Also recruited to instil discipline was a much respected teacher at the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, Olivier Hatzfeld. Under the name of Pingouin, he led his patrol of birds on missions to identify good spots from which the convoys taking food to the military garrison in Le Puy might later be ambushed.
Daniel Curtet had developed close links with the Maquis groups around Fay. He wrote to his father: ‘Our Daniels are a bit overexcited, our Matthews pleasant and calm.’ Curtet had agreed to take Communion to clearings in the mountains for the maquisards. He was also instructing a young man who was soon to marry a local girl from a devout Protestant family, who spent his days up in the mountains and came down at night to study in the presbytery.
Fayol had set up a medical service, with several local doctors, a Jewish chemist called Weill and Dr Le Forestier as surgeon; Maurice Nizard offered to act as a nurse, since he had not been allowed, as a Jew, to qualify as a doctor. Since Trocmé’s departure, Le Forestier seemed to have taken on the role of spiritual guide to the parish, and increasingly people turned to him for guidance. Mme Fayol and M Girard of the Salvation Army helped with food, while a number of ‘pères tranquils’, older, married men in the villages who worked at their ordinary jobs by day and for the Resistance at night, agreed to take charge of the distribution of ration books and supplies.
All the strategies for saving the Jews perfected over the 18 months of occupation now played neatly into the plateau’s new role. Oscar Rosowsky and Samy Charles, in their farmhouse annexe, worked day and night turning out false papers. A postman, M Arnand, listened in on the central telephone lines for any troop movements; Mme Roux, who ran the grocery in Chaumargeais, kept an eye on the Tence police, M Manon on those in le Chambon. Jules Valdener, in Yssingeaux, kept a list with all the Maquis camps. In Mazet, Lulu and her daughter Lucienne continued to be a centre for hidden Jews and maquisards alike, and when warning came of a possible raid, Lulu took all her protégés to hide in the rafters of Pastor Jeannet’s temple, to which villagers brought blankets, hot-water bottles and tea and coffee. The Armée Secrète, to which Fayol belonged, provided 25 francs a day towards each maquisard’s keep, but even so there never seemed to be quite enough to eat.
Early in October 1943, 79 prisoners, many of them communists but among them 25 young STO evaders, had escaped from the Maison d’Arrêt at Le Puy, and most of these had made their way up the mountain. Though vigorously hunted down by the combined forces of the police and the Milice, all but seven managed to vanish into the forests, to regroup and establish a base, Camp Wodli, in a farmhouse near the hamlet of Chièze. The escape cost the equivocating Prefect Bach his job; the man who replaced him, André Bousquet, was said to be made of sterner stuff. But even he could do little against the growing reluctance of the French police to track down the young resisters. Increasingly they were now choosing to leave the chasing of suspects to the more willing and eager miliciens. There was not much eagerness for finding the maquisards that they had turned into either, despite rechristening them ‘terrorists’ and talking of mopping up ‘disreputable elements’.
So disaffected did the police and gendarmerie seem to have become across the Haute-Loire that Jean Bonnissol, the teacher in Yssingeaux, who went by the name of Soumy or Dubois and led a group of resisters called Zinnia, had no hesitation in trying to recruit his old friend Alfred Morel, a senior local policeman, into the Resistance. Morel refused, but undertook to send warnings of any Gestapo raids. This obvious and growing connivance on the part of the police did much to bolster the Maquis’ sense of moral rightness and legitimacy, and that of those who sheltered them on the plateau. Even among people so schooled in independence of thought and morality, the sharing of rebellion with the forces of order and authority was reassuring.
The young maquisards were not, however, always popular. Lawlessness and banditry was spreading throughout rural France, and though many of the raids on shops and businesses were in fact being carried out by the ‘faux Maquis’, small groups of criminals or miliciens disguising themselves as resisters, the real maquisards were not always totally blameless. Curtet, for his part, was extremely critical whenever a theft was known to have been committed by the men he called ‘our good Maquis’, or the ‘men from the forests’, branding their actions burglaries and vandalism. As spring approached, and the snows melted, opening the roads to the outside world again, Brès and Eyraud needed all their tact and firmness to keep the peace. Bonnissol decided to set up a Maquis police force on the plateau, declaring that anyone caught looting or ‘requisitioning’ would be handed over to the authorities.
