Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Madeleine was finally allowed home late on the day of her arrest, but only briefly, in order to feed Annette. To her immense relief, she found the place deserted, Raymond, the baby and the two boys gone, the UGIF having clearly sounded the alert. The phone rang while she was there. It was her mother, frantic for news. ‘Go away . . . Leave . . . All of you,’ Madeleine told her.

  Raymond had taken Jacques and Michel up to le Chambon, and Mme Déléage found a safe hiding place for them under the name of Drevet, with the Lebrat family. Madeleine’s mother and her sister took charge of Annette, finding a wet nurse and a hiding place for the four of them in Ain.

  Madeleine was transferred to Montluc prison, where she was interrogated and asked whether she was Jewish. When she said that she was, her German interrogator, with an expression of disgust, threw a carafe of water over her. Looking back on it later, she concluded that the German had been Barbie, and that she was lucky that he had not tortured her, as he had so many others. She was held in Montluc for two months; from the window of her dormitory, she could see people being led out to the courtyard below and shot. She had no news of her family, and worried ceaselessly about the safety of the children. When at last transferred to Drancy, she had the good fortune to meet an old friend, who had been put in charge of registrations; he agreed to pass her off as the wife of a prisoner of war, which meant that, for a while at least, she was not deported. Receiving news that the boys were in le Chambon, and fearing that the plateau might be subjected to raids, she wrote a coded letter to Raymond. ‘You must stop the boys eating too much jambon [ham], as our Alsatian friends pronounce it.’ Through the OSE, arrangements were made to get Michel and Jacques to Switzerland.

  Between the end of August and the end of October, some 413 Jewish children were taken safely across the Swiss border. But then a group was stopped and arrested, and the crossings were halted. There would be no more until March 1944.

  As with so much that touches on le Chambon and the plateau during the war years, there are several versions of why André Trocmé decided, in the late autumn of 1943, to go into hiding.

  After Inspector Praly’s assassination, there were real fears that reprisals might follow. Trocmé, as the very visible pastor, already known for his views on the Jews, appeared to be the perfect target; were he arrested and tortured, what might he not be forced to say, what names might he give away, what hiding places reveal?

  More importantly, he had never abandoned his absolute belief in non-violence. If anything, it had grown stronger, and with it his opposition to the band of armed young maquisards forming across the plateau. It was perfectly possible, he kept repeating, to deal with the Germans, most of whom were decent men and could be reasoned with; it was through faith, obedience, patience under persecution and by acting as witness that this war would be won. If you were a Christian there was, he insisted, no other way. Why couldn’t le Chambon be a citadel of non-violent resistance? When one day the aunt of a young STO resister hiding in the mountains asked Trocmé if he would send a message of support and comfort to the boy, Trocmé replied no, never, not to a fighter. Among the maquisards, there was growing nervousness about where this intransigence might lead. Oscar Rosowsky, turning out as many false documents for the hidden resisters as for the Jews, felt that Trocmé had become a ‘loose cannon. He posed a danger for us all.’

  Later it would be said that Trocmé was ultimately persuaded to go by the Resistance, in the form of either Léon Eyraud in le Chambon or a cousin of Daniel Trocmé’s father, Maurice Rohr, who happened also to be vice president of the Reformed Church. It was Rohr who pointed out that there had been enough martyrs already, and that by staying, Trocmé would not only endanger his own family, but also, if killed, turn the whole village over to violent reprisals. What is certainly true is that Trocmé himself agonised over the decision, telling Magda that he felt it to be cowardly, that it would send out the wrong message, and that the least he could do was to preach his pacifist credo until the bitter end. However, after a visit from a young maquisard, posing, it was later said, as a double agent, who told him that he had overheard orders being given for the Gestapo to assassinate him, Trocmé finally agreed to leave. Theis, whose pacifism was no less heartfelt, was persuaded to go as well; he went off to Switzerland, and spent the next few months acting as a guide across the mountains and a conveyer of funds from Geneva.

