Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  The summons from the STO arrived couched in elegant officialese:

  I have the honour to inform you that the joint Franco-German Commission has selected you for work with the Todt Organisation / to work in Germany. I invite you to present yourself at the German Labour Office on … to learn the date and time of your departure. Failure to comply with this posting is punishable under the provisions of the law.

  The Todt Organisation was the biggest enterprise in Europe, employing 2 million workers at its peak. If working for it in France was the better of two undesirable alternatives – and a worker could earn twice the normal rate elsewhere in any factory working for the Germans – one German spokesman for the organisation announced in Moissac that, though Germany had so far limited itself to taking only half of French production, it would in future it would take all. So, if one wanted to eat well, the best plan was to work in, or for, Germany. The STO caused severe rifts between the business community and Vichy because the only factories that could keep their labour force intact were those fulfilling German orders and their sub-contractors. With no political intent, thousands of young men went underground on receiving their STO call-up. Some lived rough in the forests, and would become the core of the Maquis. Others had it easier, like some neighbours of the author who had set out for the STO train in a gazogène car that conveniently ‘broke down’ in front of the village gendarme, who obligingly issued a procès verbal confirming the breakdown. They continued their journey to the railway station, arriving after the departure of their train. The procès verbal stamped a second time, they returned home and were not called again.

  The police, gendarmerie, fire services, railways and Civil Defence all offered shelter from the STO and saw a rush of volunteers. In Moissac, Louis Fourcassié signed up with Le Service de Surveillance des Voies. The wages were low but compensated by extra ration cards. Wearing a blue-and-white armband, equipped with a torch, whistle and bilingual Ausweis, he and a friend patrolled the rail tracks at night, ostensibly to prevent sabotage. In the event, they told résistants they encountered to hit them a few times and tie them up, as their alibi for doing nothing.2

  At Vichy on 4 August an official delegate of the American YMCA protested about the rafles and deportations. A few days later Pétain received Donald Lowry, head of the co-ordinating committee for many charities. The Quakers, refusing to let a sword sleep in their hands, also protested. Slowly and quietly, Catholics and Protestants all over France began deliberately to impede the deportations by hiding Jews – especially children. Many Jews suspected their motives, and very few children followed the adolescent protected by priests at his secondary school in Orléans who converted and became Cardinal Aron Lustiger, senior churchman of France. The success of this low-key but widespread movement is that a quarter-million Jews survived the war in France despite the collaboration of police and gendarmerie.

  On 12 August 1942 Vichy newspapers made much of the first convoy of prisoners released under la Relève de-training at Compiègne the previous day, but made no mention of the deportation of stateless Jews and other immigrants from the Free Zone. At Noé, Rabbi René Kapel’s belief that they were going to labour camps took a hard knock when the old and the sick who could not walk were carried in freezing rain more than a mile to the train station. Local residents were so horrified at the emaciated appearance of the prisoners that future departures took place at night. A Catholic social worker who witnessed the scene went to Archbishop Jules-Gérard Saliège in Toulouse to ask for his intervention. Saliège, a partially paralysed 72-year-old who had supported the cause of the Spanish refugees, showed more courage than his pope by issuing a pastoral letter condemning Vichy’s treatment of its Jews. The letter was read out on 23 August in most parishes of the Haute-Garonne département, in which Noé lay. A week later, Cardinal Pierre-Marie Théas, archbishop of Bousquet’s hometown of Montauban, issued a second pastoral letter protesting against the violations of human dignity. It was read out in every church and would also have been read out at a Mass for the SOL in front of the war memorial in the town, but for the diplomatic intervention of Prefect François Martin. He reported all this to Vichy, noting that the population had overwhelmingly approved the contents of the cardinal’s letter.

