Oscar Rosowsky’s forged ID card
Just occasionally, when they realised that the child in their care was circumcised, a family would ask for him to be removed. But this happened very seldom. For the most part, the natural silence and discretion of the Huguenots and the Darbyists ensured that nothing was mentioned, nothing repeated. One day, returning to Lyons from le Chambon on the train, Madeleine found herself sitting next to two policemen. They were talking over their visit to the village. ‘Well,’ said one to the other, ‘we didn’t find any Jews, but we were certainly well fed.’
It is now that a new figure enters the story. His name was Joseph Bass, known to his friends as ‘l’Hippopotame’, on account of his immense girth and his loud, genial personality, and to his contacts as Gart, Georges, Bourgeois, Roure or Rocca. Born in Byelorussia in 1908, he had lived in St Petersburg until he was eight, when he was sent to an aunt in Paris who housed him in a maid’s room in the attic. He was a quick-witted, ambitious boy. While studying for his baccalaureate, he kept himself financially afloat by working in a factory and as a porter in Les Halles. He then took two degrees, one in engineering, the other in law, and set up in business on his own, looking after industrial patents. Interned in the camp for ‘undesirables’ at Vernet as an enemy alien, he escaped, made his way to Marseilles and met two men who would shape the rest of his war. The first was Léon Poliakov, a Russian Jewish historian already active in the underground, whose friends, the Bardones, ran a café restaurant in Saint-Etienne called L’Auberge des Musiciens; the second was Maurice Brener, associate director of the JDC, who had sources of money from the US. When the Germans flattened the Old Port of Marseilles, and sent the Jews they rounded up to Drancy, Bass set up a network similar to Garel’s Circuit B. It became known as ‘le Service André’.
The first maquisards on the Plateau
His first move was to recruit a number of young assistants, many of them members of the Sixième, the clandestine wing of the Jewish scouts, to act as couriers, forgers and finders of safe houses. His two closest collaborators, whom he regarded as his lieutenants, were a big, dark haired, voluble Corsican nurse in her forties called Anne-Marie Quilici, and a 19-year-old EIF scout leader, Denise Caraco, who had been working for the OSE office in Marseilles. Anne-Marie became Bonnet; Denise, Colibri. The two women forged papers, using bleached oxygenated water and ironing them dry, mindful of the friable nature of the cardboard used for ration books, which quickly turned into blotting paper. They fashioned a code – ‘musician’ for Jew, ‘pianist’ for communist, ‘saxophonist’ for a member of the Resistance, ‘saxophone’ for a weapon, and ‘labo’, laboratory, for a safe house.
With Bass, they identified 30 possible safe houses along the coast, some of them in Catholic convents. Money came from the JDC, via Lisbon and Geneva, and from Bass’s own generous pockets, taken from his earlier successful schemes. When they travelled, they went first class and ate in the restaurant car, Bass maintaining that it was far safer to mingle with the Gestapo officers and Vichy officials. He was not a man to miss in a crowd. Along with his great size, he had a loving nature and a terrible temper, and he ate, and read, voraciously. He seemed to need almost no sleep. With Denise, he behaved like a close, affectionate, demanding uncle.
Soon after Trocmé and Theis returned from their internment camp, Bass was taken up to the plateau by Poliakov. Their first stop was Lulu’s café in Mazet, where the two men, looking like plain-clothed Gestapo in their dark clothes and leather jackets, asked for Magda Trocmé. Appalled, Lulu hastily sent word to le Chambon to warn of an impending raid. Once the confusion was sorted out, Trocmé agreed to help Bass make contact with local families who might be willing to house some of his most desperate cases. Bass was instantly impressed by the spirit on the mountain, saying that what struck him was the evident sense of community, the feeling that morality was of greater importance than obedience to dishonest laws. Not long afterwards, he was denounced to the Gestapo in Marseilles; there was just time for him to hide and for Denise to leave for Grenoble, but his friend and colleague Pastor Lemaire, who refused to leave the city, was picked up, tortured and deported to Mauthausen. The Service André continued to run just the same.
