Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  They were making a terrible mistake. By late September 1942, most of the 38,206 Jews deported to Auschwitz on 41 trains since March were dead, among them the children, who, since they were not selected for work, were gassed on arrival. Few people now could still maintain that the ‘unknown destinations’ of the trains really meant mines, quarries or factories. Since early July, BBC Radio Londres had been putting out bulletins saying that Jews were being massacred in Poland. Leaflets in Yiddish urged Jews, ‘Do not wait passively . . . Hide, above all hide your children.’ Flyers handed out on the streets of Paris spoke of the gassing of the weak and the elderly.

  Meanwhile, negotiations were going on between Oberg and Laval for the dispatch of 15 trains from Drancy to Auschwitz between 15 and 30 September, at the rate of 1,000 Jews on each. The Germans were asking for 50,000 to be handed over, saying that they had requested 50 trains to be prepared; but Laval, pleading the sudden loud protests by the churches, begged for more time. Delivering Jews, he said, ‘isn’t quite like delivering identical items of merchandise from a single store’. He promised to ‘settle the Jewish question’ as soon as he could.

  Heinz Rothke, the new head of Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo, remembering Eichmann’s fury when one train from France had to be cancelled, and fearing his wrath when he discovered that most of the requested 50 were not going to be needed, proposed that Vichy immediately turn over all Jews naturalised since 1933, or, failing that, simply round up everyone wearing a star in the occupied zone, regardless of whether they were French or foreign-born. A major cull of French Jewish families in Paris would net, he estimated, at least 15,000 people. His superiors decided otherwise. Plans for the deportation of French Jews were shelved – for the moment. Economic interests, keeping France quiescent and cooperative, its police vigilant against resisters, seemed a more prudent option, particularly as prefects all over France were reporting in their monthly bulletins that the French were expressing ‘pity’ for the Jews and ‘hostility’ towards Vichy. The hunt for Jews would proceed, but at a more measured pace. It gave the forces intent on saving them a small window of time. But it did not for a moment fool them.

  On 5 September, Boegner had a meeting in Nîmes with Charles Guillon, a Protestant pastor who was working closely with the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Until very recently, Guillon had been mayor of a small village high in the mountains of central France. Its name was le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Guillon told Boegner that the consensus in Geneva was that although it was no longer possible to save adult Jews in France from deportation, something could still be done for the children, of whom some 5,000 to 8,000 were thought to remain in the unoccupied zone. They were scattered everywhere, from the OSE’s children’s homes to camps to special centres; some were even hiding in the forests. But there was very little time. Some of the OSE’s centres had been emptied and Austrian, Czech, German and Polish adolescents arrested.

  The scramble to save the children, and the remaining adults, desperately seeking hiding places among people whose sympathy for them was uncertain had begun.

  Part Two

  Arriving

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Walking near the Lord

  Whether it was the Protestant Madeleine Barot or the Jewish Madeleine Dreyfus who first thought to bring the children rescued from Vénissieux and the internment camps of Gurs and Rivesaltes up to le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon is not clear. But what is certain is that by the time the race to save the hunted Jews began, this ancient stronghold of persecuted Huguenots was already home to many people from all over France wanted by Vichy and the Gestapo. Many but not all who had found refuge here were Jews. The high plateau was remote, inaccessible and defiantly independent; it thought of itself as an island, enclosed by mountains, protected by rivers and escarpments. And it was about to embark on an adventure remarkable for its boldness and intensity.

  Le Chambon was only one of half a dozen villages and many hamlets scattered here, 1,000 metres up, across 500 square kilometres in the mountains of the northern Cévennes. Its name was said to come from the Gallic cambo, the source of a river. Lying between Le Puy-en-Velay to the west, Saint-Etienne to the north and Valence to the east, the plateau was a place of dense forests and open pastures, surrounded by high volcanic peaks falling away to the Rhône valley. It was renowned as one of the coldest areas of France; its famously long winters lasted from October to late April, when heavy snow, banking up in drifts across the road, would cut it off from the outside world for weeks at a time. Too cold, with sudden swings of temperature, for nearly all fruit trees apart from the occasional cherry, the area was thickly covered in Sylvester pines and fir trees, with a few oaks, larches, birches and chestnut trees, though many of these had been cut down to feed factories, to be replaced by broom, briars and juniper, which did well in the stony soil. It was said that a squirrel could travel all the way from Le Puy to the village of Fay leaping from branch to branch.

