Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Early in 1943, Max decided that it was no longer safe for him and his wife to stay in Roanne. Most of their Jewish neighbours had left and were already hiding in various parts of the plateau. Taking a stock of sweaters with them, which they hoped to sell bit by bit to pay their way, they reached Grenoble, from where they sent word to the girls to help find them a refuge on the plateau. Genie, though still only 14, set off on her bicycle to visit the farms around Fay, knocking on doors and asking for a room for her parents. She was cold and wet and very tired when a farmer’s wife, Mme Ruel, invited her in to sit by the fire, gave her a bowl of soup and said that she would arrange with Mme Exbrayat for Max and his wife to have rooms underneath another family of knitters, Hélène Grundman and her husband, and Mireille, their eldest daughter. The Grundmans’ two boys, aged six and seven, had been sent to a farm belonging to Esther Furet, while their five-year-old daughter had gone to an orphanage in Draguignan.

  For the rest of the war, Mme Ruel looked after the Schlosses, providing them with ham, eggs and butter and acting as a postbox when they needed to leave messages for each other. Through Oscar Rosowsky, they obtained forged IDs as Alsatians; they met and made friends with Mme Rosowsky and the Nizards. Since German soldiers occasionally brought their cars to Albert Exbrayat’s garage, and wandered through the village while they were mended, they seldom left the house by day, but on Sundays they attended the temple and Max, who had a powerful voice, was taught by Curtet to sing the psalms. On Yom Kippur, Curtet held a special service for the Jews. The Schlosses lived frugally, eking out their stock of sweaters. Whenever they could, Liliane and Genie, still living at the Clair de Lune, bicycled over to see them.

  The plateau was now full of Roanne’s exiled knitters. Ruth Golan and Rita Goldmayer, whose German fathers had been friends in Berlin, lived together with their families in a small house deep in the forest owned by a woman who had moved out and gone to live with her daughter-in-law. The two men worked on a farm, looked after the cows and dug potatoes; when a pig was killed, they received a share of the meat. Eggs and cheese were regularly delivered to their door. After the two families became too nervous to send the girls to school, teachers came out from the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole every few days to give them lessons. Because Ruth and Rita loved singing, they practised the psalms and sang them in the temple on Sundays. They were told to sing, very loudly, ‘Alouette, gentille Alouette’ if they saw strangers in the street, to seem like little French girls.

  The house had electricity, but none of the roads were lit, and though they knew the forest to be full of other families from Roanne, hidden away in similar farmhouses, the blackness that separated them felt dense and dangerous. One day, collecting bread on her bicycle from the village, Ruth was stopped by two German soldiers who asked for her papers. They waved her on, but for a long time, she could not stop herself trembling. As Miss Maber said, however safe the surface of life seemed, everyone was always afraid.

  Those of the Roanne children who found themselves alone, for greater safety, separated from their parents and brothers and sisters, and from the colour and love and noise of their communal lives, suffered from the isolation and harshness of their new surroundings. They were intimidated by their dour hosts. What they would think about later, long after the war was over, was not the cold or the hunger, though both had filled their days, nor the lack of electricity or running water, but how long it had taken them to get used to the silences, and the fact that when someone spoke, it was only ever to give instructions. There was no touching, no warmth. What one girl, just 12 when she found herself alone in a Darbyist household in the forests, remembered was that she had had to force herself to learn to live apart, detach herself from other people, and that once she had learnt that lesson, she found it impossible to feel close to her parents again. She had changed, become another person; she was no longer a child. In a school essay, long after the war, another wrote of the day she had lost her mother, her home and the loving centre of her life, and how the grief she felt then she was never quite able to lose.

  Many of the Jews hidden on the plateau were afraid, particularly the men, reduced to idleness and mindful of the stories reaching France of the fate of the Jews in Poland. They knew that many of their relations had disappeared, though just where they had gone was still not clear to them. Max, who worried constantly about their future, was made still more anxious when his 19-year-old sister-in-law went to meet her fiancé in Lyons, and was picked up by the police and sent to Drancy.