Bass’s contact on the plateau was Simone Mairesse, the pretty young widow from Mazet. They met in the Auberge des Musiciens in Saint-Etienne, where the proprietor’s wife, Lea, was an excellent cook and where they spent many merry evenings dancing and drinking. Behind the bonhomie, Bass was shrewd and intensely practical. He was scrupulous about secrecy and discretion, telling his assistants that he wanted to know as little as possible about what they were doing, and certainly neither the names of the people they were hiding nor their whereabouts. Papers were hidden in packets of butter; stamps for the forged IDs in the heels of shoes. Later, Bass would say that in the course of 1943, he sent a thousand people up to the plateau, ranging from babies to orthodox rabbis, and that no one was ever betrayed. It may have been an exaggeration, but there were certainly many of them.
It was, however, becoming increasingly obvious that hiding people from Vichy and the Germans was no longer enough. There were too many of them and too few hiding places, particularly for those who looked most foreign and spoke little French. Every farmhouse on the plateau seemed to have someone hiding, and no one any longer quite trusted Bach’s ambiguous messages. Somewhere safer was needed, where they could sit out the war and wait for Allied victory. The question was where.
One possibility was Spain, more or less neutral and apparently accepting of refugees. But when the Germans occupied southern France in November 1942, they assumed direct control of the 435-kilometre border with Spain, established a frontier zone, suspended the French police presence and sent in military police of their own, Feldgendarmerie and the Gestapo. Furthermore, crossing the Pyrenees was an arduous affair, taking from two to five days on foot, and involving climbs of up to 3,000 metres, some of the way under snow for most of the year. Though after November 1942 increasing numbers of people did attempt to cross, in practice those most likely to succeed were the strong young scouts, and Zionists hoping to reach Palestine. For those from the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, the Spanish border was simply too long and difficult a journey: over 500 kilometres away, with no easy roads or connections.
The Italian zone was, for a while, another possibility. After unification in 1861, Italy’s small numbers of Jews had been assimilated into Italian life; anti-Semitism had found little purchase. Though Mussolini’s personal attitude towards the Jews was one of suspicion and intolerance, racial laws played a relatively small part within Fascist policy. When Italy took control of eight départements to the east of the Rhône, the assumption by the Germans was that the Italians would implement anti-Semitic measures similar to the French and send their Jews, along with Vichy’s, to Drancy. But it did not quite work out that way.
To the intense irritation of Berlin, the Italians simply ignored orders to arrest Jews. Diplomatic missions to Rome concluded with Mussolini agreeing that he ‘fully intended to march with Germany to the end of the road’, but when they returned to Berlin, nothing happened. Ciano, at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, stalled. The ‘Jewish topic’ was quietly dropped. Faced with cables, memoranda, pressure of one kind or another, the Italians dug their toes in. In theory, policy was decided in Rome. In practice, much of it was shaped in Nice, where a rich, well-connected, profoundly anti-Fascist businessman and banker from Modena called Angelo Donati, together with the Italian consul general, Alberto Calisse, joined forces with a number of priests and the welfare organisations that had moved to the Italian zone to foil the occupier’s plans, and to protect, shelter and if possible facilitate the emigration of the Jews. On Calisse’s orders, the 11 December law requiring Jews to have all their papers stamped was shelved; the Jews in the Italian zone, he announced, would be treated as they were in Italy, that is to say, ‘humanely’. Röthke, the German chief of police in France, declared that the Italian attitude was ‘
particularly revolting’.
Though some 3,000 Jews were moved inland, away from the coast, and interned in places such as Mégève, they were neither arrested nor deported, and when in January 1943, the Germans carried out a raid on Savoie and the Drôme, and took away a number of Jews, the Italian prefects not only ordered the arrests to cease, but arranged for the release of those who had been taken. Grenoble became a centre for forgery of false papers. The Germans, faced with such mulish obstinacy, apparent incompetence and wilful misunderstandings, grew increasingly annoyed. Italian sanctuary was not to last. But for the ten months between November 1942 and September 1943 that Italy remained in control, Jews reaching their zone found a cultural and political haven in Nice, where carabinieri could be seen standing guard in front of synagogues.
And then there was Switzerland, neutral, historically a land of refuge, its 200-kilometre border with France accessible, with many easy crossing places. But Switzerland was not minded to save the Jews.
