Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  By the late summer of 1940, the Spaniards were indeed long gone, either repatriated home, or sent to serve in work brigades or on the Maginot line. Some of the huts had been filled with communists, ‘enemy aliens’, those made stateless after Germany occupied their homelands, and ‘foreigners of Jewish race’, Vichy making use of laws put in place during the phoney war. But the camp at Gurs had room for many more when, at dawn on 22 October 1940, the gauleiters Joseph Bürckel and Robert Wanger began to round up 6,508 Jews in the territories of Baden and the Palatinate and, without consulting the French, dispatched them in sealed trains over the border into south-western France.

  One of them was 15-year-old Hanne Hirsch, a tall, pretty girl with short fair hair parted at the side. Her father Max had been a portrait photographer and, after his sudden death in 1925, his wife Ella, who had been a concert pianist, had continued to run the studio in Karlsruhe in Baden. The business prospered, and once the Nazis came to power, Ella was kept busy producing photographs for the new ID cards, on which Jewish men and women still had the right to their own first names, but all took the second name Sara or Israel, indiscriminately. Karlsruhe had a close Jewish community of 3,000, though through the 1930s those who could leave did so; one of these was Hanne’s elder brother, who was able to make his way to the United States.

  On Kristallnacht, the night of 9 November 1938, when paramilitary soldiers from the SA attacked Jewish businesses, synagogues and buildings, the studio was ransacked and the glass cabinets smashed to splinters. The Jewish men arrested in Karlsruhe that night were sent to Dachau and Sachsenhausen, and when they came back later, they brought with them stories of brutality. Some were returned in coffins, and those of their families brave enough to do so opened the lids and saw signs of torture. From the balcony of her flat above the studio, Hanne and her friends watched the German soldiers marching in the streets below singing, ‘When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then things will go twice as well.’ Ella was profoundly relieved that her son was safe in America.

  While she was out shopping, very early on 2 October 1940, Ella was stopped by a policeman she knew from her precinct. Evidently somewhat embarrassed, he told her that the Jews were going to be deported, and that they had just one hour to pack a suitcase weighing no more than 30 kilos. Everything else was to be left behind. Ella sent Hanne to a Gentile friend with their remaining set of Bohemian glass for safe keeping. Most of the rest of their silver, porcelain and jewellery had long since been plundered by the Nazis. While she packed for herself and Hanne, taking warm clothes and a knife, fork, spoon, blanket and a little food for each of them, as instructed, Hanne packed for her 91-year-old grandmother Babette.

  In the open lorries carrying them to the station were Ella’s three sisters; Berta, the eldest, was diabetic, but robust. There had been rumours that they would be sent to Dachau, so there was much relief when the train crossed the frontier into France. They were cold, and had run out of food, because they had been forced to leave the luggage on the platform, to follow on a later train.

  That day, seven trains set off for France; on Hanne’s were Karlsruhe’s remaining 950 Jews. The seats were wooden and there was no water. Many of those expelled were elderly; the oldest was 104. There were new babies and the inmates of a mental hospital, dragged from their wards. Since this sudden expulsion was in breach of the armistice terms between France and Germany, the trains continued to be shunted around the countryside while the government in Vichy protested. There had been plans to send the Jews from Baden and the Palatinate to Madagascar and turn the island into a vast ghetto, but they had come to nothing. Hanne’s grandmother, who had been in excellent health, became confused, and a doctor on the train gave her a sleeping pill to calm her down. As the train passed Oloron-Sainte-Marie, the stationmaster reported hearing cries and moans. When the carriage doors were finally unlocked, 60 hours after leaving Karlsruhe, several people were found to have died. Babette appeared to have totally lost her mind.

  They had left Germany in fine weather. In France it was raining hard, and by the time that Hanne, her mother and her aunts had trudged the 15 kilometres from the station to the camp at Gurs, they were soaked through and very cold. The huts they were put into had no beds or bunks, no mattresses or blankets. They felt relieved when Babette was taken away to a separate hut, for the very old and the sick, where she was put into a makeshift bed.