  In the poor sandy soil grew cabbages, potatoes, turnips, rye, oats and swedes and not much else. However in the autumn, when the valleys and fields vanished under a silent white mist, the tall woods shone red under the rain, and the meadows were strewn with yellow leaves, mushrooms – boletus, chanterelles and cêpes – came up so plentifully in the forests that the villagers collected them in wheelbarrows, along with wild raspberries and blueberries.

  Albert Camus, who arrived on the plateau from Algeria in the late summer of 1942, in search of mountain air for the tuberculosis that had infected both his lungs, called it a ‘handsome country, a little sombre’. Sitting in the evenings on a stone bench in front of Le Panelier, a family hotel in which his wife Francine had spent the summers of her childhood, Camus listened to the ‘flute-like’ song of the toads. He thought of the fir trees massing on the crests of the hills as ‘an army of savages’, waiting as it grew light to rush down into the valley, ‘the start of a brief and tragic struggle in which the barbarians of the day will drive off the fragile army of the thoughts of the night’.

  Built of basalt and granite blocks to withstand the wind and freezing temperatures, the villages were grey and a little forbidding, the three-, four- and five-storey houses narrow and packed closely together under slate roofs. Only a single tarmac road, the Route Nationale 103, ran through le Chambon, connecting it to Tence and Saint-Agrève. All the way through the 1930s, there was very seldom a car to be seen. There were no tractors and very few harvesters. Everything was done by hand, with scythes, or by animal and horse cart, though only the richer farmers owned horses. The smaller holdings kept goats, chickens, cows and pigs, which they fed on chestnuts.

  None of the isolated farmhouses, reached via rough tracks that wound in and out of the forest, had heating, and very few had electric light, though a turbine generator near Saulières lit le Chambon and some of the outlying houses. There were wood-burning stoves in the kitchens, and the warmth from the cows, stabled in adjoining barns. During the short summers, the people farmed; come the late autumn, they retreated indoors, the men to carve clogs and wooden tools, the women to make lace. Though never rich, the farmers of the plateau were well fed, with their own milk and butter and cheese, and enough produce to give to visitors and to sell to those who came up from the valleys in search of supplies.

  In 1902, a small-gauge railway had been built to carry the Sylvester pines down from the plateau to the mining basin of Saint-Etienne to be made into supports for the pits. Its single train, known as Le Tortillard, a little toy train zigzagging slowly up the escarpment, snorting and creaking and constantly stopping, reached le Chambon and Saint-Agrève in 1903, opening the plateau to visitors.

  Le Tortillard, climbing to the Plateau

  The train became useful too in bringing up sickly and malnourished children, after a Protestant pastor called Louis Comte brought his own ailing two-year-old son up one summer and found him miraculously restored by the clean air and nourishing food. Having decided to start an organisation called L’Œuv
re des Enfants de la Montagne, he placed needy children and those abandoned by their parents in the villages and farms of the plateau for the summer months. With these young visitors – 2,398 in the summer of 1910 – came children’s homes, hospitals and family pensions, in which hygiene, good behaviour and Christianity ran alongside healthy food and exercise.

  Comte, an imperious figure with a large nose and a beard that flowed down over his collar, making him look a little like Tolstoy, had no time for sentimental piety, and was soon starting libraries and cooperative bakeries. The farmers received two sous a day for each child, who was expected to spend part of the day working in the fields. Other charitable organisations followed, and by the 1930s, children from all over the south of France, and even North Africa, were coming to spend the summer months in the fresh air and the forests. Daringly, there were even some ‘delinquents’, who were thought to benefit from the sturdy morality. Prosperity touched the farmers, who turned their barns and outhouses into guest rooms.