  Soon afterwards, a German soldier convalescing in le Chambon got into difficulties swimming in the Lignon, and was saved by a Spanish boy from the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole. On being pulled out, the German asked whether there was anything that he could do in return. That night, lying in bed in their pension, Genie said to Liliane: ‘Do you think he could save our aunt?’ It was already too late. She had been put on Convoi 57, bound for Auschwitz.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A lethal year

  Nineteen forty-three was a lethal year on the plateau.

  Towards the end of January, the Clermont-Ferrand office of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives uncovered what they decided was an ‘escape network for Jews’ among the Protestant villages on the mountain. They began to put together a list of those involved, helped by Inspector Praly, who was seen every evening at the post office handing in large envelopes to send to his superiors in Le Puy. The name that came up most often was that of Charles Guillon, but he was known to be living in Switzerland. Also high on the list, however, were the names of Trocmé, Darcissac and Theis. Darcissac, claimed Praly, was the moving force behind a ‘Judeo-Gaullist circle’ that was peddling ‘pro-Jewish propaganda’ on the plateau. Several times every week, he had observed the schoolteacher meeting secretly with men such as Le Forestier and Barbezat, the bookseller, to listen to the BBC, plot how to hide the Jews, and help forge false IDs.

  Magda was knitting in the kitchen of the presbytery when, at seven o’clock on the evening of 13 February, two uniformed gendarmes banged on the door asking for the pastor. Trocmé was at a village meeting, so she showed them into his study. She had expected this moment ever since Lamirand’s unfortunate and threatening summer visit. Trocmé returned, and was informed that he was under arrest. He suggested that they eat dinner before leaving. Magda and Jispa repacked the suitcase of clothes that they had prepared in anticipation of such an event long before but had recently unpacked when the pastor ran out of clean shirts. Cohen and Mme Berthe, one hiding in the attic, the other in the cellar, were warned to keep quiet and not show themselves. The gendarmes, apparently very ill at ease, declined to eat. Anxious that there should be no fuss about the arrest, they insisted that no one be told. As it happened, the young daughter of a church councillor unexpectedly arrived to remind the Trocmés of her father’s birthday celebrations, realised what was happening and hastened off to spread the news.

  February 1943 was exceptionally cold, even for the plateau. It was minus 10 degrees when Trocmé emerged from the presbytery between the two gendarmes to find a double row of villagers lining the path to the square, clattering their clogs as they tried to keep warm. They had brought with them small presents of things hoarded up for special occasions: a box of sardines, a bar of soap, a piece of sausage, some eau de cologne and a surprising roll of lavatory paper, on which Trocmé later discovered his parishioners had copied out verses from the Bible. There were also a few candles and when it was realised that matches were missing, the two policemen furtively produced their own. They seemed much relieved by the peaceful behaviour of the crowd, which had started to sing Luther’s hymn: ‘A safe stronghold our God is still / A trusty shield and weapon’. Trocmé felt, he would later write, ‘almost elated’. ‘This was the moment I had long been waiting for, the moment when I would have to bear witness to my deepest convictions.’ He had always believed that there were two powers, good and evil, fighting over the Kingdom of the World; it was now that he decided that ‘there
is a third: stupidity’.

  From the presbytery, the police went on to arrest Theis, who came quietly, and Darcissac, who escaped through his cellar and into the woods, until Mme Darcissac was persuaded to urge him to turn himself in, since it would be much worse for them all if the Germans came to get him. Darcissac, noted Trocmé somewhat smugly, was ‘frozen with fear’, ‘overwhelmed’ by terror that he might be sacked from his job and ‘dishonoured’. The police, anticipating trouble, had cut the telephone and telegraph lines to the village.

  The prisoners were driven off to the police station at Tence, then taken in a cortège of six police cars down the mountain to the barracks in Le Puy, where they were locked into cells but given sheets for their bunks and treated with embarrassed civility.

