To oversee all these youth ventures, Pétain had appointed a General Secretary for Youth, a former engineer and director of the Renault works at Billancourt called Georges Lamirand. He was a fervent Catholic and a great believer in social paternalism, and for a while he dreamt of marshalling France’s children under a ‘charter for youth’, a notion that soon foundered under general ridicule.
As part of his desire to be loved – though by the summer of 1942 the love was beginning to wear thin – Pétain made frequent trips around the unoccupied zone, processing regally through cheering throngs. In the spring of 1942, his official visit to the Haute-Loire was to have included the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, but plans changed and he got no further than Le Puy, where he made a special pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Virgin. As a consolation, the Prefect, Robert Bach, offered a visit by Lamirand instead, thinking it might also serve to win more recruits for the Compagnons de France. Theis and Trocmé were appalled. Their packs of enterprising young Penguins, Wolves and Storks were a far cry from the blue-uniformed Compagnons, with their bugle calls, march-pasts and cult of Pétain. They would have refused, had they not been warned that it would be unwise. Jean Beigbeder, head of the unionist scout movement, arrived from Paris to advise on procedure.
Keeping fit
The planned visit was fraught with danger. Who would sit next to Lamirand at the official banquet, given that Mme Theis was American, Mme Trocmé Italian, and most of the local dignitaries decidedly unenthusiastic about the Maréchal? Who would preach in the temple, since both pastors had already spoken out against Vichy’s treatment of the Jews? How could the unruly cubs and scruffy scouts, let alone the independent-minded students from the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, be corralled into a welcoming party? It was decided to keep it all very simple. There would be no flags, no crowds lining the roads, no parade, no sumptuous banquet, no bouquets of flowers, only bunches brought in from the fields and put into jam jars. The lunch would be rustic and modest, and would take place in the YMCA’s Camp Jouvet. The service would be taken not by Theis or Trocmé, but by Marcel Jeannet, who was the sober, uncontroversial Swiss pastor at Mazet-Saint-Voy and president of the Consistoire de la Montagne, the grouping of the Protestant parishes on the plateau.
The day was not a success. Lamirand arrived in a motorcade, as planned, on 10 August, just as the round-up of foreign Jews was gathering pace throughout the unoccupied zone. He wore a splendid sparkling blue uniform, with a military cut, and high leather boots. Bach was in his handsome prefectoral suit. If Lamirand was disconcerted by the lack of fanfare, he made little of it, praising the simplicity of the meal for its sensitivity to food shortages, and he behaved with dignity and restraint when Nelly Trocmé, carrying round a tureen of soup, spilt some down the back of his pristine uniform. In the temple, Jeannet reminded the congregation of the duties it owed the state, but observed that the Church should not be asked to disobey God’s laws. When Lamirand made a speech ending with a rousing ‘Vive le Maréchal!’, he expected loud cheers. There was complete silence.
And then, just as he was leaving, an incident took place. A group of students, led by one of the future theologians at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, presented him with a document and demanded that he read it. In it, the students declared that they had heard all about the round-ups at the Velodrome d’Hiver in Paris, during which children had been wrenched from their mothers’ arms. There were among them, the document continued, a number of Jewish students, but at the school no one made any distinction between Jews and non-Jews, since that would be contrary to the teachings of the Gospel. And if any of the young Jews were threatened with deportation, ‘they will disobey these orders, and we will do our best to hide them in our midst’. Whether it was in fact Trocmé who had written the letter, no one knows.
Caught unawares, Lamirand replied that Jewish matters had nothing to do with him, and that the students should take this up with the Prefect. Bach was furious. It was well known that Hitler was finding a new homeland for the Jews in Poland, he said, just as the British had done for the Jews in Palestine. For his part, he went on, he would very shortly be carrying out a census of the plateau’s inhabitants and visitors, including the Jews he knew from ‘seven informants’ to be hiding in the villages. And then, according to an account of the day written later by Miss Maber, Bach added, addressing Trocmé, ‘If you are not careful, it’s you I will be obliged to deport.’
