By the late summer of 1943, there were still some 10,000 Jews in the internment camps. Gurs and Rivesaltes had become holding pens for families awaiting deportation; since most doctors had long since been deported, and very few medicines reached the camps, the number of deaths was rising. After Helmut Knochen, chief of the German police in France, realised how many Jews were managing to escape from the trains taking them to Drancy, he ordered that they be tied together with long ropes, like convicts. The trains leaving for Auschwitz now carried as many French as foreign Jews. There were no more pauses between departures, which were scheduled for two every month, and no more dispensations for anyone. An association of ‘Aryanised’ organisations had been set up to make sure that after the war, no one would be legally obliged to return their stolen enterprises to a returning Jewish owner.
The French were also hungry. France had become a country of black marketeers and of inventive cooks, supplementing their endless diet of macaroni and swedes with grasses, weeds and roots, and there was much debate about the best way to cook black salsify, rampion and kohlrabi, and whether such food could really be made edible. For the inhabitants of the cities, meat, eggs, butter and cheese had all but vanished.
On the plateau, however, there was still food to be had, even if Emile Sèches had to go ever further afield in search of supplies for the hidden children. With meat severely rationed, animals were slaughtered secretly and distributed between families under cover of darkness. When Magda was offered part of a pig, she was not told where it came from; it arrived on the night of a full moon with a young man, one of ten who had volunteered to carry 10 kilos each to various households, with Pastor Jeannet lending two of his sons to take portions to the hidden Jews, who had agreed to a dispensation on eating forbidden pork.
After the events of the summer, André Trocmé thought that he detected a new religious fervour on the plateau, as if his parishioners, crushed by the never-ending war, the demands of the hidden refugees and the threat posed to their sons by forcible conscription, were turning back to the Church for help. A recent publishing venture in le Chambon, Les Messageries Evangeliques, was doing good business with religious books, the sale of bibles had gone up and the readership of the protestant Echo de la Montagne was rising all the time. When Daniel Curtet decided to hold a study meeting in his temple at Fay, taking as his theme Jesus’s words to the Pharisees about rendering to Caesar and to God what was due to them, over a hundred young people turned up to debate when, and under what circumstances, it was right to disobey an idolatrous and oppressive state.
Camus, still on his first draft of La Peste, had his hero and narrator Dr Rieux say: ‘We are working together for something that unites us beyond blasphemies and prayers. That is the only thing.’ But Camus was tiring of his solitary life. ‘The will, the mind gain from it. But the heart?’ He had made friends with André Chouraqui, the Algerian Bible scholar and Madeleine Dreyfus’s link on the plateau, who cooked him North African food and instructed him on the significance of the plague in the Bible, and its appearance in 49 separate places. At last, repeating that ‘the only cowardice is to get down on one’s knees’, and escaping a second long winter of snowy loneliness, Camus left for Paris, where he was in contact with Resistance groups for whom he began to write and edit clandestine material, while working by day as a reader for the publishing house Gallimard.
What Madeleine Sèches would later remember was not hunger, but the monotony of the food her father was able to find, and the fact that the only fruit she ever saw was an apple. That, and the cold. Only the ground and first floors of Tante Soly were heated, and in their attic dormitories the children shivered. By the autumn of 1943, most of the boarders were Jewish, but the household remained curiously untroubled by the authorities. The German convalescent soldiers next door, certainly aware of what was happening, were apparently choosing to pay no attention. Though the names of the children had not been disguised, Emile Sèches was careful not to mention their religion in the neat, brief notes he kept on every child, just as he was careful to say nothing to his own children, reasoning that ignorance would keep them safer; so that it was only after the war that Madeleine discovered that the house had been full of Jewish orphans.