  Next morning, all signs of politeness gone, they were put on a train for Lyons, then on another for Limoges, to be interned at the camp of Saint-Paul-d’Eyjeaux, where they were received with great ‘uncouthness’ by the captain of gendarmerie. The camp, a series of low grey wooden barracks surrounded by barbed wire, was home to 500 men, most of them prominent communists from south-west France, interned at the time of the Soviet–German pact, along with a number of Catholic and socialist opponents to Vichy. The inmates were thin, from many months eating little but Jerusalem artichokes, salsify and turnips, and extremely bored. Saint-Paul-d’Eyjeaux had been designed as a ‘re-education’ camp, not a work camp, but had long since abandoned all attempts at persuading the men to look on Vichy more favourably, leaving them with nothing to fill their days. They spent the time surreptitiously listening to radio receivers made of lamps and bits of wire hidden inside tins, and were currently celebrating the fall of Stalingrad. They were not unfriendly to the newcomers, joking that the camp was already full of Catholics and they had a rabbi, ‘but pastors! That’s all we need!’

  The camp commandant appeared dubious when Theis proposed holding Protestant services, saying that he could not imagine that anyone would wish to attend, but he had not reckoned with Trocmé’s powers of oratory, nor with the acute boredom of the men. A first service drew a congregation of nine. Trocmé preached, Theis took the liturgy, Darcissac, whose voice and skills as choirmaster were legendary, led the singing. The nine became twenty; the twenty, forty. Soon the barrack hut was too small for the meetings that followed and the overflow of prisoners had to listen from outside, leaning on the open windows. Deftly, Trocmé and Theis used codes, substituting the name of Pétain for that of Marx, and a lively debate started up among the prisoners; pastors and Marxists alike agreed that after Stalingrad, anything was possible, even the overthrow of capitalism and the crumbling of evil through non-violent means. Walking around the camp, the pastors heard some of the inmates humming the psalms.

  The commandant, sitting in the front row to make certain that nothing seditious was taking place, was delighted to see such eagerness for re-education, and felt so lenient towards his new prisoners that he allowed them unlimited visits and parcels. Darcissac’s son Marco smuggled in a camera and took pictures; Trocmé, who had a real talent for drawing, did sketches of the prisoners and their surroundings. The shelves above their bunks began to look like a grocery shop. On the night when one of the prisoners managed to escape through a tunnel, there was widespread rejoicing, in which the three men shared. They had come to like and admire their companions, and would later say that their talks on communism had been a revelation to them; they were surprised, then pleased, to find themselves so popular.

  From left to right: Theis, Darcissac and Trocmé

  In le Chambon, Magda had been visited by the captain of police from Tence, who apologised for her husband’s arrest, and said what a fine man he considered Trocmé to be. The village was calm, Curtet wrote to his father, ‘as after a storm’. In Nîmes, Boegner, as head of the Protestant Church, was alerted to the arrests. The Bible circle at Mollé expressed their great sympathy; the Catholic curé sent his warm support. In the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, the students had never been so hard-working, nor the farmers in the surrounding countryside so generous with supplies; Noël Poivre, one of the plateau’s fieriest pastors, preached a sermon on Herod and John the Baptist, only thinly disguising Laval, Pétain and the Jews. This would be the start of a far more robust and outspoken attitude towards the ‘unhappy, the prisoners, the persecuted’, in which Bible texts and commentaries would henceforth deal implicitly with resistance.

  Writing to reassure him, Le Forestier told Trocmé: ‘The Church of le Chambon may not be the dove of the Holy Spirit, but it is like a duck: even when you chop off its head, it keeps on walking automatically.’ Characteristically light-hearted, he added that he recommended that the pastor stay on in the camp, where there were grown men to convert and bring to God, while in le Chambon ‘there are nothing but women who have already been saved and many children whom we will look after with tenderness and perseverance’.

  Taking with him the pastor’s nephew, Daniel Trocmé, recently arrived on the plateau, Dr Le Forestier went to Vichy, where he was given an audience with the chef de cabinet of the police minister. The captives, Le Forestier reminded him, pastors and teachers, the fathers of eight, five and three children respectively, were neither spies nor traitors. On the contrary, they were men of God, preaching the Gospels, and Vichy would be making a grave mistake if it turned them into martyrs. They were quite wrong in imagining ‘charity towards enemies, political plots and Gaullism’; what they should have seen was that it was all about ‘love, faith in God, the church of Jesus Christ’. What Le Forestier proposed was a proper inquiry, not one based on ‘anonymous informers’. Bach, it soon transpired, had already put in place an inquiry of his own, warning Vichy that these arrests might well undo all the previous goodwill he had brought about on the plateau.

