At Rivesaltes, where the surrounding fields were golden with sunflowers in the strong summer sun, Friedel Reiter, the young Protestant nurse from Vienna, watched the deportees leave. ‘I can see only a long file of people, going on for ever, expelled – hunted down – excluded. Where are they going? Can no one stop this slow-motion slaughter?’ Before leaving, each internee was given bread, mortadella, three tins of sardines, two kilos of fruit and a little jam. Able to parlay 10 children as ‘simple-minded’, and multiply that number to 20, Andrée Salomon was faced with the terrible question: which 20? How to choose them? The smallest? Those whose parents were most insistent? Those she had grown most fond of?
All over Vichy France, in the camps of Noé and Récébédou, Vernet and Les Milles, Argelès and Rieucros, similar scenes were taking place. The chaos was indescribable. At Récébédou, the departures were scheduled for the hours of darkness, so that the local villagers would not be aware of what was happening, and the deportees stumbled towards the station across the fields, under a full moon. At La Verdière in Marseilles, a young OSE worker called Alice refused to hand over any of the children; she was taken away with them and deported.
In the confusion of the moment, Vichy and the Germans continued to vacillate and disagree over their policy towards children; and in most places parents were still being given the option of leaving their children behind, providing there was someone to leave them with. The OSE and Cimade women moved quickly around the barracks, whispering to parents to leave the children, saying they would care for them.
As the Jews were led out of the camps, mothers clung to their children, giving them little personal objects: photographs, jewellery, letters. In Les Milles, only hours before the lorries left for the station, a team from the OSE led a group of 78 children out of the camp, having promised their parents that they would do everything in their power to get them to America. Some of them were babies. The children cried and clung to their mothers; the women, weeping, clung on to the lorries taking them away. In Rivesaltes, Andrée Salomon made last frantic efforts to get children out, hiding them in the boots of cars, or under the ample cloaks of her assistants. One small child was carried away in a shopping basket. When attempts were made to save the mother, by giving her a powerful sleeping pill and maintaining that she was very ill, the police took her away on a stretcher.
In the stations, the people were pushed on to goods wagons and packed in tight, and when the elderly had trouble climbing on to the high steps, they were shoved from behind. At Rivesaltes, Friedel Reiter watched as a young Protestant woman, come in search of her Jewish husband, was pulled on board a train to make up numbers, though she fought and shouted that it was all a mistake. As the train pulled away, her cries could be heard through the bars, ‘terrible in the night silence’.
The first train from Rivesaltes took 900 people. Eighty-two of them were children, aged between 2 and 18. The OSE’s frantic attempts had managed to reprieve just 20 in all. When the carriages pulled out of the station, the heads of some of the taller men could be seen through the upper slats, like those of animals. The train passed through Lyon-Perrache. Rabbi Jacob Kaplan was at the station. ‘It was a heartbreaking sight,’ he wrote later. ‘People of all ages, even the very elderly, in a state of appalling feebleness. They seemed to be almost naked . . . broken by exhaustion. We were forbidden to speak to them.’
One of the 1,500 people in Gurs whose name fell into the first 13 letters of the alphabet was Hanne’s mother Ella. Her visa had not come through, and it was later thought that the money had been stolen along the way. Not long before, she had written to Hanne, still under the OSE protection outside the camp, that she was not well. Hanne decided to return to Gurs to see her. She was instructed to make her way to Oloron and look for any of the young female assistants working for the OSE or Cimade, who had their base there. In Oloron, she learnt that none of them had been seen in days. It was 6 August; the deportations had begun. When Hanne reached Gurs, on foot, she saw that it was surrounded by armed police. She managed to find someone willing to get a message into the camp and was able to speak to her mother over the perimeter fence. Ella had already packed her suitcase. Hanne spent the night in a nearby field and returned to Gurs in the morning. She saw Ella again, and they talked across the barbed wire.