  Internees at Gurs, 1941

  The next day brought little comfort. The huts were grouped into ‘îlots’, little islands of 25 barracks each, women and children separated from the men and boys over 14. They were surrounded by barbed wire. Hanne and Ella and her sisters were in îlot K, hut 13. Watchtowers and more barbed wire encircled the camp. The straight track that ran from one end of it to the other was almost two kilometres long. Bales of straw were handed out to act as mattresses, but there was too little of it to go around. Hanne and her family made a little encampment in one corner. Paper was stuffed into the cracks between the planks to reduce the draught, but even so the winds from the Pyrenees felt like ice to people so thinly dressed and so hungry. Each hut had a stove, but there was no wood, and it was almost entirely dark inside, the only light coming from two weak electric bulbs in the ceiling, and the doors at either end, kept shut against the cold. Their suitcases had finally been delivered, but everything inside was soaked through, having stood for several days in the rain.

  The sandy clay soil of Gurs was impermeable, and there was no slope down which the rain could run away. The deep gluey mud, so thick that it was impossible to leave the hut without boots, never dried. There were just five taps for every îlot, and the water was only put on for a few hours each day. For the sick, the elderly and small children, the walk to the latrines, through ankle-deep mud, was an ordeal that led to frequent falls. The elderly broke bones.

  What Hanne would remember all her life was the feeling of constant, insatiable hunger. There was very little to eat beyond ersatz coffee, coarse bread and watery soup made of root vegetables. The internees collected it in metal bowls, like prisoners, standing in a queue. Soon after the arrival of the Jews from Baden and the Palatinate, rations in Gurs were reduced. The internees were now losing weight steadily and beginning to show the first signs of malnutrition: loose skin, weakened muscles, trembling. The cold brought rheumatism. Fleas made people itch and scratch, their bodies covered with sores, eczema and impetigo. People lost their teeth. There were signs of rickets. A former prisoner in Dachau observed that the food there had been more plentiful. There were now some 50 to 60 deaths every week.

  Writing to her brother-in-law in the US, Ella described Babette’s ‘terrible suffering’, the ferocious cold, the incessant hunger. Begging him to send warm sweaters and stockings, as well as overalls for herself and Hanne, she wrote: ‘I rely on your help and think that you will not desert us in our unspeakable misfortune . . . We need help immediately before we perish. Paper, toothpaste, skin cream, everything is welcome, even polish. Never in my life could I have imagined being in such a situation, as poor as beggars.’ She asked him to pass the letter on to her brother, because she did not have enough money for two stamps.

  Gurs was not the first of France’s internment camps, of which more than 20 were dotted around the country, most of them in the unoccupied south, in disused army barracks, abandoned factories and prison buildings. But it was one of the worst. As the months passed, more and more people kept coming, stateless Germans and Austrians, communists, Freemasons, Gypsies, Jews, all Vichy’s ‘undesirables’, from 59 countries. According to the German Kundt Commission, which carried out a series of inspections, looking for German dissidents to deport to face imprisonment or execution, there were already some 32,000 detainees in custody. And they kept on coming, from new rafles, police raids, and the ever more stringent policies to exclude more recent immigrants from the protection of French citizenship. Many spoke no French. All were fearful, depressed; the older among them were often silent and apathetic, traumat
ised by what had happened to them. Some, like Ella, kept busy, cleaning the huts, collecting and dividing up the rations of bread, according to ferociously monitored fairness. One of Hanne’s aunts had been a seamstress in Karlsruhe, and she made a dress for her out of a petticoat and an apron.