  It was while Trocmé, Theis and Darcissac were at Saint-Pauld’Eyjeaux that change, of a radical and lasting kind, drawing in farmers and pastors, Jews and communists, students and Darbyists, came to the plateau. It represented everything that these three pacifist, reasonable, believing men most mistrusted.

  In 1942, Laval had agreed, under pressure from the Germans, to set up recruitment offices throughout the unoccupied zone for workers to go to Germany. Fritz Sauckel, the officer in charge of coordinating foreign labour, arrived in Vichy to instruct the French that they would have to supply a quarter of a million workers, over half of them skilled metallurgists. The scheme was given the name ‘Relève’. The terms settled on were designed to appeal to the families of the million or so prisoners of war still held in German camps: one to be released for every three Relève volunteers. Anxious to retain French control, Vichy set about implementing Sauckel’s demands – with a notable lack of success. Only 12,000 volunteers could be persuaded to take up the offer in June; 23,000 men left for Germany in July, 18,000 in August. It was far short of Sauckel’s demands, which were increasing all the time.

  Seeking not to lose the initiative, Vichy tried coercion. In September, a law was passed making national service working for the Germans obligatory for men aged 18 to 50 and single women between the ages of 21 and 35. On 16 February 1943, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, known as STO, came into force. The first to be called up were young men born in 1920, 1921 and 1922.

  If by the winter of 1942 the brutal round-ups and deportations of the foreign Jews, and the unfeeling behaviour of the French police, had cooled not only the attitude of the churches but that of a large swathe of the French population towards Vichy and Pétain, the STO sparked off a far more serious rupture. It was no longer foreigners and strangers who were at risk, but the French themselves. Outrage and anger spread. There was a scramble to find reasons to avoid call-up: women hastened to marry, young men to join the police, the railways or mining companies, all of which carried deferment. Employers were enraged at being left without skilled workers. Women lay down on the rail tracks. When the trains left for Germany with the first men on board, singing the ‘Internationale’, there were shouts of ‘Lava
l au poteau!’ – Laval to the stake. From London, André Philip was only one of the many Free French exhorting young Frenchmen to take to the countryside, ‘prendre le maquis’, rather than allow themselves to be sent to Germany.

  The Protestant Church had come out clearly and rapidly against STO, saying that there was an ‘insurmountable’ contradiction between the Gospels and forced labour. It was imperative, declared Pastor Boisset in Montpellier, to remain faithful ‘to God in the face of authoritarianism . . . total war and deportations’. Among the Catholics, many of the lower clergy were also loud in their criticisms of the STO. The hierarchy, once again, remained silent. But then Cardinal Liénart of Lille spoke out, saying that the occupiers had asked for more than they were entitled to, and after the spring conference of bishops and archbishops came a declaration that to evade the STO was not a sin. There was much talk about the justness of disobeying unjust orders. On the plateau, where the STO was compared to Napoleon’s unpopular ‘levée en masse’, the young men refusing to leave were spoken of as heroic descendants of the Camisards.

  There was a tradition among the villagers, when young men left for the army, to gather them together and give them advice. In the absence of the pastors and Darcissac, it was Dr Le Forestier who took it upon himself to summon a meeting in the annexe of the temple for all those ordered to present themselves to the authorities. Thirty young men, due to leave the following day, turned up. This meeting marked another crucial moment in the plateau’s war.

  Le Forestier’s message was unambiguous. No one should serve the Germans. Furthermore, if anyone did accept, he would do well to take with him a little bag of earth, for that way he could be sure that when he was killed – as he surely would be – he would at least lie under the soil of his native land. The glamorous young doctor was persuasive. He would help, he said, anyone who chose to refuse the summons. After a heated hour of talk, only four volunteers went ahead and presented themselves to the authorities. Before long, there were 41 ‘réfractaires’, refusers, reported missing, hiding out in the isolated farmhouses, where there were farmers prepared to say that they had seen no one, heard nothing.