Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  Lily Garel saw a man struggling up the road drenched to the skin and dyed blue all over from a coat that was losing its colour. It was her husband Georges; he had bicycled all the way from Pau, 450 kilometres away. They took the baby and went to Switzerland, where Lily bought a cucumber in the market and marvelled at its crisp freshness, not having seen such a thing for many months. Then they set about making their lives.

  The Garels in Switzerland

  Dressed as scouts, Gilbert Nizard and his sister Mireille took the little train down the mountain, crossed the Rhône, hitched a lift on a military lorry to Aix-en-Provence and from there made their way to Marseilles. Everywhere they saw the debris of fighting. The house in the Rue Notre-Dame was intact, but it had been stripped bare. In a depot near the zoo they found a few pieces of their furniture, labelled ‘Jüde Nizard’. A school friend of Mireille’s, who was engaged to an American officer, got them passes to the buildings that had been occupied by the Germans, and there they found more of their things. Gilbert wrote to his mother and told her that it was safe to come home. Friends lent linen and plates. Bit by bit, they put their business together again. Gilbert went back to school to do his second baccalaureat. Sometimes, in the evenings, they danced. They waited, every day, for news of Armand and André.

  While the Allies fought their way north and west, liberating Europe town by town, it was still perfectly possible to believe that many, if not all, of the 150,000 people deported by the Germans from France might yet come home. Nineteen forty-four was a year of waiting.

  As the plateau emptied, the villagers felt a little lost. It had been an adventure, a challenge, to which they had risen, they felt, just as they should have done, with resourcefulness and generosity. They had behaved well, bravely. As Miss Maber would later write, looking back on the years of rescue and hiding, of silence and wariness, of listening out for danger and taking in strangers about whom one knew nothing and whose language one did not always speak, with no sense of when they might ever leave, ‘it seemed like the belle époque – a time when we lived according to an ideal’. What worried her was that now, having lived so long with lies and illegality, ‘we might have trouble knowing right from wrong’.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Memory wars

  When Rambert, in Camus’s La Peste, meets his wife again after the town is reopened, he wants to ‘be like all those around him who seemed to believe that the plague could come and go, without men’s hearts being changed by it’. The Germans had gone, Vichy had fallen, but the French could not forget. Too much had happened, too much complicity, too many betrayals, too much enmity; their hearts were different. The need to put France back on its feet, and de Gaulle’s insistence on speed and pragmatism, meant that there was much instant justice, some of it very rough indeed. Even before the courts got down to work sentencing collaborators to various forms of punishment – from execution and life imprisonment for the ‘grands responsables’ of Vichy, to ‘dégradation nationale’, national indignity and its ban for those deemed less guilty on wearing medals, becoming lawyers, judges, notaries or public school teachers – 9,000 summary executions had been carried out by the Resistance.

  On the plateau, Fayol and Bonnissol took part in the tribunals that led to the execution of 144 men in the Haute-Loire. As Pompidou later said, the French had not much liked each other in the years of occupation, and they did not much like each other now. Fresnes and Drancy, once holding pens for the Jews and members of the Resistance, were now full of mayors, prefects and officials who had served the Germans. But as quickly as justice was meted out, so were their crimes forgotten. Amnesties followed.

  France itself was in ruins, its rail tracks blasted, its bridges bombed, its factories idle. For five years, wrote the American journalist Janet Flanner in her diary, Europe had been the ‘victim of cannibalism, with one country trying to eat the other countries, trying to eat the grain, the meat, the oil, the steel, the liberties, the government, the men of all the others’. The French felt denuded, impoverished, devoured. In that winter of 1944, when it rained incessantly and then snowed, Parisians said that they felt colder than at any other time during the war; they were living on carrots and turnips and there was no coal with which to heat their houses.

  It was not until the spring of 1945, however, when trains began to bring home the survivors from the German extermination and labour camps, that the scale of Vichy’s crimes became clear. Of the 150,000 people who had been deported from France, 75,721 of them were Jews. While a little less then half of the political deportees came home – 40,760 out of 86,827 – only 2,564 Jews did so. More than 10,000 Jewish children under 18 had been put on to trains for the death camps: 300 survived. The statistics, reflecting Laval’s attempt to buy time for the French Jews at the expense of the foreigners, show that while 13.5 per cent of French Jews had died, the figure rose to 42 per cent for foreign Jews.

  Even so, the deportation and murder of the Jews would not become criminal offences until 1964, when French law changed to allow retroactive trials for crimes against humanity. Until then, the Germans, not Vichy, were deemed responsible. More heed was paid to the pillage of France – half a million books and more than 400 trainloads of furniture and pictures – and to the crimes of collaboration perceived to have been committed by writers. No one had obliged them to publish. Many had chosen to do so. Over 400 plays had been performed in occupied Paris, among them those by Sartre, Cocteau, Guitry, Claudel and Giradoux. Sartre maintained that he wrote in coded messages for the Resistance; but it was a code few had the key to.