  Berta was growing sicker, her untreated diabetes beginning to affect her eyes; when there was light, Ella read aloud to her. Occasionally the women were allowed to visit their mother, still living in the hut for the very elderly. Hanne was with her one day when the old lady, in a rare moment of lucidity, asked where she was. Told that she was in a camp, she asked why. ‘Because,’ said Hanne, ‘we are Jews.’ What shocked her most was the way that every morning a man would push open the door to the hut and shout out: ‘Have you got anything?’ He was part of the burial detail, come to collect those who had died in the night, often of cold, having frozen to death in their sleep. She could not bear the heartlessness of it. All night she would listen to the groans and tears and the constant dripping of the rain on the bitumen roof.

  When there was news of a fresh arrival of internees, people would hasten to the barbed wire to see if they included relations or friends. They stood in silence, staring. ‘We had lost our pasts,’ wrote one woman many years later. ‘We no longer had a homeland. Over our future hung a black cloud.’

  In November, Alex Cramer, a Swiss doctor with the rank of colonel with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, was finally allowed in to inspect three of the larger camps. One of these was Gurs. His report to Vichy was angry. There were no tables and no chairs, he wrote, the cold was ferocious and the elderly were dying. Rats were devouring the supplies and biting the small children, whose wounds grew infected. There were no special provisions for babies, though there were very few of these. The rudimentary hospital was lacking in medicines, disinfectants, equipment and linen. He had seen many people in rags, and children without shoes. The barbed-wire division between the îlots left no room for exercise, and the wire itself was being used, on the few sunny days, to dry the laundry. The situation in Gurs, he concluded, was ‘very serious’; he recommended that it should be pulled down and the inmates either housed elsewhere or released. ‘We are currently witnessing, impotent and appalled,’ he wrote, ‘the brutal expulsion of entire populations, who have been forced to abandon everything to invaders.’

  The ICRC, allowed access by virtue of the Geneva Conventions, was in a weak position. War had been declared before it had been able to get through a new convention regarding the treatment of civilians in wartime, so that the delegates’ jurisdiction covered only camps for prisoners of war. For civilians there was no protection. Cramer proposed asking the British to release the ships currently blocked in Dakar and Casablanca and allow them to be used to ferry the Jews to safety, but who would take them? How much notice Vichy accorded his report is unclear, even if, on one of his only visits to the camps, Pétain had conceded, with casual unfeeling, that the inmates were indeed ‘emaciated, wan’ and speculated as to how they might survive ‘the winter and the hunger’.

  There were people, however, who did pay heed to what Cramer had said.

  It was by pretending to be the wife of a Protestant pastor that Madeleine Barot got into Gurs. Madeleine was the 31-year-old general secretary of Cimade, an association of mostly Protestant women drawing on a generation marked by the scouting and Christian youth movements of the 1930s and founded by Suzanne de Dietrich, herself a theologian and translator of Karl Barth. Cimade’s first task had been to help refugees when Alsace-Lorraine fell to the Germans. Madeleine was a plump young woman with short brown hair; behind her seemingly easy-going manner lay tenacity and a fierce sense of justice. She had been working in Rome as an archivist at the French school, but with Italy’s entry into the war in May 1940, she had returned to Paris and joined Cimade, soon taking over from its general secretary, Violette Mouchon, who moved up to become president. Madeleine’s roots lay in Alsace and in her mother’s strong feminism, and she felt considerable sympathy for the German Jews of the border provinces, expelled so ruthlessly from their homes. As a student in Paris, she had worked in the bidonvilles, the slums surrounding the capital, and had been much influenced by the theology of Karl Barth, the idea of total obedience to Jesus Christ, and the need to bear witness and speak out. In Gurs, she found her cause.

  Having unexpectedly wormed her way past the guards and into the camp, Madeleine learnt that the officer in charge had just been informed that one of the new babies had died. He was a decent man and he lamented to Madeleine the lack of baby clothes and nurses. She offered to provide both. Installing herself in the nearby village of Navarreux, she recruited a nurse from Pau, Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné, who had been caring for her dying mother. Jeanne was a tall, strong woman who looked, said her friends, like a Valkyrie. A few days later, she reported to Madeleine that she needed help, desperately: there were more than 16,000 people in Gurs and many of them were ill. It was not enough, Madeleine realised, to visit the camps: you had to install yourself and live there. In ones and twos, Madeleine began to send in other young nurses and social workers. A small hut was taken over to act as headquarters. Though nothing was made official, the gates to Gurs had effectively been breached. Others stepped through.