There was 10-year-old Jean-Pierre Brunswick, a nervous, clever boy, ‘mature but spoiled by his parents’, and his brother Michel, who wet his bed every night; 15-year-old Jacques Goldschmidt from Lyons, ‘brought up to be somewhat girlish, with a viper’s tongue, oversensitive and easily frightened at games’; 14-year-old Nicole Meyer from Saint-Etienne, ‘sensitive and rude, perhaps because her parents are so far away’. Henri Fesser lied and stole, and had ‘no moral sense’; Huguette Spitz was quiet and good at washing up, but so pliant as to have almost no defined character. These were not easy children. Few knew where their parents were, and most had witnessed and experienced terrible scenes and painful departures. Emile ran the house with a strict hand, trying to lend, with order and discipline, some counterbalance to the fears that filled their minds. But on their behalf he was ferocious. When Dr Le Forestier, whose easy manner and teasing ways could be insensitive, mocked one of the young boarders for being circumcised, and the boy was extremely upset, Emile went round to the doctor’s surgery and protested to him.
Madeleine’s father had other preoccupations. Her mother’s deafness had become more severe and she now took very little part in the running of Tante Soly. His 15-year-old niece, Danielle, who had spent some time with the family in le Chambon before going with her mother into hiding in the Vendée, was reported to have been arrested and sent to Drancy, and he kept a photograph of her in his bedroom, hoping for news. In the photograph of all the children together, taken not long before she left, Danielle, with her short hair held back by bows, looks out boldly, seemingly untroubled. And one of the boarders, 17-year-old Joseph Emir, who thought that because he had a Turkish passport he would be safe, suddenly left for Lyons to look for his family, and news came that he had been picked up by the Gestapo and shot.
All over the plateau, in remote farmhouses, in village attics, in schools and pensions, Jewish children were struggling, missing their families, trying to make sense of the secrecy and silence that surrounded them; and, simply, waiting.
Though later most would recall these months with gratitude and appreciation, there were some who were very unhappy indeed. One of these was Jacques Stulmacher, the boy from the Passage Alexandrine in the 11th arrondissement in Paris.
Jacques was now 13. He and his 7-year-old brother Marcel had been living in hiding in Lyons with their Lithuanian father and Polish mother. With the help of the OSE and Madeleine Dreyfus, the two boys reached the plateau on the little train in the early autumn of 1943. Arrangements had been made for them to join five other refugee children on adjoining farms at Pont du Cholet, three kilometres from le Chambon, owned by the Franc family. Jacques’ first sight of his new home was of a smoky, dirty farmhouse, built around a muddy courtyard, with goats, chicken, pigs and five cows in one wing, the family in the other. There was no heating. Jacques and Marcel, together with 10-year-old Pierre Cohen, and 11-year-old René, who was not Jewish but who had lost his mother, were given a mattress of dried leaves to share in a small, windowless room in which potatoes were stored. It was damp and extremely cold. In a nearby farmhouse, with the other side of the Franc family, were three other Jewish children, Nicole, Rapha and Max.
The Francs, with Pierre Cohen directly in front of Madame Franc
Though M Franc was being paid by the OSE to take the children in, he was reluctant to allow Jacques to attend school, saying that he was of an age to do full-time farm labour. Jacques, a clever boy, accustomed to being top of his class and desperate to continue his education, pleaded and fought and was eventually permitted to accompany the other children on their two-kilometre walk to the small local school at Les Tavas. Before and after school, he worked on the farm. His schooling having been so much interrupted, he was forced to repeat his last year, bu
t he did well, liked his teacher, and soon rose to join his peers.
The seven children were consumed by hunger. It was not just that they were forced to watch as eggs, cheese, butter, chickens and meat were sold on the black market, or directly to people coming up from the plains in search of food, and that nothing was ever left over for them, but at night, at supper, any lump of meat or lard that made its way into their bowls was immediately transferred to M Franc’s plate. If the children worked in the fields with the men, they were never invited to share their elevenses of sausage and ham. Soon, they could think of nothing but food. When Jacques was foolish enough to tell Mme Franc that at school the other children had been amazed to see how little food she sent with them for their lunches, hoping to provoke more generous rations, she stopped giving them any at all, and told them that if they wanted lunch, they had to walk the two kilometres back to Pont du Cholet. Jacques tried to get the others to run away with him, but Mme Franc got wind of the plan and threatened to report them to the police. He stayed. It only occurred to him later that she could never have denounced him, for her position harbouring Jews was no safer than their own. He took to stealing whatever he could lay his hands on: raw eggs, onions, crusts of bread.