Robert Bach is an enigmatic figure in this story. Born in 1889, he was a military man, with a distinguished record in the Great War. A Catholic and a career prefect, he came from a family of Alsatian bankers. Legalistic, rigorous, a lover of calm, he was considered by some to be autocratic and arrogant, by others genial and impartial. Having been posted to the League of Nations in Geneva in the 1930s, he was appointed prefect of the Haute-Loire in June 1941, with his headquarters in Le Puy. Under Vichy, with the republican constitution abolished and the parliamentarians on permanent leave, the French prefects had again acquired the kind of power they enjoyed under Napoleon, little emperors in their own départements. Some, like Angelo Chiappe, under whom fell the internment camp at Gurs, were wholeheartedly on the side of the Germans. ‘With every opportunity,’ he had been heard to say, ‘I repeat: let us collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.’ Others, of whom Bach was one, seemed to admire the discipline of Vichy and enjoy the power, but felt increasingly wary as to where it was leading.
On being appointed, Bach had refused to sack 51 of the 80 mayors whose dismissal had been requested by Vichy on the grounds of their socialist and radical views, saying that they were too competent to remove. He spent his first months in the job listening and gathering reports. Though apparently more concerned about food shortages, crops, the black market and the health of those he had come to govern, he remarked on several occasions on the probity and intelligence of the Protestants in their ‘Huguenot stronghold’ in the mountains, observing of them that they were an ‘elite from an intellectual and moral point of view’, interested in liberal and international ideas, and that they clearly held ‘very elevated ideals’. He visited the plateau several times, spending his holidays there in the spring of 1941, and, from records in the archives, clearly knew all about André Philip and his ‘nest of socialist-Gaullist dissidents’. However, Bach not only gave Secours Suisse permission to open their children’s home in le Chambon, but offered money for extra expenses.
Travelling around his département, Bach promoted lacework, increased salaries, and did what he could to boost rations and provide extra fuel. When, soon after his appointment, Pastor Marcel Jeannet said to him: ‘If, even in France, Jews were to be persecuted, the Protestants would say: No!’, Bach was said to have replied: ‘M le Pasteur, I am Catholic, and I too would say: No!’ Though a Pétainist in 1940, he was no lover of right-wing fanatics, and steered a prudent and calculating path.
What happened next, like so much else on the plateau, is contradictory. Prefects were required by Vichy to file regular reports on their area. As expected, Bach reported on Lamirand’s visit to le Chambon. But instead of describing the cool reception of the minister, or the embarrassing final incident, he noted that the Protestant communes of le Chambon and Mazet-Saint-Voy had been particularly enthusiastic, and had proved beyond all doubt that any earlier misgivings about the loyalty of the plateau towards Vichy were misplaced. What was Bach doing? Was this a form of protection?
Fifteen days later, events took a different turn. On Saturday 26 August, some 50 to 60 police and gendarmes from Tence, Maufaucon, Fay and Saint-Agrève wound their way up the steep roads in police trucks and on motorcycles and stopped in front of the Mairie in le Chambon. Trocmé and the mayor were summoned and ordered to hand over the names of all Jews resident in the area, ‘pour un contrôle’. ‘I am their pastor,’ Trocmé is reported as saying. ‘That is to say their shepherd.’ He had no idea whether there were any Jews among his parishioners, and had he known he would not tell them. The policeman in charge informed
him not politely but ‘brutally’ that he had just 24 hours in which to come up with the names, and that if he failed to obey, he personally would be arrested.
Furthermore, the police officer continued, it was absurd to say that these people belonged to his flock: they were foreigners, suspects and black marketeers. And if Trocmé refused to produce the list, the very least he must do was to advise all the Jews known to be in the area to come forward. As Trocmé wrote many years later in his unpublished autobiography, the police told him: ‘All resistance is futile. You don’t begin to know the means that we have at our disposal – motorcycles, cars, radios, and we know where your protégés are hidden.’