  One of the first of these was the OSE, the organisation to which Madeleine Dreyfus and André Chouraqui belonged and which was helping children like Simon Liwerant and Jacques Stulmacher get away from Paris. The OSE was an older organisation than Cimade. It had been founded in Russia on the eve of the Great War to help improve the health of destitute Jews, and later moved on to work in Romania, Poland and Latvia. In 1932, it had made Paris its headquarters; its president was Albert Schweitzer and one of its patrons Baron Robert de Rothschild. As German and Austrian families escaping the Nazis after Hitler’s rise to power crossed into France, the OSE had set up children’s homes. Never quite believing in the impregnability of the Maginot line, it had been one of the first organisations to go south, taking all the children to Montpellier and Lyons. And there it stayed, employing Jewish doctors as they lost their jobs under the Statut des Juifs and creating medical and social work programmes among the refugees.

  An OSE home, with one of its founders, Andrée Salomon

  It was in Lyons that Madeleine Dreyfus set up her office. She was a restless, conscientious woman and a natural organiser. Born Madeleine Kahn in 1909, she had worked as a bilingual secretary in an import-export business before discovering the surrealists and making friends with Cocteau and Breton. Through them she learnt of the work of Adler and began studying psychology. In 1933, she married Raymond Dreyfus, and after the birth of their two sons, Michel in 1934 and Jacques in 1937, the family moved to Lyons and Madeleine went to work as a psychologist with the OSE. Both Madeleines – Barot and Dreyfus – one Protestant, one Jewish, were now in Lyons, and both play a crucial part in this story.

  Gurs having been breached by the welfare organisations, Madeleine Barot dispatched Ruth Lambert, a young French social worker, to join the team. Slowly, inching their way forward, the young women began to organise. Paradoxically, it was the very haphazard and unbureaucratic nature of the camps, the uncertainty about who was in charge, that made them susceptible to infiltration. The men sent in to run them in the early days were army officers, the guards often former policemen and soldiers disbanded after the fall of France; checked for alcoholism, criminal records and any hostility towards Vichy, they were left with surprising powers of initiative. Some were brutal; many were anti-Semitic.

  The inmates in Gurs needed everything – food, medicines, blankets, hot water, books, religious services and distractions. Donald Lowrie, an American working for the YMCA, had become aware of conditions in the internment camps. He had been one of the founders of the Russian Student Christian Movement in France in the 1930s and spoke good French; he also had contacts in Vichy. As the US had not yet entered the war, Americans were still moving freely around the country, and Lowrie
got permission to take books and musical instruments into Gurs. What seemed obvious to Madeleine Barot and Madeleine Dreyfus was the need for some sort of committee to coordinate relief for the camps. Lowrie put the idea to the Minister of the Interior in Vichy.

  On 5 November 1940, 25 welfare organisations – Jewish, Protestant, Quaker and lay – met in Toulouse to decide on tactics. It was to be a ‘complete and sympathetic collaboration of Christians and Jews’. From the first, however, not everyone present saw the situation the same way, some being more hesitant than others about what they considered should be the proper attitude towards the Vichy government. When Daniel Bénédite, from the American Welfare Committee, suggested stirring up a political scandal about conditions in the camps, there was an uneasy silence. Though cooperation with Vichy was still regarded by most organisations as the sole way forward, collaboration was beginning to ensnare people whose instincts might originally have caused them to act differently. A Service Social des Etrangers had been set up by Pétain, and its director, Gilbert Lesage, attended this first meeting; several of these present mistrusted him – unfairly, as it happened – suspecting him of having spies in the camps.