  There was a thought of encouraging Dr Le Forestier to leave too, as his behaviour towards the Germans was constantly provocative, and as he continued to blow his horn loudly whenever the Germans put on a musical performance in the village square. But Le Forestier was judged too useful on the plateau. ‘The two shepherds have had to become hirelings,’ wrote Curtet to his father, referring to the hireling in John 10:2 who, seeing a wolf arrive, flees; a somewhat ambiguous choice of verse, given that the wolf then caught the sheep.

  Borrowing bicycles from their neighbours, the entire Trocmé family accompanied the pastor on the first leg of his journey, across the flat middle of the plateau in the direction of Saint-Agrève. Trocmé had taken the precaution of shaving off his moustache, putting on a beret and dark glasses and getting false papers in the name of Béguet. Just outside the town, he was met by the ironmonger from Lamastre, M Lespet, who drove him to the presbytery, where an old friend was acting as temporary pastor. A few weeks later, the incumbent returned, not best pleased to discover a hidden guest, and Trocmé moved to a remote farmhouse high on the mountain; it was just as well, for the Gestapo soon came looking for him.

  His new home was an attic above a barn. The farmer was a prisoner of war in Germany, and Trocmé spent his evenings helping the young wife and her son peel chestnuts, the staple local wartime diet. During the day, he walked in the pine forests, reflecting on the nature of his faith. The months of exile reveal a gentler, less judgemental, more doubting side to Trocmé’s nature. He had decided that it was too dangerous to correspond directly with Magda, so letters had to wait for travellers to le Chambon. Trocmé was lonely. Scrawled across the top of a letter dated 26 November are the words ‘total solitude’. Addressing Magda as ‘My dearest’, he wrote after receiving a letter: ‘At last some news of you! I feel myself come alive again! I exist once more! I am no longer a pale little retired monsieur who is sitting around waiting for death!’ When no letters came, he fretted.

  But the farm was soon judged too dangerous and Trocmé moved again, this time to an isolated property owned by a businessman who was hedging his bets by selling cement to the Germans for their Atlantic wall, while hiding resisters and their weapons in his house. ‘Drôle d’atmosphère!’ noted Trocmé, adding that it was a very far cry from the elevated ideological debates of le Chambon. ‘I suffocated morally.’ He also felt suffocated by the behaviour of his hostess, the businessman’s surly 40-year-old daughter, who treated him like a servant and sent him out to mind the goats, which drove him mad by straying and, when he finally found a way of tying them together with a piece of string, by refusing to eat. She had also put him in a room without heating. Magda, receiving his plaintive letters, arranged for him to move again, this time to far greater comfort in a chateau in the valley of the Drôme. Here the food was excellent and he had the company of a hidden Jew, with whom he was able to debate the issues of the day, though he found him annoyingly contrary.

  When Christmas came, Magda sent over Jean-Pierre, with whom Trocmé had snow fights, and after him came Jaques, now 12, who had been doing badly at school and whom Trocmé planned to coach, while sending him for a term to the local school. Their meeting at Lyons station almost ended in disaster. Having left Jaques to watch the suitcases while he went off to collect a bag deposited by Magda in the left luggage, Trocmé found himself in the middle of a Gestapo round-up. He was seized, jostled and thrown into a lorry. Since he spoke excellent German, he was able to persuade first the guard, then his superior officer, to let him collect Jaques and tell him what was happening.

  Later, waiting in a long line of
suspects with Jaques to be interrogated, Trocmé was riven by doubts. Would it not be best to tell the truth, for otherwise would he not be tempting God? If he lied, would this not be yet one more step along a downhill path ‘for which God did not call me’? On the other hand, what was he to do about Jaques if he told the truth? Paternal responsibility won the day. While the German soldiers had their backs turned, Trocmé and Jaques slipped behind a pillar and disappeared into a throng of passengers waiting for a train. God, Trocmé told himself, had not, at that moment, wished him to die. Many years after the war, he learnt that the Gestapo had in fact discovered who he was, but only after he and Jaques had got away. The officer responsible was demoted and sent to the eastern front.

