Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  After breakfast, the day followed a strict timetable, with children of school age setting off with their coevals for a day in the classroom. The younger ones marched along the main street in a crocodile to the junior school, holding hands and singing Hebrew songs. If they adapted easily to the French curriculum, many older ones had academic difficulties. Freddy X recalled starting school in Düsseldorf with lessons in German, before his parents fled in 1938 to Belgium. There, he attended school for two years, speaking Yiddish in the playground and Flemish in the classroom. For the next two years he had no lessons while in concentration camps. At Moissac, he began French schooling. His answer to how he and those with similar backgrounds coped was, ‘We copied everything the others did or said, without understanding anything at first.’5

  Older children who could not cope with school attended workshops where they received practical instruction, which might for the girls be making clothes for themselves and the little ones under the supervision of a professional couturière, while boys were taught a useful trade. Both also had lessons from French and refugee volunteer teachers. Below is a sample of their weekday routine from November 1941, which was no soft alternative to school:

  6.45 – 8.00 a.m. – wake-up, toilet, breakfast

  8.00 – 12 noon – workshops

  12.00 – 1 p.m. – lunch

  1 – 3 p.m. – siesta in summer / reading in winter

  3 – 6.30 p.m. – physical training in the open air

  7.30 – 8.30 p.m. – dinner

  9.00 – 10 p.m. – studies or bed according to age

  10 p.m. – lights out

  After the Friday night seder meal, Saturday was the Sabbath:

  8.30 a.m. – getting up, toilet, breakfast

  9.30 a.m. – sports

  1 p.m. – 3 p.m. – free time

  3 p.m. – 6 p.m. – Jewish history

  6.30 – 7.30 p.m. – Leisure activities6

  Sundays were reserved for scouting activities, outdoors whenever weather permitted.7 Older boys and girls, who would have been Rover Scouts and Ranger Guides in peacetime, acted as the routiers, meaning literally ‘rovers’, travelling hundreds of kilometres by public transport, by bicycle and on foot to bring children to Moissac and take them on to safer hiding places, when these had been arranged. They also regularly visited children placed with foster parents, both for contact and to bring vital food coupons, without which town-dwelling families’ meagre rations would have been insufficient. As to where the documents came from before these extraordinary scouts and guides began manufacturing their own false papers, the answer is, from local mayors’ offices and even on one occasion from the office of Prefect François Martin in the département capital, Montauban. After Shatta personally explained to him her desperate need for identity papers, he promised her 150 ID cards, plus the food coupons to go with them, and despatched them to Moissac by hand, so that she ran no risk of being caught with them at a checkpoint.

  Until his resignation in 1943, Prefect Martin epitomised the many public servants at all levels who were paid to obey and implement the laws of Vichy, yet chose to remain in office so that they could temper some of the worst excesses. Daily, they confronted dilemmas that no servant of the English Crown or Parliament has known for centuries. In some villages and rural areas the local gendarmerie was co-operative with the rescue operation, closing its eyes to the presence of unregistered children or those whose papers were obviously false, warning of imminent searches and sometimes sheltering fugitives from Vichy justice. When caught, the penalties for those in the uniforms of law and order were even more severe than for others: during the occupation, over 800 were deported to camps in the east; 338 were decapitated or shot by the Germans in France.

  On the other side of the coin, when the new assistant commissioner in Moissac read the census list of 208 persons ‘known to be Jewish or reputed to be such’, registered as living in the town, he sent for Madame Simon and informed her coldly that he was an anti-Semite and a personal friend of Darquier de Pellepoix, an anti-Semitic journalist whose proposals in an extremist newspaper in 1937 could have served as a draft for the first Statut des Juifs. As such, he warned her, he would carry out all the orders he was given without compunction. On one occasion when two police inspectors came to arrest some of ‘her’ children, Shatta admitted that the children were present, but asked the officers to obey the dictates of their consciences, and they went away empty-handed.