Something of the extreme tension in the area, and the pressures exerted by the arrival of ever more young men seeking a role in the Maquis, exploded one day in a sudden verbal attack on Brès, who had continued to insist on the need to wait until the Allied forces had landed before resorting to sabotage. Driven frantic by his caution, longing to make forays against the Germans in the plains, a group of the young men under him accused him of authoritarianism and ‘attentisme’, endless procrastination. Reluctantly, Brès stepped down, telling Fayol sadly that once ‘something is broken, it’s broken’ and that it would be very hard for him to work again with the young boys he had trained. His place was taken by a more aggressive leader, known as Bob, who soon sanctioned the ‘requisitioning’ of cigarettes from tobacconists, and a raid on a dairy said to be owned by a collaborator.
Skirmishes between maquisards and the Milice intensified. A milicien called Lambert, working for the Gestapo, was shot dead in a café in Yssingeaux, and several young men were caught. One of these was Jean Bonnissol himself, whom Morel had not been able to warn in time, and with him 14 others. Bonnissol had apparently been denounced by nine local people, suggesting that even an area as apparently harmonious and watertight as the plateau was not without its active collaborators; though exactly who these were has never been established. Some of the young maquisards who escaped capture decided to leave the area, to join the better-provisioned FTPF in the Ardèche and the Loire, where they were promised stouter shoes, the prospect of immediate guerrilla warfare and more to eat.
In Mazet, Lulu’s grocery and café had become a depot for arms, hidden under the hay and in the deep hole in her garden. One night, an entire lorryload of clothes stolen from a depot was concealed in her barn. On 22 April, a joint operation of Milice and French and German policemen, fanning out across the plateau, encircled a group of isolated farms, set fire to them and murdered farmers and FTPF fighters, including the two young sons of a farmer called Charles Valla, Marc and André, aged 19 and 21. Eleven more people were arrested. On Monday the 24th, Pastor Jeannet, Pastor Besson and a Darbyist preacher together officiated at the funeral of the dead men in the temple in Mazet; the congregation overflowed into the square outside.
The next day, the Germans returned to conduct a house-to-house search of Mazet. They found nothing. When they questioned Lulu about the various bags and cases she seemed to have lying about, she explained that these were all part of the regular post service that she ran with the local bus company.
Over the following days, word got out that the maquisards and the Valla brothers had been given away by a tinker who lived with a family of sedentary Gypsies between Tence and Mazet. Marcel Bachon was 19 and always seemed to have money in his pockets. The rumours reached the police in Tence, and Sergeant Tavernier, who had never made any secret of his sympathy for the hidden Jews and the young maquisards, went to arrest him. The Armée Secrète was informed. They arrived, took charge of the boy, made him repeat his confession, then told him to dig his own grave. In 2012, Mme Tavernier, at the age of 100, remembered the terrified young man asking to be allowed to go home to get his shoes, saying that he did not want to be shot in the clogs that he was wearing. His request was refused.
All through May, skirmishes between the Maquis and the Milice continued. The Yssingeaux sector, the most militarised, now had three battalions of men, Y1, Y2 and Y3, and their numbers were g
rowing all the time. In le Chambon, the proprietor of the farm where Oscar Rosowsky carried out his forgeries asked his tenant, M Héritier, to get the young man to leave, fearing raids and counter-raids. M Héritier merely told Rosowsky to move his equipment to some empty beehives at the bottom of the garden.
The wait for liberation, on the plateau as all over France, was taking too long and proving costly.