  In their vast vaulted and wood-beamed room in the chateau, Trocmé and Jaques settled down to work, to make up stories and jokes and to raise an orphaned family of field mice in a metal tub. Trocmé started writing a book he intended to call ‘Oser Croire’ – daring to believe – which he conceived as a theological treatise for lay teachers, to help them navigate their way through questions about rationality and empiricism, Marxism and the teaching of the Gospels. His pacifism unshaken, he wrote: ‘I believe in the final triumph of good over evil.’ Reflecting on his own nature, he concluded that his patterns of thought were disorderly and his memory was poor, but that, wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he was always thinking, and that he was rarely at peace, but rather incessantly juggling with hypotheses and problems. If he sometimes appeared strong and sure of himself, he noted, it was because he chose to voice only positive things, never his doubts and fears of failure. The snowy, companionable weeks passed.

  But on the plateau, events had moved on. It would be neither the pastors and their pacifism, nor the Darbyists and their silent sense of morality, who would determine the last months of the war in the Haute-Loire, but something more martial. Describing his time in hiding, Trocmé noted later, with some complacency, that it had coincided with a magnificent period of piety on the plateau, when ‘belief in non-violence spread around the area, perfectly expressing the hopes and desires of nearly everyone’. He was deluding himself.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Perfect Maquis country

  The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was perfect Maquis country. The isolated farms, with their barns and outhouses, and the dense pine forests and rocky hillsides, which had provided such excellent hiding places for those escaping the Gestapo, were ideal for sheltering the young men gathering to form units for the Resistance. It snowed hard all through December and into January and February 1944, with metre-deep drifts along the roads and tracks. Secure in this still white world, people waited for the spring.

  Throughout France, repression was if anything intensifying. Vichy, once apparently eager to distance itself from the more unpleasant aspects of occupation, was busy conferring legitimacy upon the most collaborationist period of the war. In December, Bousquet, head of the police, judged insufficiently aggressive by the Germans, was ousted and Joseph Darnand, chief of the Milice, was made secretary general for the maintenance of order. He was now in control of both the police and the 25–30,000 young miliciens, who, regarding themselves as above the law, looted, robbed and menaced at will. The Germans had originally been reluctant to arm the Milice, but, bit by bit, the miliciens had acquired weapons, often stolen from Allied parachute drops. Some moved into the administration; others into prison service and the legal system. Darnand set up court martials for those they arrested for resistance activities, often held inside prisons, three miliciens acting as judges. There was no representation. The judges arrived and left in secret, unidentified, having handed down death sentences, against which there was no appeal.

  Ordered to flush out ‘suspects’ of every kind, wherever they could be found, the Milice recruited informers, rounded up communists and organised manhunts, assisted by Laval’s decision finally to turn over all prefectural lists of French Jews to the Gestapo. Vichy’s pretence of sheltering French Jewry, long a mockery, was officially abandoned. Almost unimaginable brutality – persecution, violence, murder – was now being carried out by the French against the French. Wherever they could, the Resistance fought back. ‘Your duty is clear,’ read one of the many clandestine flyers circulating around the country. ‘Kill the miliciens . . . exterminate them like rabid dogs.’ For their part, the miliciens were becoming ever more efficient torturers.

  Simon Liwerant was one of the people who very nearly fell into their hands. After reaching Figeac, he had been sleeping in an old monastery with ten other Jewish boys, several of them members of the Jewish scouts, who went by the names of animals and birds. His two particular friends were Souris (mouse) and Giraffe. One morning, before it was light, a party of miliciens and SS men arrived, forced their way in and ordered everyone to assemble in the courtyard. In the confusion, and urging the others to do the same, Simon, Souris and Giraffe slipped away and hid. The others were taken away in lorries. When the Jewish scouts heard what had happened they took Simon to join 30 other young Jews preparing to cross into Switzerland. Twenty-year-old Marianne Cohn, who called herself Colin, had volunteered to be their passeur. Marianne was a gregarious, laughing young woman, a little overweight, with a mass of curly black hair and round spectacles. Her parents were German Jewish academics; after their arrest and internment in Gurs, Marianne had been taken in by the Jewish scouts and became one of their first couriers. Arrested in 1942 and held for three months in a prison in Nice, she had unexpectedly been released, upon which she had returned to her job as passeur.