  With the biggest heart and greatest reserves of courage in the world, money is still what fuels such an operation. Like a number of other EIF children’s homes, the Maison de Moissac was subsidised by the Jewish Consistory, Baron Robert de Rothschild and the Comité d’Aide aux Refugiés. The Joint American Distribution Committee, known as ‘Le Joint’, also contributed 400 francs per child per month, although after the German occupation of the southern zone in 1942 this money had to be smuggled into France from Switzerland at great personal risk to those involved.8 However, the regular funding never covered more than bare necessities, so when it came to buying books for the library, tools for the workshops or any other ‘extras’, Madame Simon had to beg previous benefactors to be generous again. Alternatively, there was some ‘trading’, as when the metalworkers overhauled the forge of a local blacksmith in return for its use as their new workshop. The output of some workshops, like the book bindery, could have been sold for much-needed cash, but the Simons wisely decided against this, not wishing to antagonise local tradesmen.

  The children’s house was a fragile shelter, as they were well aware. In the Free Zone, Jews did not have to wear the yellow star, but on 5 September in Paris the exhibition ‘Le Juif et la France’ opened at the Palais Berlitz on Boulevard des Italiens. After it closed to go on provincial tour four months later, the director of the Institute for Jewish Questions Captain Paul Sézille wrote to Vallat at the Commissariat Général des Questions Juives that paid attendances had totalled 500,000, which, because of free and reduced-price admissions, meant a total attendance of close to 1 million. Abetz’s figure of 250,623 visitors was closer to the truth. Sometimes propaganda achieves the reverse of what its authors hope: a 28-year-old history teacher with a Jewish husband visited the exhibition on its provincial tour in Lyon and was so horrified by all the lies that she decided to ‘do something about it’. Lucie Aubrac was to distinguish herself by exceptional courage later in the occupation.

  Most Parisians were more interested in the annual Paris Fair that opened on 6 September, and the gazogène stand was the biggest draw for would-be motorists who had no entitlement to petrol coupons. A strange exhibition-in-reverse that ran from February to October at the Petit Palais was a German shop window exhibiting not products for sale, but products the Reich sought to buy. Tenders were received for 80 per cent of the 12,000 different items required by the German military and 75 per cent of the civilian requirements. With 26,000 tenders received, the organisers congratulated themselves on holding out exactly the right carrot to bring into line any proud laggards in French industry. For every carrot, there is a whip – in this case the alternative to working for the Reich was to see precious machinery shipped off east of the Rhine, against which accepting German orders was the best defence.

  On 16 September Wehrmacht Captain Scheben was shot dead on the Boulevard de Strasbourg in Paris. Reflecting the mood of the population, journalists of all shades except the communists deplored the assassination, author Pierre Audiat commenting:

  It is by no means clear how the elimination of a German soldier who was only there in obedience to military discipline might influence the outcome of the war. Had some truly heroic gesture been at stake, the murderer should have fulfilled his patriotism by being right out in the open.9

  His readers saw the curfew brought forward to 9 p.m. from 21 to 23 September, before which Maître Antoine Hajje, a 39-year-old communist lawyer arrested on 25 June, was executed in reprisal by firing squad with eleven other hostages, some after interrogations and torture
at 11, rue des Saussaies.

  On 18 September 1941 a new law made it compulsory to harvest Spanish broom, whose fibres could be treated to replace hemp and flax, possibly even cotton and wool. Bones, too, were wanted by the state. Pairs of Compagnons knocked on doors collecting them; for 1kg of bones, they received a bar of soap or a packet of washing powder, which were passed on to elderly householders who had helped them.

  On the night of 2 October, while Von Stülpnagel was still debating how to handle the assassination campaign, SS-Standartenführer Helmut Knochen’s SD in Paris took matters into their own hands by providing explosives and vehicles with curfew passes for a group of Deloncle’s thugs to blow up six Paris synagogues. A seventh, where the charge failed to explode, was blown up in broad daylight next day, allegedly for reasons of public safety. As ever, the different German intelligence organisations were spying on each other and Von Stülpnagel, briefed by the Abwehr on the truth of the operation, reprimanded Knochen, who pretended the explosions were the work of anti-Semitic civilians.