For all his cleverness and determination, Jacques was a timid boy. But something snapped the day that Nicole was caught stealing another child’s lunch, and the teacher called her to the front of the class, yanked her hair and scolded her sharply. As Nicole wept, Jacques leapt to his feet and shouted out that she was starving, that she never got enough to eat, and that stealing food was not like stealing money or jewellery. The teacher listened, clearly appalled. He sent Nicole back to her place and told the class that they were to arrange a rota, and each in turn was to bring in an extra lunch for Nicole. Unhappily, the same good fortune did not stretch to Jacques and the other children living with the Francs, but it gave him a first taste of what it was to plead a case; and it was this that led him, he later said, into a career in the law.
The Jewish children, for everyone’s safety, had no contact with their parents. On this, the OSE was strict. During the entire year that Jacques and Marcel lived with the Francs, they received just one visit from their mother. They told her how hungry they were and she remonstrated with Mme Franc, agreeing to leave extra money so that the boys might each be given an egg every day. This happened for a few days, then stopped. The weeks passed, cold, full of thoughts of food, loveless. The Francs showed no signs of affection or tenderness towards the seven young children in their care, no human contact of any kind. Jacques thought of himself and his brother as cows, for when a police inspection of the farm was threatened, they were sent into the forests with the unregistered cattle, ‘all of us, clandestine creatures’. When the Francs wanted to punish them for various misdemeanours, they sometimes slapped them, but more often they simply deprived them of food.
To get more to eat, Jacques took to staying back after school and helping the other children with their homework, in return for the bread and jam or sausage they had brought in with them. However little it was, it was still more than the soup he was forced to forgo when he arrived back at the farm late for supper. The Francs’ form of dour neglect extended to health. The boys were given only clogs to wear, without socks; they got chilblains and blisters. When a sore on Marcel’s head spread and would not heal, the Francs refused to let him see Dr Le Forestier until Jacques made a scene, by which time it was too late to prevent a bald patch, on which the hair never grew back. The farm dog, kicked by one of the cows, developed an infected eye; it died, slowly and in agony, without being taken to a vet.
Later, recounting his year on the plateau, Jacques would agree that he had been unlucky. On other farms, children were loved and well cared for, though some would later say that they had lived in a sort of ‘bubble of unreality’, as if play-acting in their own lives. Of the farmer’s wife who took her in, Carole Zalberg, one of the girls from Roanne, would later write: ‘No, she was not unkind. It was just that in the arc of her emotions there was only severity.’ In her own family, Carole had been loved and spoilt; the more bewildered and lonely she felt, the more she clung to her Jewishness. ‘We became different,’ she wrote. ‘We learnt to live apart.’
Jacques later held to his tale precisely because it countered the often overly self-righteous taste of all-pervading goodness with which the war years came to be associated. It was a reminder, he said, that it was not all gentle and untroubled, and that even those who were physically well looked after were most often lonely, frightened, haunted by what had happened to them and terrified of what lay ahead. When, in addition to their unhappy thoughts, they were mistreated and starved, it pushed them to the very edge of what was bearable. They survived, Jacques would say, and without the Francs he might easily have died; but the scars that were left were not the kind that healed.
Simon Liwerant, whose little brother Jacques, still with the Gilberts, was now almost totally withdrawn from him, was having troubles of his own. Simon remained with the Darbyist couple, M and Mme Bard, who, though often silent and somewhat severe, treated him kindly and fed him well. When the circus came to le Chambon one day, Simon got tickets and took Jacques. A German soldier came and sat next to them, an older man, with grey hair. He offered to take Jacques on his lap, but Simon got up and moved away. The soldier followed them, again attempting to take Jacques into his arms. Later, Simon would realise that he was probably the father of a small boy himself, and longed for the warmth of the child. But at the time, he could feel only hatred. He picked Jacques up and left the tent.