Next day, the Jewish prisoners were moved to the station at Oloron, where a line of cattle trucks awaited them. They were pushed on board. Hanne, who had walked the 15 kilometres from the camp, ran up and down the train, frantically calling her mother’s name. A French policeman stopped her, gave her a drink of water and said to her: ‘What is going on here breaks my heart.’ He helped her to find Ella, and the two women had an hour and a half together talking, Hanne on the railway siding, her mother leaning out of the cattle truck. Ella was calm. Just before the doors were bolted, she said to her daughter: ‘This is my last trip. I will never come back.’ Years later, thinking of that day, Hanne remembered saying to herself: ‘I will never see her again.’
She stood watching as the train pulled out.
All through August, the deportation trains crawled northwards through France, carrying foreign Jews from almost all the southern départements. As they passed through stations, police and soldiers kept people from getting too close. It was extremely hot, and there was never quite enough water on the trains. A new tally had suggested to Bousquet that there were 12,686 ‘eligible’ foreign Jews in the south, but after the internment camps had been cleared of these eligible people, only 3,472 people had actually been put on trains between 6 and 13 August. For a brief moment, in order to ingratiate himself with the Germans, Bousquet tried to inflate the numbers. When the shortfall became too evident, he volunteered that he could soon find another 2,000. And then there was always the possibility of moving the year of naturalisation back still further, to 1931. People who believed themselves to have been French for 11 years would now suddenly discover themselves to be Polish or Russian after all. As for children, it was probably better, said Eichmann, to mix them in with adults, so that the French public, seeing them all together, would think that they had opted not to be parted from their families. The Germans for some time had not wanted to be bothered with children; under pressure from Vichy, they agreed to include some.
The trains were all bound for Drancy, the four-storey horseshoe of tenement-like buildings put up before the war, which had served as a barracks for a legion of gardes mobiles. Along with housing civilian detainees and prisoners of war on their way to Germany, Drancy had been acting since the end of March as the way station for the deportations to the extermination camps in Poland. It was a grim and ugly place, surrounded by a double row of barbed wire and watchtowers. The courtyard was made of clinker, which turned into dust in summer and mud when it rained. Inside was more barbed wire. By the time Ella’s train reached Drancy, there were 120 people in dormitories designed for 30; the more fortunate slept three to a bunk, the rest on straw on the floor. There was not enough of anything – food, medicines, water, towels, clothes, bowls, spoons. The stench was overwhelming.
Among the new arrivals were many children, some of them orphans, others kept back when their parents were sent ahead but now dispatched ostensibly to join them. Many were clothed in little better than rags; several had no shoes and went barefoot. They arrived filthy, smelly, covered in sores and lice. The youngest, who could not yet speak, had labels tied to their clothes with their names on. But these were soon lost or torn off, as were the little bundles of personal items their parents had so lovingly given them, and they became numbers, with a question mark alongside. Impetigo was rife. Those who did not already have dysentery soon caught it. The very young ones, who could not negotiate the long walk to the communal latrines, used buckets on the stairs, which overflowed and dripped down from floor to floor. There was no room in the infirmary to take them all, and the few Red Cross nurses and social workers allowed in battled to keep them clean and fed. There were very few towels and very little soa
p. All night, you could hear the sound of constant crying.
By the time Ella was taken from Drancy and put on a train for Auschwitz, there were three convois, transports, leaving every week. No one could say for certain where the trains were going, but there was now growing talk of extermination. Several people chose to leap to their deaths from the fourth-floor windows. The first transport to take children on their own, without parents, left Drancy on 17 August. Five hundred and thirty of the children on board were under 13. Before they left, their bundles of belongings were searched by Gestapo officers and anything of any value was removed. Many of the children had had their heads shaved. One little boy, who had thick blond curls, kept begging to be allowed to keep his hair. His mother was so proud of it, and she would want to see it when they were reunited. Those who screamed and struggled as they were herded on to the buses that were taking them to the station were picked up by policemen and carried. Between 17 and 31 August, seven trains left for Auschwitz. Among those on board were 3,500 children. Most of them, commented a Quaker delegate grimly, ‘may already be said to be orphans’.
