Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Reports began to circulate that the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was a good place to hide, and that there was a doctor called Le Forestier who was waiting to help. ‘That day was a turning point for the Resistance in the whole area,’ one of the young men, Victor May, son of the owners of the Hôtel May, would say later. ‘Le Forestier was the spur, and his words acted as a spark.’ Police sent from Yssingeaux to report on what was going on noted a general lack of cooperation on the part of the inhabitants; even the ‘notables’, they said, claimed to know nothing. Bach, possibly to cover his back, asked his superiors for reinforcements. By now, only one in ten of all those called up across France was actually on a train to Germany. The rest had wrangled deferments or disappeared.

  Among the young men appearing on the plateau was a boy scout called Pierre Piton. He was 17, a wily, resourceful, generous-spirited boy with a round face and bright blue eyes, who had been working in the shipyards on the Normandy coast and sending back messages to the Allies about German troop movements. His father was a naval officer, his mother a teacher. Somewhat austere by nature, Piton had for a while thought of becoming a missionary. On the plateau, he found another kind of vocation.

  He took a room at the Pension des Genêts, where in return for his keep he agreed to supervise the evening homework of the young theologians studying at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole. He soon met Mireille Philip, who recruited him to help find more hiding places for Jews as well as for the new STO evaders. Passionate about his scouting, he was welcomed into the ranks of Penguins, Wolves and Storks, and was soon made second to the leader of the unionist troop, Pierre Brès, who preferred to call his packs by the names of Camisard heroes.

  Brès, another important local figure, was a devout Protestant, a keen sportsman and a print designer; he had arrived on the plateau with his wife and son after being demobilised from a tank unit. As scout leader, he brought together local children, tourists, Catholics and Protestants and schooled them vigorously in basketball, as well as taking them camping, where they sang hymns and acted out valiant Camisard deeds. His wife became professor of gymnastics at the college, and they were soon friends with Le Forestier and his family. But Brès had ideas beyond simple scouting on his mind, and the young men escaping the STO were perfect recruits. The early resistance in France had been essentially urban, concerned with writing and distributing literature hostile to the Germans and organising a number of specific attacks on the occupying forces; it had not given much thought to guerrilla warfare in the countryside. With the STO came the beginnings of a Maquis.

  Nor was Brès alone in envisaging another step towards the liberation of France. In Yssingeaux, there was a teacher called Jean Bonnissol, whose brother-in-law, M Valdener, ran a café that acted as a letter drop for people on the run, and who was already in contact with the Franc-Tireur resistance movement active in Lyons and along the Rhône. There was Pierre Fayol, an engineer and former army officer, newly arrived with his family in le Chambon, having helped the Jews in Marseilles before the German assault. And there was Léon Eyraud, a former miner who now ran the Pension Les Ombrages, within sight of the station in le Chambon, from where he would watch out for the train bringing new Jewish families and hasten up the hill to gather them into his pension. Eyraud was musical, a humorous, sly, astute man who possessed a great deal of authority; his wife treated their 14 guests as ‘mes gosses’, my own children. Between them, these five men, Piton, Brès, Bonnissol, Fayol and Eyraud, brought with them stirrings of a militancy far from the pacifist dreams of Theis and Trocmé.

  What the draft evaders needed was precisely what the plateau was already providing for the Jews: safe hiding places, food, sympathy and false IDs. Galvanised by Le Forestier, Emile Sèches was soon adding concealed STO young men to his list of people for whom he needed to scrounge food, while Mme Barraud and her daughter Gabrielle were finding them beds at the Beau Soleil.

  Early in March, while the imprisoned pastors were still absent from the plateau, Rosowsky decided that he needed more privacy for his ever-expanding forgery business. Eyraud had already asked him to increase his output to take in the new STO evaders, for whom he now had to produce a whole range of IDs, making them younger than their real ages and therefore not subject to call-up. He borrowed a bicycle and cycled off on the road towards Mazet. After four kilometres, at a hamlet called La Fayolle, he saw a young woman knitting outside her house. She directed him to the tenants of a farm owned by Henri and Emma Héritier, who had five young children and four cows, stabled in outbuildings. Rosowsky told them he was a student. They asked no questions, offered him a room in the barn and provided him with meals. M Héritier registered him as a necessary farm worker, to protect him from being called up for the STO.