  Furious, Von Stülpnagel cabled Berlin demanding the recall of Knochen, Brigadeführer Rhomos and another SD officer named Sommer. A spate of cables hissed vituperatively between the SD in Paris and Himmler and between Stülpnagel and OKW in Berlin, each side trying to outmanoeuvre the other. Confirming Knochen’s independence from Wehrmacht control, his boss Reinhard Heydrich told OKW that Von Stülpnagel should mind his own business because Knochen and Rhomos were key personnel in the important campaign that would rid France of Jews. As a sop, the junior officer involved was sent home.

  In October the Swiss closed their frontier, to make it more difficult for refugees to flee France. Flautist Marcel Moyse, living at his country home in Franche-Comté, had regularly travelled to teach at conservatoires in Geneva and La Chaux-de-Fonds. With this no longer possible, and since he was wary of returning to the Paris Conservatoire, where his name might be mistaken for Jewish – Moïse being the French for Moses – he earned his living by travelling to Lyon and playing live concerts on the radio with his son and daughter-in-law. The nerve-wracking downside of these paid engagements came at the end of the broadcasts. Well after the curfew, they had to return on foot to a friend’s apartment where they were staying. Armed with appropriate passes, they took care to walk in the middle of the street so that no German patrol would shoot them as curfew-breakers. Their wisdom was proven when another musician was spotted hiding in a doorway on the way home and gunned down without even being challenged.

  The nadir of Moyse’s war came when he was subsequently denounced to the Gestapo as Jewish, but released after a collabo musician vouched for his racial purity. When Moyse asked why he had done this, the reply was simply that the collabo had admired his playing for twenty-five years. Armed with a Certificat de Non-Appartenance à la Race Juive, Moyse was safe for the rest of the occupation, but was stunned to discover that a former student, at whose wedding he had been best man, had denounced him.10

  When appointed Minister of the Interior in July, Pucheu had boasted of his intention to execute 20,000 communists. After the assassination of a German colonel in Nantes, he personally selected ninety-eight hostages to be executed on 22 and 23 October at Châteaubriant, Nantes and Bordeaux. Roughly half were Jews taken from Drancy, enabling Pucheu to justify his action by claiming that otherwise the Germans would have shot French veterans. Among sixteen hostages shot at the firing range of Bêle, near Nantes, was one of many bemedalled heroes abandoned by the country they had served in one or both world wars.

  Léon Jost was a director of the biscuit company Lu who had lost a leg in the First World War and since devoted much time to ex-servicemen’s and other welfare work. Arrested on 15 January, he had been sentenced on 15 July to three years’ imprisonment for helping to organise an escape line to Britain via Douarnenez. As there was a three-hour delay in taking the men to the firing range, Jost added a series of postscripts to his last letter, all neatly numbered, as in the minutes of a meeting. In the first, he apologised for his writing, having given up his spectacles and pen. In the last, he asked his wife to write for their children a memorial of his life with her. ‘I was marked out by fate,’ he wrote, ‘but we loved each other greatly, didn’t we, my darling?’11

  Like all the other terror machinery of the Reich, the hostage executions generated their own bureaucracy. Désiré Granet, shot at Châteaubriant on 22 October, wrote just before his death to his 11-year-old son Raymond, ‘I ask you to keep the promise you made me, to work hard at school and to love your mother, who has loved me and whom I love so much’. A confused and anonymous Oberleutnant (signature illegible) in the Feldkommandantur at Nantes wrote on 9 December to Granet’s wife Yvonne. Addressed in error to the dead man, the letter read:

  In reply to yours of 28th inst, the Kommandantur informs you that your husband, shot as a hostage at Châteaubriant on 22 October was buried in the cemetery of Russigne [sic]. Your request for re-possession of his effects has meanwhile been passed to the Prefecture. Your request to remove the body has been refused.