While Trocmé now dispatched scouts to warn the hidden Jews, the hapless acting mayor, Grand, a figure previously made the villain of Magda’s story, apparently appeared and begged him, ‘trembling’, to capitulate, saying that he himself had been threatened with arrest. ‘Me too,’ replied Trocmé, according to his memoirs. ‘But one must sometimes say no in public.’ Next morning, the temple was packed to overflowing. Theis and Trocmé read out a prepared statement in which they invited their parishioners to ‘obey God rather than man’. In the meantime, the hastily convened municipal council had held an emergency session in the presence of the policemen, who stood around holding their guns, after which an ‘appeal’ had been issued, ‘firmly’ urging the Jewish refugees to make their way to the Mairie to be counted. A ‘sibylline and characteristic utterance’, Trocmé noted sternly, many years later. But was this too just a smoke screen?
Once again, what actually took place is mysterious. In the departmental records at Le Puy are filed two reports written by the gendarmerie of Tence and Fay-le-Froid. Though orders for the visit to the plateau and the round-up of the Jews were only issued to the local police by the prefecture in Le Puy on 26 August, on the evening of the 24th – that is to say, 48 hours before the police descended on the plateau – moves were already afoot to conceal the Jews. Where the warnings had come from, whether, as would later be claimed, Bach had telephoned Trocmé, no one has ever quite discovered.
About what happened next there are no disagreements. When no list of Jews was forthcoming, the police, who had brought a list of their own with 72 names on it, began to search the village. They checked documents, opened cupboards, combed through cellars and attics, banged on walls to see if they contained false panels. They found no one. Next morning at dawn, they set out to explore the surrounding villages and the countryside, and there was much mirth when a police lieutenant fell into a hidden cesspit.
One of their first visits was to the Coteau Fleuri, the house not far from le Chambon to which Madeleine Barot and Cimade had been sending Jews released under house arrest from the internment camps. Marc Donadille, a pastor who had arrived not long before to help the director, Hubert Meyer, was waiting for them. It was still dark when there were shouts and orders to open the door. Donadille went down, calmly greeted the assembled police, who seemed embarrassed by their task, looked at the list of names they had brought with them and led them to the bedrooms. They were empty. Donadille professed astonishment. ‘They were here yesterday,’ he told the police. ‘I can’t think where they have gone. But we aren’t a concentration camp. Perhaps, hearing of the round-ups, they decided to escape?’
The preceding day, Donadille and Meyer had escorted those of the residents of the Coteau Fleuri who were Jewish into the forests. Some time before, Madeleine Barot had sketched out a plan showing precisely how, in case of sudden danger, people could leave the house through the cellars and out by a concealed back door that led directly into the woods behind. She had heard about the threatened raids and informed Boegner, who in turn had – so it was later said – spoken to Bach.
Madeleine Barot’s escape plan
There were two bad moments. The first came when a Mme Bormann – who had insisted that, as a relative of prominent Nazis, her Jewishness would be overlooked, and who had therefore refused to join the others in the forest – was ordered out of bed and told to dress and accompany the police. Throwing herself on the floor, her eyes rolling, trembling all over, Mme Bormann apparently suffered an epileptic fit. A doctor was called and pronounced her too dangerously ill to move, but not before Donadille had caught her winking in his direction.
The second near-disaster came when one of the non-Jewish residents whispered to Donadille that a steady drip could be heard in one of the top rooms, coming through the floorboards from the attics, where three of the older Jewish women, paralysed by fear and refusing to leave the Coteau Fleuri, had been concealed in the rafters. They were urinating in terror. A bed was quickly pushed underneath the drips to muffle the sound.
The police remained at the Coteau Fleuri until late morning, then left empty-handed. They narrowly missed bumping into one of the Jewish residents, an elderly and absent-minded professor who had somehow got lost in the woods and bumbled his way back towards the village, where he had encountered a local policeman who kindly directed him home. They now moved on to the homes run by Secours Suisse. Mlle Usach was away, and had left 17-year-old Hanne in charge of La Guespy. Alerted the night before, she took her group of young Jews down to sleep at L’Abric, where Auguste Bohny supervised the younger children. Bohny opened the door to the police, but refused to let them in. His children, he told them, were under the protection of the Swiss government, and there would be a nasty international incident unless the gendarmes were able to produce clear written orders from their superiors. By the time they returned with signed documents from Le Puy, the children had vanished. Hanne, helped by the older teenagers, had taken them off into the forests, where they spent the day picking blueberries and wild raspberries.