  In the third week of August 1942, 5,000 more Jews were arrested in the Free Zone, police in Nice and Monaco rounding up 548 adults and twelve children, who were sent across France to Drancy en route to Auschwitz. That there were not more children was due largely to the Marcel network founded with the help of Bishop Rémond of Nice by Syrian-born Moussa Abbadi and the woman who would become his wife, Odette Rodenstock.

  When shown in Lyon, the Paris winter collections, featuring wasp waists, fitted busts and exaggerated sleeves in artificial fabrics, attracted foreign buyers for the first time during the occupation, causing the fashion editor of L’Illustration to gush that the ingenuity of making little go far was ‘the crowning glory of our race’.

  Archbishop Gerlier of Lyon had hailed Pétain’s regime as the New Jerusalem after the corruption of the Third Republic. His realisation that under Vichy’s racist legislation Jews were being deported, not to labour camps but to killing factories in Occupied Poland and elsewhere, came after ‘the Night of Vénissieux’.

  Eight kilometres from the centre of Lyon, Vénissieux was the site of a concentration camp which, in some respects, was worse than Drancy. On one night alone, twenty-six detainees committed suicide. The complex of factory buildings surrounded by 5m walls was guarded by Vietnamese troops under French officers. Inside the walls, conditions were so appalling that the officials departed, leaving the job of drawing up lists for deportation to the volunteer workers of the ecumenical charity Amitié Chrétienne. They had to deal with 1,300 cases – soul-destroying work compounded by their commitment to find foster homes for children whose parents had been, or were going to be, deported and killed. In the absence of ‘proper authorities’, they ignored Bousquet’s orders to ship all the detainees to Drancy for onward routing to Auschwitz, and managed to save some 500 adults and 100 children by forging identity papers, altering them to show false ages, arranging escapes and sending 140 people to hospital with faked medical certificates. Many of the children were smuggled out of the camp, hidden in the beaten-up old Citroën car belonging to the Jesuit Abbé Alexandre Glasberg. An unlikely-looking hero, with his short, stout build and thick-lensed spectacles, Glasberg was himself a converted Ukrainian Jew, who understood anti-Semitism all too well. Working with him in the camp was the Jesuit Father Pierre Chaillet, from whom Archbishop Gerlier of Lyon learned all the gruesome details.

  They could do nothing to save the rump of 545 people who were transported to Drancy, but on the night of 29 August, they packed the camp bus with children and managed to get 108 of them to the Lyon headquarters of EIF. There, twenty or so were kitted out as Scouts and Guides to be sent on a camping trip in remote countryside, the others being hidden in private homes, for the most part Catholic. Prefect Alexandre Angeli of Lyon furiously demanded the eighty-four children be handed over, but, as the patron of Amitié Chrétienne, Cardinal Gerlier backed up Chaillet’s refusal to divulge names, after first making a statement that he was still a loyal citizen. Father Chaillet was confined in a psychiatric clinic for three months, in conditions that were no better than they had been in the camp – Vichy had an appalling record for neglect and maltreatment of the mentally handicapped.

  At Montauban, Prefect François Martin felt and acted very differently from his counterpart in Lyons. Receiving orders to arrest 1,700 Jews shown on the census list, he and his staff did everything possible to ensure that the people affected were warned. This was not simple, for one careless word could reveal him as the source of the warning. So many children were being moved long distances that Shatta had to attend a planning meeting with other organisers in the Hôtel des Alpes near to the main station in Grenoble. In the middle of the meeting, two policemen knocked on the door and quickly detected the false ID
papers, for which the penalty was torture to uncover the source. Shatta kept her nerve and told them, ‘Yes, they are false papers. But we are meeting here to try and save the lives of 200 Jewish children under threat of deportation. You must do what your conscience bids you.’ After delivering a warning not to stay so close to the station again, the officers left, their intended victims breathed normally again and took the advice to heart.3

  Reading an article about police and gendarmerie collaboration in L’Express of 6 October 2005, Lucien Janvoie wrote that many gendarmes, like his own father, made a practice of warning those they were to arrest and turning a deaf ear to denunciations of refugees in hiding once they had realised the fate of those rounded up. In at least one case, at Gap in Provence, an entire company of gendarmes enlisted together in the Maquis and worked against the authorities.4 Others were engaged on more mundane tasks. The hunt for metal was one: by September 1942 cities had long since lost their bronze statues, but the copper shortage led to a bizarre campaign advertising a reward of a litre of wine for every 200g handed in. The logic was that without copper sulphate solution to kill mildew on the vines, there would be no grapes next year.