  In the wake of these small visitors came not only doctors, medical students and social workers to oversee their progress, pedalling around the countryside on bicycles, but tourists. Long before Léon Blum’s Front Populaire conceded paid holidays to French workers, causing them for the first time to explore the country’s immense and empty landscape, families from Saint-Etienne, Lyons and Le Puy had discovered a taste for this solitary region, with its dry summers and cool winds. Taking the Tortillard, they rented rooms in le Chambon, Saint-Agrève and Fay, which was widely known as Fay-le-Froid on account of its exceptionally exposed and chilly position.

  By 1939, le Chambon alone had 9 hotels, 38 pensions and 9 children’s homes. In summer, the local population of fewer than a thousand people multiplied five and six times. There was much talk in the local Protestant paper, L’Echo de la Montagne, of some special spiritual link between religion and the mountain, described as a pure, morally uncontaminated outpost, and much quoting of Luke 6:12, ‘Jesus went up into the mountains to pray’, though André Gide, who passed through, took against the place, saying that the ‘very pine trees seemed to introduce into nature itself a kind of moroseness and Calvinist rigidity’. The tourists took their picnics to the banks of the Lignon, which flowed through le Chambon, and bicycled over the flatter reaches of the plateau. Many came from Switzerland, and commented on how similar it all was to their own meadows and forests. At an international convention of Christian socialists held in a garage in le Chambon in May 1938, where the mayor, Charles Guillon, and the deputy for the 4th département of the Rhône, André Philip, warned against the perils of totalitarianism, the area was referred to as ‘la petite Suisse’.

  Having picked the blueberries and gone mushrooming, the summer visitors and the children, fatter and rosier for their stay in the mountains, would return to the plains in time for the autumn school term. This had made the plateau, with its now empty rooms, a perfect place of refuge for the Spaniards fleeing Franco when they started arriving in 1937, though they were not always made welcome, the farmers being deeply suspicious of the ‘reds’, particularly after three small Spanish boys made a feeble attempt to derail a train. The Spaniards, they declared, were not only unhealthy, carriers of infections and venereal diseases, but also immoral, unruly and very likely agents of Moscow. It had taken all the persuasiveness of Guillon to make them accept at least women, children and the elderly, on the grounds that it was unthinkable to refuse hospitality to people seeking asylum.

  Charles Guillon is a man often overlooked in the story of the plateau. The son of a Parisian concierge, he had studied architecture before finding his vocation and serving as a chaplain in the First World War. As a Dreyfusard, he voted with the left. Emerging as a driving force behind the Christian Socialist movement, he had been appointed pastor of le Chambon in 1921, at the age of 38, and soon turned what had been a sleepy community from which young people were drifting away to the cities into a centre for Protestant study. Churches in rural communities, as he saw it, should become ‘reservoirs of men, of reflection and of spiritual life’, and it was up to their pastors to be ‘the best of their parishes’.

  Travelling constantly to ecumenical conferences, Guillon encouraged everyone he met to visit the plateau, and though he stood down as pastor in 1927, he was seldom absent for long; he became mayor in 1931. By the time the war broke out, he had visited 74 countries and set up Christian Unions on several continents. Profoundly devout, he was made the vice president of a new federation for ‘moral action’ in the Haute-Loire, and campaigned against alcoholism, brothels and pornographic films, and for more to be done on behalf of neglected children. On the plateau, he was known as ‘l’Oncle Charles’. Returning from Munich, where he found himself at the time of Chamberlain’s visit, he warned the villagers to prepare themselves. ‘The worst,’ he said, ‘can become reality.’ International promises, he added, seldom lasted longer than the ‘brilliance of a firework’. Like Dr Weill at the OSE, he had no illusions about either Vichy or the Germans.

  André Philip

  Nor, as it happened, did André Philip, another frequent visitor to the plateau. A political economist by training, former member of the Front Populaire, Philip spoke of the armistice as an act of ‘dishonour’. Pacifist by inclination, he nonetheless felt that armed struggle against Vichy and the Nazis was preferable to submission, though this struggle had to be tempered by patience. Born into an old Cévenole family, Philip had often brought his wife Mireille and five children to spend summers in le Chambon, where he had joined in local life and given seminars on the Gospels. Both Philips were ardent Protestants. André said of himself that his faith was ‘Calvinist (of a Calvin warmed up by the sun of the Mediterranean)’. He had a neat beard, trimmed along his chin under a small moustache, and heavy dark eyebrows. He smoked a pipe.