It was against this background of terror and Vichy-led deportations that the remarkable story of Vénissieux took place. What happened in this small camp on the edge of Lyons says much about what could be done where there was the will, the imagination and the courage to do it. Vénissieux also marked the next step in France’s war, one in which saving, not yielding, came to take on ever greater importance, and when safe, secluded places, full of courageous people, would come into their own. And it happened at the very last moment when it was still possible for such a public and bold act to be carried out on such a scale.
By the summer of 1942, Lyons, the second-largest city in France, former capital of Roman Gaul, was full of Jews, both those long resident in this city of manufacturers and industrialists, and the many thousands who had fled the occupied zone and the Germans in search of greater safety. When Bousquet announced plans for the deportation of 10,000 of Vichy’s foreign Jews, the prefect of the Rhône, Pierre Angeli, and two of his more zealous subordinates set about preparing for the capture in his département of all those who had entered France after 1 January 1936. They opened a camp in a disused military barracks built around an arsenal and surrounded by high walls at Vénissieux, a suburb on the western edge of Lyons, hitherto home to a number of Indochinese workers. In the middle of August, Dr Jean Adam, the young medical student who had been detailed to care for these workers, was ordered to present himself to the camp.
Very early on the morning of 26 August, while it was still dark, police and gardes mobiles, in teams of three, set out with lists of names. Roadblocks were set up. Moving from district to district, they banged on doors, searched attics and basements, looked into cupboards and storerooms. One thousand and sixteen Jews were arrested and taken to Vénissieux by lorry. There would have been many more, but a marked lack of enthusiasm on the part of some of the policemen, along with the warnings of the impending round-up that had reached the welfare organisations, meant that a number of people had had time to escape. Enraged, Bousquet ordered manhunts. The police were instructed to shoot anyone who attempted to get away.
These same warnings had been received by the OSE, Cimade and the other groups working with the immigrant Jews, and so they had had time to make plans. Crucial to what happened next was the involvement of two Catholic priests, Père Chaillet and Abbé Glasberg.
Chaillet was a stocky, robust Jesuit in his early forties, with thin lips and shiny eyes behind heavy dark-framed glasses; he was a theologian, little known outside his group of students and colleagues. Glasberg, who was a little younger, had been born in the Ukraine to Jewish parents, but had converted to Catholicism at the age of 18, toyed with the idea of becoming a Trappist monk, and emigrated to France in 1930. He was a shabby, dishevelled-looking man, of great charm and energy, with an old soutane and shoes with flapping soles. He was often ill-shaven, and his prematurely grey hair and thick glasses made him look ten years older than he was. Some of his more conservative colleagues suspected him of being a communist; his friends said that he was both Western and Eastern in outlook, and that he brought together two faiths and two cultures.
Père Chaillet and Abbé Glasberg
Glasberg was a familiar figure around Lyons, pedalling on his bicycle between his parish of Saint-Alban and the city centre, and was regarded as being very skilful at charming officials into making concessions. He had long been a critic of the Nîmes Committee, of which he was a member, saying that he was maddened by its ‘tone of universal goodwill and forgiveness’ and that far more time should have been spent worrying about the very existence of the camps, rather than trying to improve conditions inside them. Chaillet and Glasberg had been founder members of an association of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, L’Amitié Chrétienne, which had been working with refugees since 1941. Cardinal Gerlier of Lyons, though earlier a supporter of Pétain, had accepted an invitation to become its honorary chairman.
It had been agreed that a ‘commission de criblage’, to monitor the suitability of candidates for deportation to the north, would review the arrested Jews. Eleven possible exemptions had been conceded, including the old, those married to non-Jews, and those with children under two. At this point, Vichy and the Germans were still dithering about whether or not all children would be obliged to accompany their parents.