  Wearing scout uniforms and loudly singing Protestant hymns, the group marched boldly towards the frontier, passing themselves off as a scouting expedition. Here, too, Simon was almost lost. Having run up a grassy slope and through some trees, the young people reached the double row of barbed wire and began to clamber through, each pair holding the wires for those that followed. Two of the last were Simon and a girl with very long hair. As she scrambled across, her hair caught in the wire. Simon stayed with her to unpick it. At first he assumed that the guards who ran up shouting were Germans, but they turned out to be Swiss, and he was allowed to cross. Simon, like Max and Hanne, was safe. Jacques, his little brother, was with the Gilberts in le Chambon, safe too. Later, he heard that Souris and Giraffe, who had joined the Maquis, had been shot. Later, too, Simon married the young girl with the long hair.

  It was just as well that Trocmé and Theis had left the plateau. The mood had altered. There was little taste any longer for gentle acceptance, the belief that powers of persuasion were enough to make people behave better. In their own ways, Dr Le Forestier, Miss Maber, Daniel Curtet and Oscar Rosowsky, who had earlier tacitly accepted the pastors’ pacifism, had all shifted in the direction of armed struggle, and how they could best help the final push towards liberation. That it could only be violent, no one doubted. In this story, the hidden Jews and their godly protectors now move backstage. For the moment, they are safe.

  In December, the Combined Allied Chiefs of Staff had committed themselves to Overlord, the invasion of France across the Channel. General Eisenhower had been appointed Commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. In March 1944, de Gaulle, in Algiers and head of the Committee of National Liberation, announced the setting up of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur. Plans were being finalised for the invasion and liberation of France, in which the Resistance, and the Maquis, intended to take a major role.

  By the spring of 1944, there were some 14 different groups of maquisards in the eastern Haute-Loire, about 350 to 400 men gathered under the umbrella of the Gaullist Armée Secrète, under that of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance or under the fighting arm of the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Francais. Some of them were local boys, evading the STO draft. Others came from further afield, drawn by the area’s reputation as an inaccessible wilderness and for its rebelliousness towards Vichy France. From Bolbéc in Normandy, sent by a pastor who knew Piton – who had bec
ome a saboteur near Nîmes – came 20 young men escaping a summons to work on the Germans’ Atlantic wall, and more were arriving all the time, in ones and twos, to be taken in and fed in Mme Jouve’s farm or Louis Manon’s Hôtel des Lilas, before being sent on up into the mountains with a password.

  Pierre Brès, the local chief scout, had left his job as sports instructor at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole to join the Maquis, adopting the name Naho and taking with him a number of his students. Brès worked closely in parallel with the pension owner Léon Eyraud, and Pierre Fayol, the engineer in overall charge of much of the Resistance on the plateau, to train and occupy the new recruits, who found the snowy months of enforced idleness irksome, and who clamoured for action. To keep them busy a new ‘école des cadres maquis’ laid on classes in navigation and map-reading, in weapons and sabotage, and much physical training. Eyraud, who had a fine collection of ancient weapons, lent them for practice, since equipment, arms and ammunition were severely lacking. Brès, idealistic and sporty, kept his maquisards in their shorts and scouting uniforms and made them sing psalms and read the Bible. When not otherwise occupied, the boys were urged to offer their services to the local farmers.

  Constantly fearful that their inactivity might lead to foolish pranks against the convalescent German soldiers in le Chambon, who continued to jog heedlessly around the village every morning, the older men stressed the need for patience and caution. Eyraud, a short but exceptionally strong man, with a quiet voice and great affection for the recruits, had natural authority, which came with a strict sense of the plateau’s spirit of Huguenot morality. He did much to curb their turbulence and impatience, but there were still times when the endless waiting threatened to explode into violence. When he learnt that they were planning to ambush the German soldiers as they swam in the Lignon, he patrolled the banks to ensure their safety.