Not long after the end of the Great War, a movement of Catholics, farmers and white-collar workers had come together in Switzerland to form a coalition that opposed not only communism but many aspects of social democracy. By 1938, a fear of being ‘overrun by foreigners’, particularly those deemed ‘unassimilatable’ – that is to say, Jews from Eastern Europe – permeated much of Swiss life. The Anschluss brought some 6,000 refugees and served to harden attitudes still further, particularly as most had been impoverished by the plunder of their property and money by the Nazis. On 4 October 1938, a mandatory visa for German ‘non-Aryans’ was imposed; and under Swiss – not German – pressure, passports had henceforth to be stamped with a ‘J’ for Jew.
During the time that emigration to other countries – the US, South America, China – remained possible, Switzerland was prepared to act as a transit country, against many guarantees that people would rapidly move on. But as these possibilities closed, and particularly after the entry of the US into the war, so the Swiss federal government, which had assumed emergency powers in October 1939, instructed the cantons to expel all refugees who had entered Switzerland illegally and to intern those they could not send back. People with no papers, and no guarantee that they were merely en route to somewhere else, or could soon return home, now lost all chance of entering legally: to do so, they needed to apply for a visa, and by admitting that they were refugees, they forfeited virtually all hope of obtaining one. The Swiss did accept escaped French soldiers, whom they knew would eventually go home and whom they interned. They also agreed to take a small number of ‘needy’ children from France, as long as they did not include ‘undesirable’ Jewish ones, judged ‘dangerously unstable’ and with no guarantee that they would ever leave.
Determined to guard the country against unemployment, Bolshevism, excessive ‘enjuivement’ and general disorder, and with strong banking and economic ties to Germany firmly in place, the federal government restricted all rail traffic with France to a single line, Bellegarde to Geneva. The army was sent to reinforce the cantonal police and border guards on the frontier; barbed wire, lights, mines and dog patrols were increased. A ‘military zone’, some 600 metres wide was established across which no one without valid documents to enter Switzerland could pass.
Until the summer of 1942, however, loopholes could be exploited, and penalties for those aiding refugees remained vague. But on 4 August, with news of the round-ups of Jews throughout France – along with incontrovertible evidence of the fate that awaited them at Auschwitz – Switzerland moved to seal its borders hermetically. There were few dissenting voices, few to point out that Switzerland had once been a country of asylum; very little debate at all, in fact, either on the radio or in the newspapers. Heinrich Rothmund, director of the police division in the Federal Department of Justice, drafted a new decree: all illegal refugees, whatever their story, were to be repelled and expelled, ‘even if this could have serious consequences for the foreigners in question (danger of life and limb)’.
Thousands of frantic people, whether Jews, resisters or, soon, STO evaders, would be given one chance to turn back voluntarily into France, in which case they would not be handed over to the Germans; but they would not be given a second chance. The Swiss boat, Rothmund famously declared, ‘was full’. It was not prepared to allow any other boarders. Article 2 of the regulations published on 13 August specified that ‘those who have fled on account of their race, for example the Jews, cannot be considered political refugees’. ‘Refoulement’, the sending back, could be ‘sauvage’, immediate, with no documentary trace; it could be straight into the hands of the occupying power; or it could be ‘disciplinary’, as punishment for anyone escaping an internment camp. For all those for whom remaining in France spelt certain death, the question now was what else might be possible.
Contacts between the Protestant and Swiss churches had long been excellent, and there were 33 Swiss Protestant pastors serving in France. With the border sealed, Pastor Boegner travelled to Berne and to Geneva, where Charles Guillon was already exploring all conceivable loopholes and continuing to act as a conduit for money into France. After many negotiations, Boegner was able to make a deal with the federal government for a number of ‘Israélites chrétiens’, almost all of them Jews who had ostensibly in some way converted to Christianity, to be given safe passage into Switzerland. Together with Abbé Glasberg, and another determined Catholic priest working in the internment camps called Abbé Gross, and working closely with Madeleine Barot at Cimade as well as the other organisations with offices in Geneva, Boegner began to draw up a list of candidates, for whom he had to provide ‘guarantees of morality’. It was a slow and fraught process, involving many negotiations to get the names of the ‘non-réfutables’ accepted by the Swiss and transmitted to the police on the borders, but by and large, it worked, even if there were moments of anguish and confusion. The list, however, was, inevitably, extremely short. And some 200,000 Jews remained in France.