Glasberg and Chaillet quickly got themselves into Vénissieux. In their wake, by one means or another, came Gilbert Lesage of the Service Social des Etrangers, Andrée Salomon and Madeleine Dreyfus from the OSE, Madeleine Barot from Cimade, and a Polish engineer from Vilnius called Georges Garel, who had no connections to anyone but whose anonymity might prove useful. For two days and three nights, working as a team, these people deployed their forces; they had helpers on the outside collecting documents and birth certificates, finding bits of evidence, consulting records in order to make the cases for exemption. One of these was Elisabeth Hirsch, known to all as Böszi, an extremely pretty young woman with very bright blue eyes, who had been working in Gurs; another was a young volunteer from the OSE’s offices, Lily Tager, a girl with a mass of curly dark hair. From time to time, Glasberg was able to spirit away those who had been temporarily reprieved; his little black Citroën with yellow wheels conveniently looked identical to the one driven by the Prefect.
Inside Vénissieux, total chaos reigned. Orders arrived, were cancelled, then reinstated. The eleven exemptions were abruptly reduced to five. Glasberg, Chaillet, Dreyfus and Barot pleaded, bargained, prevaricated. There were far too many people for the bunks and most were now sleeping on straw on the ground. The few remaining Indochinese workers cooked. Guards, policemen, officious civil servants sent by Angeli milled around. Dr Adam, who had willingly been coopted by Glasberg, was given a rudimentary infirmary and was busy declaring as dangerously ill people who were not. Supposed cases of acute appendicitis were rushed to hospital, from where a few managed to escape. Some adolescent girls were dressed in scout uniforms and led out of the camp. Those of the internees who had experienced German brutality in their home countries were frantic. One night there were 26 suicide attempts. The noise was overwhelming. It was known that Angeli had decreed that the camp was to be emptied by 19 August. Lorries arrived to start taking people to the railway station. By now Glasberg and his colleagues were operating in increasing desperation, conscious that they were working against the clock.
It was Glasberg who by sheer chance intercepted a telegram from the Prefect to the police chief saying that it had been decided that there were to be no exemptions for children after all. He and Garel realised that something bold and dramatic had to be done, and that there was very little time in which to do it. Night had fallen and the final deportations were scheduled for the next day.
A storm had knocked out the electricity. Glasberg and the others moved through the barracks in the dark, going from family to family with their torches, asking parents to give them th
eir children. They had hastily typed out and roneoed forms bearing the words ‘Paternal responsibility and rights of guardianship abandoned by me’ – a necessary formula under French law – and leaving room for names and signatures. The parents were told that they would be giving their children to L’Amitié Chrétienne and Cardinal Gerlier. Glasberg spoke both German and Yiddish. Some parents, as they signed, gave Madeleine Barot addresses of relations; others pressed bits of jewellery or small precious items into her hand. She put them into separate envelopes with the name of each child. The families were told that their children were simply being offered a better life until they were able to return to reclaim them. What Madeleine and her colleagues found so unbearably distressing was that it was clear that they understood perfectly well what was really meant. Lily Tager would be haunted all her life by the despair on the women’s faces. When the moment came to part with the children, they clung to them and told them, in Yiddish, to be worthy of their Jewishness and not to forget. Several women fainted. As the night wore on, and the need for haste increased, so Glasberg and the others were forced to become more brutal. A few of the children had to be physically torn away. One father cut his wrists and covered his child in his blood.
By five o’clock in the morning there were 89 children in the refectory and the camp was full of crying people. The police chief asked Glasberg why everyone was so upset. ‘Wouldn’t you be upset, if they were taking away your children?’ Glasberg replied. The children were of all ages; they came from Vienna, Brussels, Lodz, Graz, Berlin, Luxembourg, Warsaw, Breslau, Magdeburg and Liège. There were several brothers and sisters. Few spoke much French.
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