Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Emile and Solange Sèches at Tante Soly. Madeleine is the little girl at the font on the left hand side

  Not least the oddest aspect of the plateau’s war was the presence of all these German soldiers living in the very heart of the village, apparently unaware that they were surrounded on all sides by Jewish children.

  Relations between Bach and many of his men in the prefecture in Le Puy remained ambiguous. What was Bach thinking when, in December, he asked André Haussard, a policeman in Fay, whether some kind of home could be found on the plateau for ten adult Jews? Who these people were, and why they had not already been interned, is not clear, and nor are Bach’s motives. What is revealing is Haussard’s reply. As far as he knew, he told Bach, there were no Jews on the plateau, and since the local hotels were not heated, and food was scarce, it would not be a good idea to send any. From the archives, it is plain that Haussard, who after the war was put up for a medal for his work on behalf of the Jews, knew perfectly well the extent of the hiding operation already in place. Were he and Bach in league with each other?

  There were heavy snowfalls on the plateau in the days leading up to Christmas. The children tobogganed at terrifying speed down the icy tracks. Madeleine Sèches dreaded these snowy times, when, carrying 15 litres of milk on her back for the household, she would sink deep into the drifts, her feet freezing and ill protected by the wooden clogs she wore. In the mornings, when she woke, the panes of glass on the inside of her bedroom window were thickly cased in ice.

  At the presbytery, Alice Reynier, who took the nickname Jispa – from ‘joie de servir dans la paix avec amour’ – a nursery school teacher whose lay community of Protestant women in Pomeyrol had closed for lack of food and heating, arrived to help Magda, who was overwhelmed by the tasks that filled her day. Jispa was very small, gentle and competent; she had a round, unlined face, beady eyes and a haircut like a boy’s. Magda, at first apprehensive at taking in someone so pious, learnt to love her. To the family, she soon became ‘petite maman’, mother to Trocmé and Magda, who had both lost theirs as children, grandmother to Nelly and her brothers. She helped with the accounts, the homework, the parishioners and the refugees, who sometimes gathered in great numbers in the dining room to see Trocmé. Jispa, Nelly would later say, injected a note of calm and orderliness into their ‘intemperate’ household. The villagers referred to her as the ‘Martha of the presbytery’.

  Never had Trocmé been so busy. The Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole had 300 students and 30 teachers and was being forced to turn applicants away; among them were 20 future pastors, the ‘futhéos’, who acted as monitors, leaders of Bible classes. ‘We have had too much success,’ André Trocmé wrote to his brother Robert. There were Bible meetings, choirs, sermons to write, visits to sick parishioners. The parish was an exceptionally large one. Both he and Magda were exhausted; he was also suffering from the acute backache that often plagued him at times of overwork, while Magda had lost weight and looked grey. But the children were thriving and ‘learning very young the lessons of life’, both from the dramas that seemed to crop up every day, and from the remarkable men and women who were now living on the plateau.

  Nelly, though not pretty, might become so, Trocmé told Robert, and she was a keen cub leader. Her character was ‘rugged’ and conscientious. Jean-Pierre, growing up fast, was a philosopher, a musician, a reader and a great charmer. Jacques was a dreamer, a boy made in Andre’s own image (though thinner), with ‘something of a Russian aristocrat’ about him; while Daniel, at five still the baby of the house, was practical, steady, the ‘stockman’ of the establishment, who knew where everything was. And another kind of ‘grave peril’ had just been averted. An enterprising newcomer had proposed opening a cinema. Trocmé managed to sabotage what he feared would be immoral and corrupting entertainment by persuading the parish council to buy a projector of their own, and to install it in an annexe of the temple, where it could show improving films. The newcomer’s application for a licence was turned down.

  On Christmas Day 1942, Magda decorated the house with candles stuck into potatoes cut in half and covered in red paper. The children each played an instrument, as they did every year, and sang songs and psalms; Trocmé played the accordion. In the temple, under the enormous Christmas tree hung with small presents for the children, he recounted one of his fables, adapted from a Bible story to suit modern times. The packed congregation included many of the hidden Jews, some of whom struggled to reconcile Trocmé’s message – that what was taking place was a test of man by God – with their own view of the persecution of the Jews. For them, it made no sense at all.

  Camus, at work at Le Panelier on La Peste, feeling lonely, seeing in his trapped occupants of Oran a metaphor for the exile and isolation of the plateau, was longing for the arrival of spring. Was it possible, he wondered, to be both ‘happy and solitary’? ‘In this country,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘where winter has abolished every colour since everything in it is white, the slightest sound since the snow stifles it, all fragrance since it is overladen with cold, the first whiff of spring grass must be like a call to joy, the bursting trumpet of sensation.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  An open pen of chickens

  Hardly was Christmas over when the fortunes of the Jews on the plateau began to change. The Prefect, Bach, sent a police inspector to le Chambon to keep an eye on the Coteau Fleuri and La Maison des Roches, and to spy on the ‘movements of Jewish refugees’. Léopold Praly was a Protestant, a pleasant-looking, eager, apparently amiable young man of 23. He took an office on the main square and rooms in a small hotel nearby, the Pension des Acacias, but spent much of his time sitting in a café and flirting with girls. Behind the bonhomie lay considerable shrewdness. In the café, Praly overheard much useful information.

  It was not long before he was reporting back to Bach that Darcissac was known as an ardent socialist and a ‘very doubtful’ character, as indeed were many of the Protestants on the mountain. Meeting Trocmé one day in the street, he remarked to him that he was perfectly well aware that the Maison des Roches was a ‘dangerous den of Jews and anti-patriots’. When Trocmé reprimanded him for being a spy, Praly replied: ‘We each of us earn our living as best we can.’ Soon he was ordering all Jews to come forward and register themselves, and it was not all that long before he learnt the name of a young Jew, Serge Vollweiler, hiding in the Secours Suisse house Faïdoli, and arrived to arrest him. The quick-witted cook of the house offered Praly a cup of coffee while Serge went to pack his bags before climbing out of a window and disappearing into the woods.

  Praly had not been in le Chambon many weeks before he acquired a girlfriend; he appeared anxious to make friends on the plateau. This very young police inspector is another of the story’s ambiguous characters. Although he is generally regarded as a villain, some later claimed that he too had entered into the prevailing spirit of resistance. Miss Maber, ever a canny observer of local affairs, who got to know Praly well through his girlfriend, always believed that his intentions, at least, were good.

  The main square in le Chambon

  Before Praly had a chance to show his true colours, the German assault on the Jews in the newly occupied zone took a sudden turn for the increasingly lethal.

  Marseilles had long been a problem in the minds of both Vichy and the Germans. With the fall of France, thousands of refugees, fleeing Paris and the north, had come to settle in and around the charming old port, with its ancient hidden underground passageways and its narrow streets and alleyways, the washing hung out between the houses. It reminded visitors of Naples. The exodus brought Germans and Austrians belonging to the pre-war intelligentsia of Vienna, Munich and Berlin to join the many Italians, Spaniards, Armenians and North Africans who over the years had made the city their home. By 1942, there were some 35,000 Jews living and sheltering in its parishes, making Marseilles, along with Lyons, the southern city with the highest population of Jews; slightly over half of them were French Sephardic, descen
ded from families expelled by Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, or drawn by trade and the links between North Africa and mainland France.

  Right up until 12 November 1942, when the Germans entered the city and drove their tanks with swastikas flying along the wide and magnificent La Canebière, past the Bourse and the grand hotels, Marseilles had been a lively cultural centre, a place of theatres, concert halls and learned societies, where Golo Mann, Walter Benjamin and Max Ernst all spent time hoping to find visas and ships to take them away. The city was also a centre for the many welfare organisations, their offices crammed into hotel rooms and rented apartments. For a long time, despite the presence not far away of Les Milles, one of Vichy’s largest internment camps, opened in an old tile factory and used as a transit area for those awaiting permission and visas to leave, the Jews of Marseilles had felt safe. They were not required to wear yellow stars, France was their home, and most considered themselves more French than Jewish. This sense of invulnerability had somehow stretched to many of the newcomers, though it was not a sentiment shared by everyone. As Donald Lowrie, still in France and working hard to support the scattered Jews, observed, Marseilles was ‘like an open pen of chickens with a hawk in the sky, circling ever lower’.

  Lowrie was right to feel apprehensive. From the summer of 1941, the Germans had been running a secret information service in the city, which they well knew to be full of German deserters, ‘negroes . . . and above all Jews’, its narrow streets concealing precisely the people they wanted to be rid of. Marseilles, they said, was the ‘capital of anti-France’, ‘openly hostile’ to Vichy and the Reich. Much of the right-wing press agreed. In an article published in October 1942, Louis Gillet, an academician, spoke of ‘this empire of sin and death’ and asked: ‘What means are there to rid these districts full of riffraff of their pus, and to regenerate the city?’

  His answer was not long in coming. On 3 January 1943, a bomb exploded in a brothel, injuring several German soldiers, then another in the Hôtel Splendide, which had been commandeered by the army, killing a maître d’hôtel and wounding the wife of a German consular official. A curfew was imposed. Posters appeared announcing reprisals. Germans took over various primary schools as barracks.

  Early on the morning of 22 January, some 12,000 French police from various forces, together with about 5,000 Germans, all under the command of SS Karl Oberg, who had come down from Paris to direct operations, set out to comb through the city. They stopped people in the streets, in bars, in restaurants, on trams and buses, and they banged on people’s doors. Forty thousand IDs were checked; 5,956 people – ‘irregulars’, those with no papers – were arrested; 800 bars were closed. Operation Tiger took 786 Jews – of whom 570 were French nationals, many of whom, against all evidence, continued to believe themselves inviolate – put them on a train marked with a yellow Star of David, and sent them directly to Paris, to await deportation. A further 1,642 people picked up during the rafle were sent to Fréjus, to sit in the freezing cold in a vast bare field to await their fate. Of those deported to Sobibor on Convois 52 and 53, none returned.

  But this was only the beginning. Fearing an Allied landing along the Mediterranean coast, the Germans wanted no potential hiding places for resisters. On 1 February, having cleared the Old Port, house by house, street by street, they moved in with tanks and explosives. Over the next 17 days, they blew up the entire area, demolishing some 2,000 buildings and reducing 14 hectares to a desolate waste of dust and rubble.

  One of the Jews who witnessed the destruction of old Marseilles was a 13-year-old boy called Gilbert Nizard, who climbed every day to the top of the Basilica of Notre-Dame and watched the buildings crumble.

  Gilbert and his parents thought of themselves not just as French, but as Pétainist. They liked the speeches of the heroic Maréchal and did not blame him for the disasters visited on the Jews, choosing to believe that the Germans and the men Pétain surrounded himself with, such as Laval, were alone responsible. As good Frenchmen, totally assimilated into every aspect of French life, they felt safe. Whatever happened to the hapless foreign Jews could never happen to them. Armand, Gilbert’s father, had arrived in Marseilles in 1907 from Tunisia, bringing with him his two brothers, Albert and Simon, and his mother; his father had died not long before. The three young men were enterprising and hard-working and were soon running a profitable import business, bringing sugar, coffee, cocoa and spices from the French colonies.

  In Marseilles, Armand met Bella Veill, who had come to France from Strasbourg. They married in 1913 and had nine children, all of them born in their large family house at 46 Boulevard Notre-Dame. Gilbert was the seventh; two younger boys followed. André, the eldest, worked with his father, as did Marthonne and Suzanne, until she married in 1939 and moved to Avignon. Apart from Blanchette, who had also married and emigrated to Portugal, the entire family lived at home, in considerable comfort. There were four maids. Even if the economic crisis of the early 1930s had made a dent in the Nizard fortunes, they continued to entertain lavishly, and once the German Jews escaping from the Reich began to reach Marseilles, they kept open house for them too.

  Armand and Bella Nizard, with seven of their nine children

  The first two years of Vichy rule were uneventful. The name Nizard did not sound Jewish. The younger children went to various lycées, where they sang ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’. Armand continued to shower Bella with costly pieces of jewellery. As the mother of nine French children, she was awarded the Médaille de la Famille. André, who had been called up on the outbreak of war, had been decorated with a Croix de Guerre with palm before being demobilised. They all felt, the parents as well as the children, secure in their Frenchness; as Gilbert would later say, fearing nothing, protected by Pétain, even after Armand’s business had to be put in the name of an Aryan – he had a trusted colleague who volunteered to act as a front – and after 20-year-old Maurice was banned from sitting his final medical exams. It did not occur to any of them to leave France. Were they not French? Was André not a decorated war hero? Rationing had made inroads on their lavish lives, but what could not be found in the shops could usually be bought on the black market.

  The round-ups and the clearances of the old town of Marseilles stopped just a few hundred yards from the Boulevard Notre-Dame. But after they had destroyed the port, the Germans kept going. They did more spot checks; they arrested new groups of people. Marseilles was suddenly full of alarming rumours. Day by day, it became harder to cling on to the carefully nurtured illusion about assimilation, about the legacy of the French Revolution, about liberty and fraternity.

  Armand’s brother Simon was married to Marthe, the niece of an antiquarian, who, being childless, was studying to be a doctor. One day, with no prior warning, the couple were denounced as Jews, arrested, taken to the prison of Saint-Pierre, put on a train for Drancy and deported to Auschwitz. It was all so sudden, so unexpected, that the strongest reaction throughout the rest of the family was one of shock. When they were able to consider their position, take stock more calmly, they realised that they all had to leave Marseilles. Suzanne and her two small children, briefly detained in Avignon but then released, decided to make their way to the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, whose reputation as a place of safety they had already discussed. Mireille, who was 16, was called in to see her philosophy teacher, who, having heard talk of further arrests, begged her not to come to school. As she left the lycée that evening, Mireille was stopped by the police and her ID was checked; she was allowed to go, but her friend Jacqueline, stopped with her, was not. Jacqueline was deported.

  One night very soon afterwards, at around seven o’clock, a German interpreter called Muller rang on the Nizards’ bell. He came, he said, ‘in friendship’, to warn the family that they were in danger. Muller had a revolver, and when he left, he took away with him 110,000 francs that Bella had hidden in the linen cupboard. When he returned two days later, bringing with him two German soldiers, he was considerably les
s friendly. This time he carried off Bella’s magnificent collection of jewellery, which had been kept in a desk in her bedroom. The Nizards agreed that they could wait no longer. They packed, Gilbert remembers, a mountain of luggage, and hid their valuable paintings in the coal cellar, but in their haste abandoned an important collection of Saxe porcelain. Armand, Bella and André went to Nice, to see whether they could raise some money. The four younger children, in the care of Maurice, left to join Suzanne and her family in the mountains.

  When the Nizards arrived on the plateau, having wound their way up on the Tortillard through the forests of pine and fir trees heavy with snow – they reminded Camus of almond trees in flower – they went to join Suzanne in Fay-le-Froid. The village, which jutted out on a hill, had wisely renamed itself Fay-sur-Lignon in an attempt to dispel its entirely accurate renown as a place of exceptional cold, glacial winds driving straight down from the peak at Mézenc and snowdrifts that could reach eight metres for weeks at a time. For the next two years, Fay and its outlying farms and hamlets would become a haven for those seeking refuge.

  Fay was the commercial heart of the plateau. If le Chambon had cornered the market in guest houses and children’s pensions, Fay, with its grey granite houses and slate tiles, its dour architecture broken only by occasional surprisingly decorative fretwork metal balconies, was where people shopped and gathered. It had 6 butchers, 3 bakeries, 11 grocers and an astonishing 33 cafés, and on the many market days that filled the agricultural calendar, people from all over the Haute-Loire and the Ardèche came in search of tools, produce and livestock. At Easter, the large sloping square in the middle of the village was full of lambs and sheep; in October it was given over to a widely celebrated horse fair, farmers buying and selling the elegant, hardy beige animals with their distinctive white manes, which they used to plough the fields. Even the Germans coveted Fay’s horses and came in search of them.