke plonked himself in the road and prevented the doctor from passing.

  Léon Eyraud liked my idea. I don’t know by which route or how in the end he informed André Trocmé and Dr Le Forestier. But the latter never again indulged in troublemaking in public, and André Trocmé, who was under strong pressure at the time and in the same direction from the Reformed Church, accepted that he should go into hiding until the Liberation.

  So in this version it is a forged letter from Oscar Rosowsky that does the trick.

  André Trocmé’s version of events is the same in spirit but different in method. In his unpublished memoirs, he writes that a young Resistance fighter who had been ‘turned’ came to see him in person. No letter, no Léon Eyraud.

  ‘I am a double agent’ the young maquisard began. ‘I pretend to work for the Gestapo, but I feed them a lot of false information. However, that lets me listen in to the plans of their agents. So, the other day in Valence, they decided to put a price on your life. You are going to be assassinated.’

  ‘Assassinated?’

  Yes. The system works like this. The Gestapo tell French criminals that they can free them from French prison and have their sentence suspended. All they have to do is make some troublesome people disappear. It’s a villainous business. If the French police arrest the criminal, the Gestapo insist that he is handed over to them. The Gestapo then change his identity, and he moves somewhere else.’

  ‘That would explain the recent assassinations of perfectly honest people,’ I exclaimed.

  You’ve got it!’ the young man replied. ‘By doing this, the Germans don’t stir up anti-German feeling: nothing seen, nothing known! People just don’t see the pattern in these strange assassinations.’


  ‘Are you telling me now that I’m going to be killed?’

  ‘If you don’t go into hiding, yes.’

  Of course, there is no logical reason why both stories should not be true. However, neither narrative is likely to have made a jot of difference to Trocmé’s decision. What surely turned the tide was the argument put to him by the Reformed Church.

  The logic of the situation was clear. The arrest of Daniel Trocmé made the arrest of his much more prominent cousin André something close to a certainty. And that would lead to unimaginable trouble on the Plateau. This was clear to Resistance figures like Fayol and Eyraud, as well as to some of Trocmé’s fellow pastors. In his memoirs, Trocmé set out his belief that Marcel Jeannet, the pastor at Le Mazet, had discussed Trocmé’s exile with Pierre Rozier, president of the Regional Council of the Reformed Church, who contacted Marc Boegner, asking him to intervene.

  Boegner did not come to see Trocmé in person, but he sent his number two, Pastor Maurice Rohr, a distant cousin of Trocmé’s. In Trocmé’s account of the meeting, Rohr got straight to the point.

  ‘With the arrest of Daniel and his students’ he said to me, ‘we’ve already had enough trouble. How would it help, adding another name to a list of martyrs that’s already too long?’

  ‘I can serve as an example,’ I told him. ‘I have preached nonviolent resistance. I should stick to my post until the end’

  ‘The parish is already troubled enough,’ Rohr said to me. ‘You have a price on your head. You know how these executions are carried out. You go for a ride in a car, and your body is found in a corner of a wood. Or they burst into the house at dinnertime, and the death squad from the Gestapo sprays the whole family with machine-gunfire. How can you live with the thought that not only will you be killed, but you could be responsible for the death or injury of your wife, your children and your guests?’ And Rohr listed some recent cases.