  A form letter from the mayor of Châteaubriant advised her in scarcely warmer tones:

  It is permitted to place flowers on the graves. It is not permitted to remove the bodies, nor to place a gravestone on the grave with the deceased’s name. Any pilgrimage or demonstration is forbidden.12

  Some of the questions one cannot help asking oneself about these executions are answered in an eyewitness report of the execution of Granet and twenty-six other men at Châteaubriant written immediately afterwards by Abbé Moyon from Béré-de-Châteaubriant:

  It was a warm and sunny autumn day. Being a Wednesday, the town was bustling with the activities of the weekly market when my lunch was interrupted by Monsieur Moreau, director of the concentration camp at Choisel. Hearing that the hostages were to be shot, I agreed to go with him to be with them in their last hours. At the camp, the hostages had been placed in a special detention hut, surrounded by both German soldiers and French gendarmes when I arrived. The sous-préfet had already given the men the news and suggested they should immediately write last letters to their families.

  I had the feeling that some of the men only truly believed they were going to die when they saw me arrive in my soutane. I told them that I had come not only as a priest for the believers, but to give what consolation I could to them all and execute any last wishes. For forty-five minutes I listened to them talking of their families, their hopes and cares, but I was unable to answer their most urgent question: when, where and how they were to be executed.

  The door of the hut, which I had closed to give us some privacy from the guards, was thrown open to admit French gendarmes with handcuffs for all the condemned men and a Wehrmacht chaplain, who told me to leave. All the other prisoners had been locked in their huts, and from every hut came the sound of men singing the Marseillaise. The handcuffed hostages were led into waiting trucks, joining in the Marseillaise and also singing the Internationale. I tried to keep up with the execution convoy in my car, but was left behind, my last contact being the sound of the condemned men singing. At the quarry chosen for the execution they were divided for execution into three groups of nine, all the men refusing to be blindfolded. The youngest, a boy of seventeen, fainted before the volley rang out.13

  The abbé was careful to keep a neutral tone in his account, for this was still the honeymoon period for Pétain and the Church hierarchy, with religious schools eligible for state finance and every school once again allowed to hang a crucifix on the classroom wall, which had been forbidden for thirty-five years as part of the separation of Church and State in the Third Republic. While other demonstrations and mass meetings were forbidden, pilgrimages and other religious assemblies were tolerated. On the first anniversary of the Vichy Légion, Bishop Piguet of Clermont ordered all the church bells in the diocese to be rung – which did not save him from arrest in May 1944 on the charge of having sheltered a priest on the run from the Milice.

  That mo
nth, newspapers all over France carried an announcement headed ‘Attention, all those who are eating cat-meat!’ The warning boiled down to advice to cook the cats well to avoid being contaminated by microbes from rats they had eaten. In November food shortages led to an expansion in the black market, condemned by Vichy and the Church. However, for hungry people the morality was obscure, with Bishop Dutoit of Arras declaring:

  When a producer has furnished at the legal price the quantity of foodstuffs or merchandise he is required to produce, it seems to us that it is not against the law to ask a slightly higher price for his surplus. But justice and charity are opposed to any increase in price that constitutes an exploitation of the need or credulity of the buyer.14

  If the Church was in love with the marshal, many French intellectuals were still infatuated with Hitler’s New Europe. In November, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasilach, respectively contributor and editor of the newspaper Je Suis Partout, were living it up at a writers’ congress in Germany. A more commendable motive for travelling there was that of Captain Hans Speidel – later to be NATO Supreme Commander, Land Forces Central Europe. Sent by General Von Stülpnagel to Hitler’s HQ in East Prussia to request permission to relax the Hostage Ordinance because the scale of reprisals was playing into the communists’ hands, Speidel returned empty-handed and later commented, ‘Von Stülpnagel was too correct for the Party.’ For his ‘correctness’, the unhappy Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich was to pay a double price, squeezed out of office the following year and later accused of war crimes, awaiting trial for which he committed suicide in February 1948.

  On 16 November 1941 six communist activists were shot in the citadel of Lille, not as hostages, but for crimes committed. Félicien Joly, found guilty of fifty sabotage missions and other anti-German activities, had been extensively tortured at Valenciennes, but was able to think clearly of his loved ones’ future as it would be. To his fiancée, he wrote, ‘When the rhythm of life overwhelms memories of me, embrace the future, be happy in another man’s arms and do not weep for what we have done together.’15