  In desperate need of extra forgers, Rosowsky recruited a local boy, Samy Charles, who had good contacts throughout the Ardèche and the Haute-Loire. A local farmer offered to include false documents along with his deliveries of bread to distant farmhouses. Rosowsky had never worked harder. One day a consignment of blank ration books, organised by André Philip, who was now with de Gaulle in Algiers, was dropped by parachute from an Allied plane. Piton, going to collect them from Mireille, was overwhelmed by the rich and delicious smell of jam and would forever associate it with his days on the plateau. Mireille told him that she had used her entire sugar ration for many weeks to make the jam.

  Whenever he went to see his mother in Fay, Rosowsky took with him batches of newly forged IDs for Curtet’s own ever-growing number of hidden Jews. He had been delighted at the proof of his skills as a forger when one night, on his way back from delivering a consignment of false documents to Fay, he was stopped by a policeman for riding his bicycle without a light. He produced his own false ID; the policeman professed himself content.

  Writing of his new protégés, the STO boys, Curtet told his father that he was busy collecting a number of ‘specialist books’, particularly on metallurgy, about which he felt very warmly, since most of them had been edited in the nearby towns of Saint-Etienne and Firminy, ‘where this kind of work is very popular’. This ‘exercise de math, 15/24’ (Jews) was taking a lot of his time, while ‘Daniel 1:3–4 continues at an ever-accelerating pace’. (In Daniel 1:3–4, the King orders Asphenaz to ‘bring him certain of the children . . . in whom there was no blame’.) What Curtet’s father made of it all is not known.

  The very mood of the plateau was changing, becoming angrier, more militant. With the arrival of young men from the plains and the mining communities, and the threat of capture of their own sons, more local families came forward to offer sanctuary. Some of the most active rescuers were women, and two of the most important ran cafés.

  Together with Tence and le Chambon, Mazet was the heart of the Protestant and Darbyist enclave; though the village itself was small – not much more than a collection of the grey-stone houses typical of the area, a Protestant temple, a Catholic church and a Mairie – its commune stretched across 50 square kilometres and comprised some 2,000 people, nearly all of them farmers. Thursday was market day, when they came on horseback, by foot and driving carts to exchange news and buy and sell their produce; on Sundays, they returned to attend the Protestant service in the temple. Perfectly placed on the central square, which was also the crossroads for the village, opposite the Mairie and just below the temple, was a café, built by Benjamin Argaud at the end of the nineteenth century and run now by his niece, Lucie Ruel, known as Lulu, with the help of her 20-year-old daughter Lucienne. Lulu’s husband, Paul, had died not long before the war; Lucienne was married, with a small baby.

  The Héritier family, with Oscar Rosowsky’s mother on the right

  The Café Argaud, which doubled as a restaurant and a wine shop, was the centre of Mazet life. Several members of the family were butter-makers, and Lulu was friends with the mayor, Pierre Salque. Better still, the café, reached by climbing the stairs above a former coach house and stables, where the casks of wine were stored, had a barn and outbuildings,
a back entrance originally used as a gate through which straw could be moved in and out, and a little window from which could be seen everything that happened in the square. On Thursdays and Sundays, the crowds and the bustle were ideal for every manner of deception.

  During the exodus of Spanish republicans at the end of the civil war, Lulu had taken in a mother and her two small children. When they were moved to a prison in Yssingeaux, she had continued to visit them every week, taking food. After the great rafles of the summer of 1942, she took in Jewish families, some of them sent by the Trocmés via a young Protestant widow called Simone Mairesse, who had settled in Mazet with her small daughter, Nicole. Simone had learnt of the death of her husband through reading a list of casualties of prisoners of war in the Paris-Soir; instead of grieving, she threw herself into saving Jews. She found hiding places with farmers nearby for those for whom Lulu had no room, and they came to eat at Lulu’s table, paying her what they could. If they had no money, they ate for free. The more resourceful spent their days foraging for food for the pot. A Darbyist farmer’s wife sent extra butter and vegetables; Lulu’s son-in-law, who worked for the local cooperative, provided milk and cheese.