  On 2 September Cardinal Gerlier issued a proclamation to be read in all the churches of his diocese. It was carefully worded to avoid being construed as an attack on Pétain, but the message was clear. Through ecumenical links, Pastor Marc Boegner, as Chairman of the Protestant Federation, wrote to Pétain using the marshal’s own language to equate the inhumane treatment of the Jews as ‘moral defeat’ and ‘an attack on the honour of France’.

  The action of the Catholic leaders was doubly courageous in that they were dependent on funds from Vichy for many purposes, including religious schooling. One Catholic historian, Renée Bédarida, reckons that of the eighty or so bishops and archbishops only five or six made public protests after the Vénissieux scandal.5 Indeed, Cardinal Suhard of Paris, who had married Pétain in a proxy ceremony, and continued to collaborate, was shunned by de Gaulle after the Liberation, when eight bishops were obliged to resign.

  Lower down the ladder, people from all walks of life played their parts, not always with the total co-operation of their charges, some of whom refused to eat non-kosher food or cut their side-locks, which were an immediate giveaway in the street and constituted a terrible risk for their protectors. Those prepared to integrate were found work on remote farms as labourers or child minders. Sometimes groups were sent to Annemasse on the Swiss border, only 4km from Geneva, where professional passeurs took them across for 300 francs a head. When the professionals judged it was too dangerous Georges Loinger, a sports moniteur working for Les Compagnons de France, devised an unusual way of getting more of these children to safety in Switzerland by refereeing a football match near the border and slipping the children across, one by one, during the game. The actor Marcel Marceau developed a mime routine as his cover for escorting ‘theatre groups’ of children eastwards – a gesture that would delight the world after the war. Others were escorted across by Jewish Scouts and Guides.

  Pro-Vichy prefects all over the Free Zone attacked this humanitarian initiative, claiming that it had no popular support because most of the population blamed the Jews for the black market, but the prefect of Montpellier warned that public opinion had been disturbed by the pitiless nature of the persecution. Not all senior public servants were acquiescent rubber stamps: 200 prefects were among the several thousand civil servants dismissed as unreliable. Even the RG reported widespread disapproval of the government’s handover of residents in the Free Zone.

  In the early hours of 2 October the flash of a torch from a field near Vendôme, midway between Orléans and Le Mans, was spotted by the pilot of an RAF Hudson whose passenger waiting to drop was one of the tragic players in what Kipling romantically labelled ‘The Great Game’. Colonel Buckmaster of SOE’s French Section was sending in an agent to build the largest network of the Resistance, for which Francis Anthony Suttil – a 33-year-old lawyer qualified in both Britain and France – had chosen the name of a fifth-century theologian, Prosper of Aquitaine. Having no idea that his Prosper network was to be a cynical deception plan costing the lives of several hundred French patriots, Suttil immediately set about recruiting agents throughout northern France with very poor security until several thousand people were involved. At the same time another far too large network known as Scientist was growing in the south-west.

  At Norfolk House in St James’s Square in London was the office of Chief of Staff to the (future) Supreme Allied Commander. COSSAC was also the umbrella beneath which several shadowy sub-organisations lurked – in particular, the London Controlling Section. The ambiguous title cloaked a deception factory run by Colonel John Bevan, among whose creative brains was Wing Commander Dennis Wheatley, later to be a world-famous author. The first Controlling Officer, Colonel Oliver Stanley, had resigned rather than deliberately misinform Resistance agents regarding the Dieppe raid, with a view to letting them be caught and reveal under torture their false information in order to convince Hitler that the raid was a prelude to a full-scale invasion.

