by Peter Grose
NOTES
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 weeks 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 prêtre (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 Pétair’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 Faiίdoli is a nice-sounding nonsense word, the first word of a popular Swiss folk song. Ifs 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.
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 th
e 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; Edouard 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 fichér, 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 Schmahling 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%).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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