  One of Lulu’s hidden Jewish lodgers, André Weil, who went by the name of Colombo, was a chemist from Paris. One day on his scourings of the countryside he met a young Jewish girl stumbling through the melting snow in very thin shoes; he brought her back to Lulu’s café, and fell in love with her. Lulu found room for her too, as well as for her parents. In the evenings, they listened to the BBC, and one of the visitors, René Nordmann, who owned a large textile business not far from Paris, marked the progress of the Allies with little flags stuck on to a map, though to have such a map at all was dangerous. Lulu kept a lamp burning all night during bad weather, to act as a beacon for anyone out on the roads.

  When the STO began to bring scared, defiant young men to her café, she took them in as well, beginning with a worker from Saint-Etienne, more a boy than a man, though he had a wife and two small children with him. The ever-expanding group of hidden people began to fill the barns and the outlying buildings. Whenever a raid was threatened, they hid in the attics of the temple, or in a hole Lulu had cleverly had dug in the garden, with a roof made of stones and earth, large enough to fit six grown men.

  It was the schoolteacher Bonnissol who first approached another café owner, Dorcas Robert, for help in hiding STO evaders. Dorcas, like Lulu, was a widow, a small, sturdy, energetic woman with grey-green eyes; she was the mother of an eight-year-old daughter and two younger sons, and she ran a grocery shop and café in the middle of Yssingeaux, to the north-west of the plateau. Her mother was a Darbyiste. Bonnissol asked whether he might use her sitting room as a meeting place, and when she agreed, he arranged for the buses from Le Puy, which stopped outside her door, to deliver communiqués and orders from the Resistance leaders in the plains. These she took in and hid under the counter until he could come to collect them.

  As in Mazet, Thursday was market day in Yssingeaux, and the confusion produced by the farmers and the touristes alimentaires provided an excellent cover for the comings and goings of Bonnissol and the STO boys. Some now spent their nights in the café, along with a priest on the run from the Gestapo and an escaped prisoner of war. Helping in the grocery was a young woman called Rose Bérard, a farmer’s daughter who had been brought up to ‘know the value of good causes’ and whose brother had been taken prisoner at Dunkirk. From time to time, a local policeman called Gauthier, who knew exactly what they were doing and supported them, dropped by to see them.

  Gauthier and his colleagues were no longer the unswerving supporters of Pétain that they had once been. The events of the summer of 1942 and the arrival of the Germans in the south had between them eroded much of the loyalty and obedience to Vichy, and nowhere more so than on the plateau, where the local policemen, who had grown up in the area and felt close to its inhabitants, were increasingly turning a blind eye to the presence of hidden Jews and STO evaders. There was, however, a new force, a new alliance of pro-German, pro-Vichy men; and this one would prove altogether more threatening.

  In January 1943, the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, the ‘cavalry of modern times’, flag-waving, beret-wearing saviours of Pétain’s moral values and la France éternelle, freed themselves from the old Légion Française des Combattants – Vichy’s fusion of all previous veteran associations – and became a ‘milice française’. Joseph Darnant, the crude, thuggish supporter of the extreme right-wing movements of the 1930s and of the secret terrorists, the Cagoulards, became their secretary general; Laval took the role of president. Their mission was to maintain order and, if need be, to defend France; their symbol was the bélier, Aries the ram, with its message of strength and renewal.

  This new militia, profoundly anti-communist, anti-Semitic and nationalistic, was tightly organised and hierarchical. Members wore badges and lived ordinary lives, except when called on. But there was soon also a military wing, the Franc-Garde, made up of professional soldiers, and a youth section, l’Avant-Garde, composed of fit, strong, sporty gun-carrying youths, some no older than 16 or 17, and a number of girls. Pétain urged them all to be disciplined, level-headed, moderate and blameless in their conduct. But as recruiting proved slow, so the outcasts of French society – petty gangsters, ex-prisoners, fanatical anti-terrorists – were drawn into their ranks, lured by a sense of adventure and the opportunity to loot, requisition and play the black market at will. On the plateau, in ones and twos, there were young men who began to find the whole idea very attractive.