There was only illegality left. The organisations rallied, joined forces, and set up bold, imaginative, highly perilous ‘filières’, escape routes, and in ones and twos and small groups, the Jews in greatest danger began to be guided over the mountains and into safety in Switzerland. One of the main filières went from le Chambon and the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon through Lyons to the border, a journey of some 250 kilometres. From now until the end of the war, adults and children particularly in danger would be taken to safety in a daunting game of cat and mouse in which the determination of the Swiss to allow no one on board their boat was matched only by the cunning, courage and resolve of the rescuers.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Crossing the border
One of the first people to leave the plateau for Switzerland was Hanne’s companion Max Liebmann. He and Hanne had agreed that, in order to survive, which they had firmly resolved to do, they would need to escape from France. Though neither had had any further news of their mothers, they firmly believed that both were dead. Max still hoped that his father was alive, somewhere in the Italian zone, but he had had no news of him either. All they had now was each other.
Max left le Chambon late one night just before Christmas 1942 with false papers in the name of Charles Lang, obtained for him by Mireille Philip. He walked across the fields to a hamlet near Mazet, where he hid in a barn for 18 days, waiting for instructions, before joining three other German Jewish boys to take a series of cross-country trains to Chamonix. His aunt had been a fashionable dressmaker in Mannheim and he would always remember that Mireille Philip, who was an ample woman with a large bust, wore tight angora sweaters of which he knew his stylish aunt would not have approved.
The four young men were met in Chamonix by a small boy, no older than 10 or 11, who took them to his parents’ house, where a pastor was waiting to make the journey with them, in order to learn the route for future crossings. That evening, once again guided by the small boy, they joined a group of some 40 others hoping to enter Switzerland. It was raining hard
and they spent the night under an overhanging rock. The food ran out and they were very hungry; Max’s thin shoes split. Next day, they continued to climb. When they reached the top, the boy pointed to a track leading down into the valley and told them that it was Switzerland, and that they were now safe. The Swiss border guards, however, were waiting. The boys were taken into custody, told that they were to be returned to France, and urged to go voluntarily.
Disconsolate, the party started back up the mountain, but the moment they were out of sight of the soldiers, Max broke away, saying that he had nothing to lose and would try to find another path into Switzerland. One other boy followed him; the others, dispirited, returned obediently to France. Max and his companion crossed the border without being spotted. They were given something to eat by a kindly farmer, and money for tickets by a Catholic priest, and were warned not to take the express train to Geneva, for it was routinely inspected. They reached the city without being stopped, and Max made his way to a Jewish community organisation, who advised him to turn himself in and assured him that he would not be deported. He followed their advice, and the authorities sent him to an empty school in St Gallen, but allowed him out for Christmas Day to visit a cousin. In the New Year, he was put to shovelling snow. Naturally efficient and diligent, he soon found work in the offices of an organisation dealing with refugees. Still technically interned, he spent every day thinking of Hanne and how she would make the journey. Later he remembered feeling intense relief: there was no barbed wire anywhere, and there was always enough to eat.
Hanne was now 19. She did not set out until the end of February 1943, having obtained false papers with Bohny’s help. She had an aunt in Switzerland, who could do little to help her escape beyond arrange for and pay a passeur, a guide across the border, but she could make matters easier once Hanne got across. Taking with her some bread and cheese, for she had no ration cards in her false name, she dressed in two skirts, two blouses, a sweater, a cardigan and a coat, and started by walking the eight kilometres from La Guespy to Tence, where she spent the night in Pastor Leenhardt’s presbytery. Bohny was on her train to Lyons, which was full of German soldiers; she suspected that he had come on purpose, to watch over her. On the next train, to Annecy, she sat in a corner seat and pretended to be asleep. No one bothered her. She had been given the address of a convent, but felt very nervous because a strange man followed her to the door. When there was no answer to her repeated knocking, she resourcefully found a room for the night, in what she later discovered was a brothel. Next day she returned to the convent and the nuns put her on the road to Annemasse. Walking along the highway, she was stopped by a German patrol. ‘Are you Jewish?’ they asked her. ‘Certainly not,’ she replied. ‘I have nothing to do with that dirty race.’ They let her pass.
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