As darkness fell, the children were collected by the scouts and moved to more remote farmhouses, where they were hidden in attics or behind wood piles, only emerging after nightfall while the police remained on the plateau. Though the farm dogs, trained to bark at strangers, usually gave ample warning, there was a day when Hanne and another girl only had time to get into a cupboard when the police arrived. Hidden behind clothes, they were terrified that their feet would be seen if the cupboard doors were opened. They listened as the gendarmes asked the farmer if he was absolutely certain that there were no Jews hidden on his property. ‘Jews?’ replied the farmer. ‘What do Jews look like? I hear they have big noses.’ After drinking glasses of red wine, the police left.
Day after day, for three weeks, the villagers listened to the police firing up their cars and motorcycles in the early morning before leaving to scour the countryside for hidden Jews. Donadille and the other pastors, aware that they were being watched, lay low. Threats of imprisonment for two to five years had been issued for anyone harbouring a Jew. By now, someone had mysteriously pinned up a list of names and addresses on a wall in le Chambon, indicating the places that the police intended to visit. There were, the villagers were told, still 51 or 52 ‘Israélites à ramasser’, Jews to be collected. The policemen themselves spent much of their time helpfully in the cafés, talking loudly about where they planned to go next. Encountering a small boy sitting under a tree one day, they called over: ‘You there, we haven’t seen you.’ The boy, bemused, fled; he was not Jewish and did not realise what it was about.
It was only when the police had been roaming the plateau ineffectually for some time that Miss Maber understood the full extent of their reluctance to take part in these round-ups at all. One day she received a visit from a young police lieutenant. He asked her whether she knew if there were any Jews left on the plateau. She asked him why he wished to know. He replied that if she would be willing to sign a piece of paper declaring that there were none, then he thought that the police would be recalled to Le Puy. She signed. Before leaving, the young lieutenant sat down at her piano and played ‘God Save the King’. He would come back, he told her, bringing a bottle of champagne, when the British won the war.
After three weeks, only one Jew had been discovered, an Austrian calle
d Paul Steckler. Sitting waiting in the truck that was to take him to Le Puy, Steckler, in tears, was given little presents by the villagers; Jean-Pierre Trocmé came with a precious piece of rationed chocolate. However, he was soon back, his degree of Jewishness deemed too small to merit deportation. Of the Jews on Bach’s list, the 26 adults from the Coteau Fleuri (21 German, 3 Polish, 1 Czech and 1 Russian) had all, according to the records in the archives of the Haute-Loire, ‘disappeared’, as had 16 boys aged between 17 and 23 (10 German, 2 Austrian, 2 Polish, 1 Russian, 1 Lithuanian). These young men should have been found in La Maison des Roches, a home run by another Protestant-backed organisation for students, the Fonds Européen de Secours aux Etudiants, but when the police got there, the house was empty, though there was plenty of evidence that the rooms had recently been occupied. Before leaving, the men made an inventory of what the bedrooms contained: shirts, shoes, ration books, passports, shorts.
After the brigade of police from Yssingeaux picked up traces of the missing Jews from the Coteau Fleuri in a barn in Les Tavas, and the farmer admitted to having given some food to strangers, a number of the Jewish refugees decided to seek safety elsewhere. Though the fate of all of them is not known, there are records for a few.
Kalman Scheizer, who was not apparently on any of the police lists, was picked up some way from the plateau and transferred to the camp at Rivesaltes. From there he was sent to Drancy and joined Convoi 33 for Auschwitz on 12 September. Remarkably, he survived. Another Jew from the area did not. This was 24-year-old Ida Besag, arrested when she opened the door of the presbytery where she was hiding. The policeman outside, evidently wanting to give her a chance to escape, told her that she should pack and that he would return later to collect her. When he went back, she was still there. Ida had come from Gurs, where she had been with her mother and twin sisters. She managed to climb out of the truck taking her to Rivesaltes and escape, but was caught and later sent to Drancy. She too was on Convoi 33, but she did not survive.
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