The boys received a visit from their father Aaron, allowed out from his work camp for a few days’ leave. The Bards offered to find him work, and he could easily have stayed on the plateau, with false papers, in hiding. But he told Simon that he knew that he would soon be leaving for Germany, and this was exactly what he wanted to do, in order to look for Sara, who, he was certain, was alive and in a camp somewhere. Nothing that Simon or the Bards could say would persuade him otherwise. Not long after leaving le Chambon, Aaron wrote to his daughter Berthe, now 16 and still working as an apprentice in Lyons, and she sent the letter on to Simon. He was, Aaron told them, writing from a train not far from Lourdes, taking him and 30 other Jewish men north. ‘Naturally, we don’t know where we’re going . . . I am certain that we’re going somewhere to work, but where? . . . I am leaving full of hope in my heart, and I will go on hoping until I find your mother, my Sara. My heart grows warm knowing that I will see her . . . I am setting out full of courage and my morale is excellent.’ He was sending them some money, he said, as well as his ration books, and he wanted Berthe to buy something for ‘my adorable Jacquot, and you must tell him that it was sent by his father and mother from Lyons’.
Aaron wrote again, this time from a second train taking him and 700 Jews in 23 carriages towards Paris. ‘If you can, keep these letters and hide them, for memory’s sake . . . Never forget that you are Jews and also free human beings, and you must say this to Simon too, remain free beings and look at everything with your eyes wide open.’ People, he wrote, were fickle, not easy to read, and however honest their faces, they were often full of bad thoughts. ‘Never forget this advice, remember it always.’ He told Berthe that she should never have cold drinks when she went swimming, and that she should tell Simon to work very hard, because he was capable of doing important things. ‘I kiss you again and again. I leave with the certitude that you will grow up a good, beautiful and intelligent child.’ He signed the letter ‘your papa, who hopes very much to see you very soon’.
After this, Berthe and Simon heard nothing more.
One morning, Simon woke very early, to a strange noise. It was still dark, and when he went outside, he saw lights climbing up towards the farm from the valley below. From the sound of the motor, he knew that it was petrol, rather than gazogène, which meant that it could only be the Milice or the Germans. He woke the Bards, who hastily hid him under bales of hay in the
manger among the cows. A group of men arrived and told M Bard that they had information that he was hiding Jews. They searched the farmhouse, the dairy, the outbuildings, but were driven back from the stables by the stench of the manure. When they left, they took with them all the Bards’ store of pork, cheese and butter.
It was no longer safe for Simon to stay. He went to see André Chouraqui, who made arrangements for him to be taken in by a school in Figeac, in the Dordogne, where one of the teachers was already hiding 11 young Jews. On his way, Simon stopped in Lyons to see Berthe. Jacques stayed behind with the Gilberts, who, now that he no longer wet his bed, treated him like their son. A spell apart, Simon reasoned, might make the little boy forget that he had hit him, and he might come to love him again.
Armand Nizard, imprisoned in Drancy, would not have celebrated Mussolini’s downfall with such enthusiasm had he realised what it spelt for the Jews sheltering in France’s Italian zone. As the dictator was deposed by the Fascist Grand Council, and General Badoglio began what would be his 45-day rule, the Germans moved troops into Savoy, claiming that they were merely using it as a route for transit to the south. The 3,000 or so Jews who had been living in ‘assigned residence’ in Mégève, Saint-Gervais and Barcelonnette, were brought down to the coast, many of them in Italian military lorries, guarded by carabinieri, where they joined the 30,000 others already crammed into Nice and its surrounding 30 kilometres of coastline. For a very short while, it seemed that they might be safe. Angelo Donati, the ebullient businessman from Modena who had led the campaign to find sanctuary for the Jews, and whom everyone desperately wanted to believe, still maintained that his negotiations with Badoglio and with the Allies would result in their transfer either across the sea to liberated North Africa, or over the border into Italy itself.
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