  On the evening of 24 February, in Le Puy, the commander of the gendarmerie for the Haute-Loire, Silvani, was handed a list of 82 foreign Jews, with orders to arrest them. The ‘ramassage’, a simultaneous action to take them into custody, was set for seven o’clock the following morning. This sudden call for Jews was the result of the assassination of two German officers in Paris, for which 2,000 Jewish men aged between 16 and 65 were demanded in reprisal. There were no warnings. If Schmähling and Bach were of a mind to protect the Jews, on this occasion they chose not to.

  On the plateau, Hubert Meyer, the young director of the Coteau Fleuri, had no time to evacuate his resident Jews, nor to hide them. A special detachment of police, including the gendarmerie, arrived at daybreak and took away a young man called Wolfradt; among the eight Jews seized that day were Schniebel, from a Quaker childrens home, Les Grillons, and Winitzer, from La Maison des Roches. There was, noted Silvani somewhat drily in his report, ‘a certain emotion among the onlookers’. It took the form of anger and protests, but did not prevent the captives from being driven off to Le Puy. What is known, from the records held in Le Puy, is that of the 82 names on Bach’s list, 58 people were found and arrested, and 24 of those were sent to Gurs.

  Hanne’s friend Jakob Lewin, who had been with her in La Guespy since their transfer from Gurs, had a very narrow escape. He had recently been joined by his older brother Martin, and on the morning of 25 February they were in the new carpentry workshop set up by Cimade. Inspector Praly appeared at the door, saying: ‘At last, I’ve caught you.’ The two boys were taken to the Mairie, then put on a police bus for Le Puy. A group of villagers gathered, trying to prevent the bus from leaving by lying on the ground in front of it; then, as had become the pattern when people were arrested, they began to sing. As they waited, a young pupil at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, Christian de Montbrison, arrived with a piece of chocolate and pressed it into Jakob’s hand. When the bus left, Le Forestier followed it down the mountain in his car. He managed to get Jakob released, on the grounds that he was still only 17, and therefore under age; but he could do nothing for the slightly older Martin, who joined those sent to Gurs.*

  Three days later, with no reason given, Miss Maber and Miss Williamson were ordered to present themselves to police headquarters in Le Puy, and to bring with them blankets and warm clothes. They left weighed down by little gifts from the villagers. Later, Miss Ma
ber, who was reticent about this as about all things that touched on herself, would say that they had probably been denounced as ‘enemies of the people’ by Praly. After an uncomfortable and unnerving four days, they were released, apparently on Bach’s orders. It seems that he had discovered that not long before the war, Miss Maber had adopted two French children abandoned by their prostitute mother, and was paying for their upbringing. The order for the women’s release arrived only after they were already on a train taking them north towards Drancy and deportation. The train was stopped, and Miss Maber and Miss Williamson were taken off. No one else on board that particular train survived.

  On 15 March came other releases. Five weeks after their arrest, Trocmé, Theis and Darcissac were summoned to the commandant’s office in Saint-Paul-d’Eyjeaux and told that Laval had ordered that they be freed; they were to pack their bags immediately and leave to catch a ten o’clock train home. First, however, they needed to sign some papers containing an undertaking to pledge support to Pétain. Theis and Trocmé, without hesitation, refused. As Trocmé would later recount in his unpublished autobiography, the commandant, furious, told them that they were ‘insane’, and ‘dangerous anarchists’. Darcissac signed; as a teacher, to do otherwise would have cost him his job. He had been, wrote Trocmé not entirely without malice, ‘so afraid’; he was now both ‘sheepish and very happy’. While the teacher left for the station, the two pastors, to the incredulity of their fellow prisoners, returned to their barracks.