  A stockbroker in civilian life, Bevan was made of sterner stuff. Like de Gaulle, he considered that in total war civilian lives could be spent with no more compunction than a general feels when sending his men to certain death in a militarily justifiable operation. It was already known in London that an invasion of the Continent could not be made before the spring of 1944, but Bevan’s plan was to use SOE’s Section F to pass to its agents in France ‘confidential’ information about an invasion in the spring of 1943 – as Churchill had promised Stalin. Some would be caught and divulge this information, causing Hitler to keep more forces than necessary in France, and thus weaken his eastern front. The name of the game was Operation Cockade.6

  Wary of the powder keg that was Lyons – the PCF was particularly active in France’s second city – Laval put a brake on the deportations, informing Oberg on 2 September that the Church’s attitude meant a slowing-down of the Final Solution in France, but not its abandonment. Oberg seems to have taken this in good part, knowing that Laval had other troubles. On 4 November the multi-venue annual congress of Doriot’s PPF brought to Paris 7,198 delegates from eighty-eight collaborationist organisations. Their in-fighting on hold for the moment, Eugène Deloncle shared the platform at the Vel d’Hiv with Doriot and Déat, whose Hitler moustache made him look more like the Führer than ever when his lank hair fell forward over his temple as he thumped the rostrum to hammer home his points.

  So many PPF members were marching through the streets in their SS-type uniforms that Laval feared a coup was brewing and Abwehr officer Oskar Reile was paying 160,000 francs a month to a mole inside PPF headquarters to let him see files on Doriot’s ever-closer ties with the SS and SD.7 To maintain the balance of power, Abetz now backed Laval in forbidding Doriot to make the closing address of the congress in the Vel d’Hiv, stirring 20,000 supporters to gather near PPF HQ in rue des Pyramides. Those within earshot heard Doriot say that Pétain should ask Germany to defend French interests in North Africa. Was he prescient, or was there a security leak? This was four days before the Allied landings in Morocco.

  The PPF’s enemy at home was an easier target: transports totalling 10,522 prisoners had transited from the Free Zone by 15 September, the shortfall being made up by greater police activity in the Occupied Zone and a bending of the rules so that previously exempt categories could be arrested. Greek and Rumanian Jews numbering 2,000 were arrested in Paris and rafles were carried out in twenty provincial cities of the Occupied Zone to fill the cattle trucks of the forty-second and forty-third transports, which dragged their cargoes of misery eastwards on 9 and 11 November 1942 after an article on 8 November in Au Pilori by political editor Maurice de Séré stating that ‘the Jewish question must be resolved immediately by the arrest and deportation of all Jews without exception’.8

  That month Jan Karski arrived clandestinely from Warsaw with eye-witness reports
on the Polish ghettos and Belzec extermination camp. During two weeks spent in Paris, what shocked him most was the apathy of the French population towards the occupation – a fact commented on by Abetz and others, and which was largely due to people’s preoccupation with getting the next meal, or extra clothing coupons, or grey market food at the weekends. The diary of a Parisian housewife for October 1942 goes some way to explaining this:

  7.30

  At the baker’s. Got bread. Rusks later

  9.00

  Butcher says only meat on Saturday

  9.30

  Cheese shop. Says he will have some cheese at 5 p.m.

  10.00

  Tripe shop. My ticket No 32 will come up at 4 p.m.

  10.30

  Grocer’s. Vegetables only at 5 p.m.

  11.00

  Return to baker. Rusks, but no bread.9

  At 4 p.m. she had to be back at the tripe shop. At 5 p.m. came the dilemma: cheese or vegetables? And so it went on, day after day. In addition, there were effectively three price levels: