Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  On the surrounding farms, people kept cows, pigs, ducks and chickens; they made their own butter and cheese, and smoked, salted and cured hams, for use in soups and patés during the long winter months. Few had indoor bathrooms; even fewer had electricity. Fay, like le Chambon, Tence and Le Mazet, had a large Protestant community, and among the villagers were many Darbyists. As long as the children married within the Protestant faith, mixed marriages were accepted. The local patois, which owed something to ancient Occitan and something to Italian, was widely spoken. Although in Fay’s three schools the children were taught in French, most of the small children reached the age of six without a word of the language.

  In the 1930s, Fay had become a popular tourist resort, visitors coming up from the surrounding plains to spend a month in the Abels’ hotel, to walk over the fields and up on to the Mézenc, and to eat in the excellent restaurant, which was famous for its trout, caught in the local rivers. Once war was declared, they came in fewer numbers and stayed for shorter periods, but the hotel stayed open, run now by Mme Abel, who was in her seventies, and her daughter Lydie. And as the cities grew short of food, and rationing left many people hungry, so parties of touristes alimentaires could be seen every weekend, going from farm to farm in search of eggs, butter and meat. What the farmers did not sell on the black market, or deliver in forced requisitions, they used as barter. One enterprising man, whose family had run out of shoes, wrapped a string of sausages round and round his body, covered them with a coat, whose pockets he packed with meat, then set off on the Tortillard to Saint-Etienne, where he made a deal with a local shoemaker, meat for shoes, to be taken a pair at a time, to avoid detection.

  When Gilbert and his brothers and sisters arrived in Fay, they found Suzanne and her family staying with Albert Exbrayat, who owned a garage on the edge of the village. Albert’s mother Marie ran the ironmonger’s on the main square, where she sold the vast cauldrons used by the famers’ wives for their soups, along with every kind of tool, cartridge, implement and plough, her wares displayed outside on the street on balmy days. Marie was a formidable woman, strong, canny, small and thickset, who spoke little but patois and had introduced a glass-cutting machine to the village for her customers to order and measure their windows. Nothing happened in Fay of which she was not a part. Above her shop was a large flat, in which she and her family lived. The Exbrayats were Protestants, believers, and with that belief had come a certitude that hiding people sought by Vichy and the Germans was the right thing to do.

  The Nizards stayed for a while with Chazot, the mayor, who ran another small hotel; Chazot was also steeped in village affairs. From the hotel, with the help of Marie Exbrayat, they moved into two floors of a house on the square belonging to the Girand family, which felt safe as it had a second door at the back, giving on to a side street. They were soon joined by Bella, André and Armand, who had narrowly avoided arrest in Valence. Maurice began to offer his medical skills to the neighbouring families; Bella, Marthonne and Mireille kept house, and the boys went to school. Mireille continued her studies by correspondence and Maurice coached her in physics and chemistry.

  Though impoverished, the Nizards were busy and cheerful, except for Armand, who found his enforced idleness unbearable and – foolishly – filled his time writing letters to his associate now running the business in Marseilles. Although the Jews hiding in various houses in and around Fay found it more prudent to mix little with each other, everyone knew that a constant stream of people seeking refuge passed through the Abels’ hotel, and that Esther Furet, who was related to the Exbrayats, had taken in a family of strangers, some of them into her farmhouse outside the village, where a trapdoor above the manger led to a hidden space in the rafters. A haystack concealed another unseen safe place. M Robert, the baker, whose son had just escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp, was also an active organiser of safe houses.

  The Jews arriving in Fay could not have known that its new young pastor was a great admirer of Boegner and a man absolutely dedicated to saving as many people as he could. Daniel Curtet was just 25, the son of a pastor from the Vaudois, when, hearing of the work being done on the plateau and finding Switzerland’s isolation and neutrality irksome, he applied for the post at Fay, which he had known from holidays as a boy. He was a slight, nice-looking man, with very round, rather large spectacles and wavy dark brown hair, cut short and combed straight back, gentle and humorous in manner, with none of the severity of some of his more austere colleagues. He spoke slowly, listened carefully. Curtet is a figure about whom there is no ambivalence.

  He reached the plateau in late October 1942 and immediately wrote to his parents describing the appalling cold in his presbytery, his parish of 400 Protestants scattered over 16 square kilometres, and his first impressions of his flock, who seemed to suffer from a ‘total lack of culture’, their lives given over to their cows and their conversations to the weather, crops, food, rationing and the war. Naturally bookish and very well educated, Curtet worried about how to preach sermons that were sufficiently simple and direct, but said that it would do him good having to think things out more clearly. Over the next 13 months, he wrote 45 letters and postcards to his parents; 15 of them bear traces of a censor’s blue pen.

  Soon after settling in, Curtet attended the monthly gathering of the plateau’s Protestant pastors, six of whom were Swiss, five French and one Italian. Along with Trocmé and Theis in le Chambon, there was Leenhardt in Tence, Besson in Montbuzat, Morel in Devesset, Bettex in Riou, all men he would soon know well. Together with the refugee pastors, there were now 24 on the plateau. From them, he discovered that an active system was already in place to hide the refugees, with a password, changed every month, as well as a code to be used on the telephone or in letters. Curtet became a master of the coded reference, mining the Bible for suitable phrases, and his letters to his parents are full of elegant and humorous allusions. As a pastor himself, his father, he knew, would have no trouble deciphering them.

  One of Curtet’s first encounters was with Oscar Rosowsky and his mother, still very desolate from the loss of her husband; they told him their true identity and the fact that they were mother and son. He realised that Mme Abel and her daughter Lydie, as well as M Robert the baker, were allies, and that help could reliably be found among his parishioners, and particularly in the homes of the Darbyists, whose habit of discretion and silence he soon came to admire and rely on. The Darbyists, he said, were the most faithful and the most secure of them all. M Robert, who was also the vice president of the parish council, was the only person in whom he decided to confide everything, so that were he to be suddenly arrested, there would be someone to take over.

  It took a few false starts, however, to perfect the code, and his first experience was confusing. He was paying a visit to Les Vastres, a hamlet that lay within his parish, when a telephone call came for him. There was no telephone in his presbytery. Pastor Besson, whom he had yet to get to know, barked down the phone: ‘Can you hear me clearly?’ ‘Yes, very,’ replied Curtet, having no idea that this meant that the call was important. ‘I need to send you a book.’ This was baffling. ‘What book?’ Besson sighed with exasperation. ‘An Old Testament, you idiot!’ Livres, books, which had to be moved, delivered, put into libraries, were the newly arrived Jews in need of homes.

  Soon Curtet was writing to his parents: ‘I am continuing my studies of Christian names (Mark 13/14b) and I can find no trace of the name of Hans; on the other hand, my collection grows with those of the 12 sons of the patriarch, who, as I have discovered with pleasure, my parishioners and the Darbyists cherish and love dearly. I have also found some “Ignaces-en-ski”, and even some “chiens-au-tri”.’ Mark 13/14b referred to ‘let him that readeth, understand’; ‘Hans’ to the Germans; the 12 sons of the patriarch to the Jews, descendants of Abraham; ‘Ignaces-en-ski’ to Polish refugees and ‘chiens-au-tri’ to ‘Autrichiens’, Austrians, inverted. In subsequent letters, ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel�
�� (Matthew 15/24) meant the hidden Jews; the ‘syndic des Vastres’ the friendly mayor of Les Vastres, Jean Bouix, ‘who is passionate about this kind of book’ and very ‘skilled at raising lambs’; ‘ceux du Weisshorn’, the name of a peak in Switzerland often referred to by its nickname of ‘gendarme’, the local French police. Curtet’s father was a mountaineer.

  In January 1943, noting the arrival of the Nizards, Curtet wrote: ‘Today I must hasten to find a place for my many copies of the Old Testament: five are to be delivered tomorrow, and I am especially proud of my parishioners, who have shown themselves to be fascinated by this kind of literature. This particular edition was published by a press in Marseilles. It seems that they have printed a great number.’

  How necessary Curtet’s elaborate code really was even he never quite knew; but it clearly gave him great pleasure and he felt a constant need to recount to his parents what was happening on the plateau. Modest and uncritical, he was a devoted and assiduous pastor, skiing from his presbytery to his distant parishioners when the snows came, battling with the sudden flurries that steamed up his glasses and froze his eyelashes, walking and cycling through the mud when the snows melted. A keen hiker and sportsman, he loved the rugged plateau. To feed his growing number of hidden Jews, Curtet made an arrangement with Mayor Bouix in Les Vastres to take his forged ration books, obtained from Rosowsky, which the mayor exchanged for real ones without complaint, saying that his superiors were also on their side. As both a teacher and a farmer, Bouix was a well-known figure on the plateau, and he saw it as his mission to supply all the Jews arriving in his area with false IDs. A 13-year-old shepherd boy acted as his courier, ferrying documents backwards and forwards to Rosowsky, doing the journey at night, whatever the weather. His name was Paul Majola.

  When Curtet had people hidden in the presbytery, Mme Abel sent over vats of soup. Later, when the events of the war came to be discussed, Mme Abel and Lydie would be described as ‘reserved, discreet and agreeable’. Soon, Curtet had a network of helpers taking in, moving around, hiding, feeding the Jews. Another unexpected ally turned out to be the Catholic curé of Fay, Bernard, one of the many Catholics on the plateau whose helpful actions were later overlooked. Curtet began his first visit to him by talking very generally about the refugees. Sensing the curé’s warmth, he pressed on to discuss the hiding of Jews in his presbytery. What did the curé think he should do? Bernard replied that it was an excellent idea, and that since he assumed that Curtet was incurring considerable expenses, could he give him 100 francs to help cover them?

  What Curtet’s parishioners were soon remarking on, with approval, was the way that their young pastor never laid down the law, very seldom started any sentence ‘Je pense’, I think, and entered into their culture of silence and discretion as if by instinct. He never saw himself, his son Alin would later say, as ‘an actor in history’. Curtet regarded the Trocmés, with their loud voices and strong, didactic manners, with some wariness.

  When the deep drifts of snow came, Curtet kept on paying visits to his distant parishioners, but complained that every outing took him at least two hours, and that when he wanted to visit le Chambon, some 15 kilometres away, the snow lay too thick for him to use his skis. In the evenings, by the fire in his cold presbytery, he read books on philosophy with ‘a Daniel who is my neighbour’. He had decided, he told his father, to spend some years in Fay, because the local Protestants had seen too many pastors come and go, and they were people who were ‘slow to open up’. He noted with pleasure that in his regular congregation there were now as many Darbyists as Protestants. Although he was somewhat lonely at first, his life changed when he met a young woman from Tours, Suzanne, whose father owned a shoe shop in Tournus and who had come to Fay on holiday; they talked after the morning service and met in the library. Before long, they were engaged; Curtet told his parents that she was ‘a pearl among fiancées’.

  Through the snow one day appeared two new ‘goats from the breed of the Otrichtal’ (Autrichiens), as he reported to his father, both seemingly very happy to have found a new owner – himself – who had transformed a corner of his house into a stable. These were two Austrian Jews, a painter called Schmidt and a history professor, Lipschutz, who had seen both his parents and his fiancée executed after the Anschluss. Writing to his father at this time, Curtet described them as ‘tchekas’, this time using a word from the patois of his childhood village in Switzerland to mean someone hidden secretly in your home. The two men spent three weeks in the attic of the presbytery, reading the books from Curtet’s library, and in the evenings, when the shutters were closed, they came down and sat in his study. One night, the bell rang. When Curtet went to the door, he realised that the young girl who had brought him a message could not have failed to have caught sight of his visitors. That same night, he led them on a two-hour walk up into the mountains, to the house of a farmer called Bonnet, who took the men in and asked no questions. Next morning, Bonnet drove his horse and cart into Fay and appeared at the presbytery in search of mattresses for his guests.

  Since silence and discretion were the essence of the inhabitants of the plateau, it is not always easy to know either how many Jews there were in hiding, nor where precisely they were being concealed. It did not take very long, however, for Curtet’s deeds and network of helpers to become known; once one family had found its way to Fay, others followed. During the snowy months of early 1943, when heavy downfalls cut off the village for days at a time, and Curtet struggled through the drifts to pay his pastoral visits, the knitting families of Roanne began to make their way up the mountain.

  At the end of the Great War, there had been three French Jewish families living in the little textile town of Roanne, not far from Vichy. All through the twenties and thirties, knitters and weavers arrived from Poland and Germany, driven abroad by poverty and pogroms, drawn to Roanne by the promise of work in this bustling, thriving area. Most were related; others were friends. As a community, they were not particularly observant, but they were attracted by Zionism and believed passionately in the traditions and culture of Judaism. They worked as a cooperative, spoke Yiddish, and celebrated the Jewish holidays with much singing. Kristallnacht brought new families and with them a greater consciousness of danger, but the outbreak of war and then the months of the phoney war passed uneventfully, even though they knew that their relations still in Poland were being herded into ghettos.

  The 92 knitting families settled in Roanne had between them a great many children, who spoke French by day in the local schools, and Yiddish at home and in the many scouting and cultural activities arranged by their parents. Much was made of their education, schooling being regarded as crucial to their future, wherever it took them. Many of these children would later say that the winter of 1940–1 was the last happy winter of their lives.

  Genie and Liliane Schloss were sisters. Their father Max had grown up in Lodz, come to France at the age of 19 to escape the Polish draft, tried to reach Israel but been turned back by the British at Jaffa, and had then settled in Vienna, where he became a knitter, learning to operate one of the first knitting machines. Chancing one day to meet a French Jew working in Roanne’s textile business, and hearing of its possibilities, he took his wife and small daughter, Genie, and both his and his wife’s families, and emigrated to France. It was 1930, and the French needed Polish labour. Liliane was born in 1933. Both Max and his wife worked on the knitting machines, making pullovers. The little girls were happy, feeling themselves part of a large communal family; they joined the Jewish scouts, went camping, learnt to play musical instruments and sang. What both would remember later was the music of their childhood. When Pétain visited Roanne early in 1942, they called out ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’ with great enthusiasm.

  Genie and Liliane Schloss

  But then the Germans crossed the demarcation line and occupied the Grand Hôtel in Roanne, and no one felt safe any more. Rumours of round-ups and arrests spread rapidly through the little community
. At school, French children hissed ‘sale Juives’ in the playground. One of the knitters heard from his dentist, who was a Protestant, about the plateau in the Cévennes where Jews were being hidden. Having been given an introduction to Trocmé, Max decided to send his daughters up the mountain on the little train to live in one of the children’s homes, Clair de Lune, run by a childless Spanish republican couple in a hamlet not far from le Chambon. At 14, Genie took seriously the task of looking after 9-year-old Liliane. They kept their surname of Schloss, which sounded German and not Jewish, and passed themselves off as Alsatian refugees who had been living in Tulle.

  Clair de Lune had ten boarders, half of them Jewish. The kindly Spanish director taught the girls how to ski, and how to sing the psalms popular on the plateau; but his wife struck the sisters as avaricious and unsympathetic, rationing their already small portions of food, and quarrelling with her husband when he lit a fire to make them feel warmer. They ate a great many watery carrots, and when they walked into le Chambon, they would stop and gaze at the rows of blueberry tarts in the bakery. From their bedroom window they watched the convalescent German soldiers run past during their daily exercise.

  Genie was sent to Theis and the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, Liliane to Darcissac and the primary school. Having been instructed to say that they were Protestant, they decided, on their first Sunday, to go to the temple in le Chambon to hear Trocmé preach. It was unlike anything they had ever known. They were impressed and intrigued by the service, by the long silences, by the pastor’s forceful and commanding presence. Very occasionally, Max found ways to visit the plateau to see them. One day, a group of French and German police arrived at the pension in search of refugees. The sisters were terrified. Genie hid in the cupboard in their room, in which happened to be hanging an old coat of their father’s, which, she knew, had a Jewish calendar in its pocket. The police left the house without checking their room, but that night, Genie and Liliane cried with fear.