During his rescue operations in Marseilles and Nice, Joseph Bass, the buccaneering, quick-tempered, bossy Byelorussian businessman, had become increasingly concerned with the need for young Jews to take their part in the battle against Vichy. Why, he would ask, when Protestants and Catholics are losing their lives to save us, are we not doing more? There had been, since the end of 1941, a clandestine Armée Juive, intent on protecting France’s threatened Jews and planning later to take their fighting skills to Israel, to defend the creation of the Jewish state. By late 1943 it was said to have some 1,500 members, scattered in various parts of France.
But Bass wanted a Maquis of his own, a Jewish Maquis, and when he was forced to leave the coast and fall back on his safe house in the Bardones’ restaurant in Saint-Etienne, he remembered his dealings with Trocmé and the isolated farmhouses in which he had been able to place some of the children he had rescued. He came up to the plateau, rented rooms near the station in le Chambon, bought revolvers on the black market, and contacted Léon Eyraud to discuss what he might do. And then he began recruiting. Driving his distinctive motorcycle with its sidecar, on which his huge bulk could barely perch, Bass went around the countryside looking for Jewish families who might donate funds towards the keep of his young fighters; when they proved reluctant, he was not above a little blackmailing. In the evenings, sitting at his kitchen table, he wrote flyers and pamphlets in German and Russian as part of the campaign to win over disaffected Tartar, Georgian and Armenian soldiers serving with the Wehrmacht in Le Puy. Bass, as Rosowsky would say, had the temperament of a poker player.
Recruits were not hard to find, hidden in their isolated farmhouses and restlessly awaiting liberation, but the young Jews needed somewhere to train. Through the OSE, Bass had met André Chouraqui and his wife Colette, who lived in a house with a courtyard at Chaumargeais, a hamlet outside Tence, which acted as the OSE’s headquarters for the hidden Jewish children, now that Madeleine Dreyfus had been caught. Tence, like Mazet, Fay and le Chambon, had from the very beginning taken in and hidden Jews – the knitters from Roanne, people rescued from Gurs and Rivesaltes, refugees from Baden and Wurtenburg, but above all French Jewish families. It had no children’s homes; most of those the villagers rescued were adults, and by the winter of 1943, some 163 Jews were in hiding in its village houses and on the many scattered farms that made up the community.
Unlike the other three villages, however, Tence was largely Catholic, and it was among the Catholics here that the Jews had found sanctuary. Just the same, the mastermind behind much of the rescue operation was the Protestant pastor, Roland Leenhardt, who maintained that protecting the Jews was a political as well as a spiritual obligation and who willingly lent his presbytery for Jewish occasions. Leenhardt hid the people sent to him in a concealed room under the rafters, reached by a ladder and trapdoor, and from which they could escape over the roofs. He had rigged up a long piece of string with a bell, by which warnings could be sounded. The mayor, Franchet, was generally regarded as a staunch Pétainist, but the local police were clearly sympathetic to the refugees, and the Jews of Tence had enjoyed a remarkably untroubled war. In Chouraqui’s courtyard, Bass’s small army began to learn to shoot and handle weapons, trained by a Spanish republican fighter called José Vera Martinez. In the evenings, they were joined by younger boys and girls, who came to learn Hebrew and sing Jewish songs.
It was not surprising, then, that it was in Chaumargeais that a small yeshiva had started under a Lithuanian philosopher and Hebrew scholar called Jacob Gordin, who had helped to write the Jewish Encyclopedia in Paris before the war. Gordin was in his late twenties. The six or seven young men who came to join him were all younger, some little more than boys. Most had lost their families. What they wanted to do was to survive, study, sit out the war. The local people called the yeshiva ‘l’Ecole des Prophètes’, the Prophets’ School. Before he left for Paris, Camus was an occasional visitor.