  The sturdy Protestant mood of the plateau was much promoted by a spirited Swiss evangelist called Marguerite de Felice, who as a child had come under the influence of Louis Comte, and who arrived in le Chambon with her only son, hoping to save him from the TB that had killed her husband. Mme de Felice, widowed at 30, had started a chapter of the Union Chrétienne des Jeunes Filles at Versailles, and was a fervent preacher against the perils of alcohol. On the plateau, she started a farm where the grapes never ripened and the tomatoes never turned red but where her particular strain of apples thrived, then stayed on to open La Pouponnière, to take in five Spanish mothers and their thirteen children. To feed them, she bought enormous vats of olive oil, having observed that her guests liked to dunk their bread in it.

  Most of the Spaniards returned home before the outbreak of war in 1939; the villagers were deeply relieved, having feared the loss of their profitable summer visitors if their rooms were occupied. They proved considerably more welcoming towards the Austrians and Germans escaping the Nazis after the Anschluss, particularly as these first refugees from the coming war were people who were able to bring with them decent reserves of money. In the last summer before the war, there were said to be some 12,000 visitors in and around le Chambon.

  When Madeleine Barot and Madeleine Dreyfus began their frantic search for homes in which they could hide the wanted children, it was only natural that they would turn to the plateau for help. Their earlier successes in sending up people released from the internment camps under police supervision in ‘assigned residences’ made them think that infiltrating newcomers among them might pass almost unnoticed. At Les Tavas, a hamlet some four kilometres from le Chambon, there was the Coteau Fleuri, a former hotel with 100 beds rented by Cimade and partly funded by the Swedes, where children released from Gurs, Rivesaltes and Récébédou had been taken in and sent to school, while adults had been given household chores and cut wood for the village. Those who had already spent months in the muddy, barren internment camps were overwhelmed by the carpets of gentians in the fields.

  There was Beau Soleil, where Georgette Barraud and her 19-year-old daughter Gabrielle had taken in families sent up by
Cimade, mixing up the newcomers with regular French summer visitors to the plateau. Georgette, who had known Charles Guillon from before the war, had been a missionary in Zambia. Both she and her husband, a carpenter and also a missionary in Africa, spoke good English. Somewhat to the anxiety of their neighbours, the Barrauds listened to the banned BBC French service bulletins, keeping their windows wide open and the volume at full blast as M Barraud was extremely deaf.

  Auguste Bohny, who came to work for Secours Suisse

  In the middle of le Chambon, not far from the main square, was Tante Soly, a tall, thin house giving directly on to the street, but with a lower level opening at the back on to a terrace and a side street, which enabled people to disappear if necessary. Tante Soly had been opened by Emile Sèches, who was Jewish, and his wife Solange – who gave her name to the pension – who was Catholic. Emile had been working in Saint-Etienne for an insurance office before the war, but when he was demobilised in 1940, the newly introduced Statut des Juifs had prevented him as a Jew from returning to his job. Emile and Solange had a son and two daughters. The younger, Madeleine, had been a sickly baby and had spent some months in one of the healthy children’s homes in le Chambon immediately before the war, so that it was to the plateau that Emile turned when he thought to open up a children’s home himself. Caught in le Chambon during a heavy snowstorm, he had been directed by the mayor to a house for rent, at a time when renting to a Jew was already a brave thing to do.

  Solange, like M Barraud, was very deaf; she did the cooking. Emile, strict, loving, conscientious and an excellent organiser, ran the home and acted as a kind of quartermaster for all the children’s pensions in the immediate area, driving his little van to collect food from all over the plateau, which he would then scrupulously apportion according to numbers. In the early days at least, most of the homes were run by elderly spinsters, and Emile’s firm hand with the adolescent boys was much in demand. What his daughter Madeleine, who was three when the family arrived in le Chambon, remembers is the boys fighting in their dormitory, and the fact that many of the children had no idea where their parents were.