One of the youngest of the prophets was Itzhak Mikhaëli. His grandfather, who had owned a button factory in Lodz, had raised the boy after his mother fell ill, and sent him to study in Paris. There Mikhaëli had been drawn into the world of left-wing Zionists, preparing to go to Palestine. The outbreak of war found him working on a fruit farm near Valence, and his wartime adventures had included teaching sport to children taken in by the Jewish scouts, helping Loinger with his crossings of the Swiss border, and a spell in the internment camp of Rivesaltes, from which he was the only one of a group of friends to be spared deportation. On one occasion, taking a party of 8–12-year-olds to the frontier by train, and finding no seat for them anywhere, he knocked on the door of a first-class compartment full of German soldiers and asked whether they might find room for his party of ‘Catholic schoolchildren on their way from one school to another’. The Germans obliged. Mikhaëli was a bold young man.
Shunted from contact to contact, he had eventually received instructions to make his way to Tence, and had been told that there he would find somewhere to hide. Alighting from the little train that took him up the mountain, he found the snow waist deep. He struggled along the road, following the directions he had been given, but was stopped by a group of maquisards, who, taking him for a milicien, threatened to shoot him on the spot, until prevented from doing so by an older man.
In the Prophets’ School, Mikhaëli spent his days studying, analysing texts, discussing, and pooling his reading and his knowledge of Jewish culture with the other young scholars. There was no Talmud, but Gordin knew many of its passages by heart. Mikhaëli lived in a room above a cowshed; the farmer provided the yeshiva with eggs, milk, cheese and butter. One day, when it was his turn to collect supplies from Tence, he was stopped in the café by two policemen, who asked to see his papers. He handed over his false documents. ‘What was your mother’s maiden name?’ one of the men asked. Mikhaëli had failed to memorise the details: the name he produced was wrong. ‘Next time,’ said the policeman, ‘learn your mother’s name.’ Many years later, telling this story at a conference, he heard a young woman shout out: ‘That policeman was my grandfather.’
Ever since the arrival of the Germans in France, Mikhaëli had imagined that his fate would be to join the Jews on their journey to the death camps. As the weeks passed, safe and intellectually occupied, as spring came and liberation began to seem a real possibility, the young prophets started to talk about the future, of how they would help build a new intellectual Jewish life once the fighting was over. As Passover approached, and with it the seven days of celebrating the story of the Exodus, when the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt, Mikhaëli took a candle and went out on to the plateau. There he sat and by its light read the Book of Ruth.
The groups of maquisards on the plateau were short of everything; but above all they lacked weapons and ammunition. All this was suddenly changed by the arrival of one of the most improbable and exotic figures to enter the story.
Her name was Virginia Hall. The daughter of a Baltimore banker who had married his secretary and made a fortune in movie theatres, Virginia had studied at Radcliffe and Barnard. Sporty, a keen basketball and hockey player, and wilful, she persuaded her father to let her do a year at the Ecoles Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris, following it up with courses in Vienna, Strasbourg, Grenoble and Toulouse. She returned to the US with good Spanish, German and Russian to study further French at George Washington University. Her appearance was as striking as her abilities: she was tall, with reddish-blonde hair, high cheekbones, a determined chin and grey-green eyes, spaced far apart. She had a fiery temper and could be imperious; of
herself she would say that she was difficult and capricious. But she was a born organiser.
In 1931, soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Virginia joined the American Foreign Service as a secretary in the embassy in Warsaw. By 1933 she had been moved to Izmir. Out hunting one day, she slipped; her gun went off, and a bullet lodged in her left foot. When the wound became infected and gangrene set in, a surgeon rushed down from Istanbul and decided that her leg would have to be amputated just below the knee. She was given a wooden leg, with a brass foot she referred to as her ‘aluminium puppy’. She insisted on a new posting; this time it was Venice. But when she applied to the State Department for a full diplomatic position, she was turned down: women, and particularly one-legged women, were not considered suitable candidates. No amount of high-level intervention helped.
Virginia was not a woman given to retreating. After a short spell as a secretary in Tallinn, she resigned. She reached Paris in January 1940, during the phoney war, joined the French ambulance service as a private second class and was sent to the Maginot line, to serve with an artillery regiment stationed near Metz. Demobilised soon after the fall of France, she crossed to London, via Spain, where she soon found a job as a code clerk with the American military attaché.
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