  It would be many years before it was acknowledged that, from the very beginning, with their censuses, their revisions of nationality, their Statuts des Juifs, their seizure of property and businesses and their expulsions from professions and jobs, Vichy had effectively paved the way for Hitler’s Final Solution in France. By turning Jews into inferior beings, by interning them in camps, where they starved and grew sick and died, by letting loose on them anti-Semitic zealots, by identifying, gathering, earmarking and preparing them, they had made it far easier for the Germans to do their work. The Nazis could have done little of this on their own. But they had given Vichy no military ultimatum, and on the rare occasions that Vichy said no – as with the wearing of the yellow star in the south – there had been no reprisals. Had Vichy, and Vichy’s police, not actively helped the Germans, many more Jews would have survived. Nor were the French who did help the Jews in danger in the way that rescuers in Poland or Germany were; penalties for rescuing and hiding Jews were often smaller. Even modest acts would have made a difference.

  No other European country had taken such a clear anti-Semitic line: Denmark sent 93 per cent of its small Jewish population to safety in Sweden, Fascist Italy dragged its heels, and even Hungary’s dictator stopped deportations towards the end of the war. As the SS officer Helmut Knochen declared at his trial in 1947: ‘We found no difficulty with the Vichy government in implementing Jewish policy.’ Nor were the Jews themselves deemed by all to be blameless: one of the many bitter legacies was an accusation levelled at UGIF, the umbrella Jewish body, that by trying so desperately to remain on good terms with the Germans, they had effectively turned their children’s homes into traps, and thus become complicit in the arrests and deportations.

  Many Jews in France did in fact survive: three quarters of the 330,000 thought to be in the country in 1940. This was due to many things: the existence of an unoccupied zone until late in 1942, the presence in France of such a small occupying force, but it was chiefly because of the behaviour of a number of ordinary French people; and of this, the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was a remarkable example.

  Switzerland did not emerge well from the war years. Of the 28,000 people accepted from France, 12,635 got in by crossing the border clandestinely. At least 1,467 – though the number is certainly far higher – were known to have been turned away, to almost inevitable capture by the Germans. It was only on 12 July 1944 – five weeks after the
Normandy landings, by which time those Jews still at liberty or hidden in France had no need to get to Switzerland – that the Swiss federation passed a law allowing foreigners in danger to pass freely across their border. The Swiss did indeed take in more refugees than they have been credited with; but they did not do enough. With a little more generosity, a little less xenophobia, they could have saved many lives.

  For the plateau, the connections forged in Geneva by Boegner, Guillon and Mireille Philip were crucial, as was the work of Madeleine Dreyfus, Georges Loinger, Cimade and the OSE on the border. And Switzerland did offer sanctuary to Max and Hanne, and to Simon Liwerant, along with at least 70 people who passed through the Coteau Fleuri, 15 from Les Roches, and all the dozens of young children saved by Garel, Moussa Abadi and Joseph Bass.

  Altogether, taking into account the 311 who received visas to emigrate, the 100 or so who made it to Spain, the estimated 1,350 who got to Switzerland and those hidden by Aryan families, some 8–10,000 Jewish children in France survived the war. But many of them, in 1944, now had no parents.

  Proportionally, their rescuers had not fared so well. Of the Sixième’s 88 full-time workers, 30 died, though Liliane Klein-Liebert remained safe. Joseph Bass survived the war, as did his collaborator Denise Caraco, better known as Colibri. Mireille Philip, Piton, Loinger all saw peace arrive. The Abbé Glasberg, weaving and ducking his way through a plethora of Resistance activities, escaped capture, as did Père Chaillet, who was so upset by the seizure of the children of Izieu that he kept a list of their names in the pocket of his soutane until he died. Two other priests who had played a part in the plateau story were not so lucky. Père Louis-Adrien Favre, of the Salesian college, and Abbé Jean Rosay, curé of Douvaine, through whose hands so many of Madeleine Dreyfus’s children had passed, both died in the final weeks of the war, Favre shot by the Germans, Rosay in Bergen-Belsen.

  Marguerite Pellet, in whose school for deaf and dumb children Madeleine had been caught, was sent to Ravensbrück and died in the Allied bombing of Amstetten*; the body of René, her husband, caught by the Gestapo, was washed up in the Rhône, covered in marks of torture. The Marco Polo circuit lost 115 of its agents. It would be many months before these deaths were confirmed. Simon Liwerant was one of thousands of anxious relations who went day after day to the Hôtel Lutétia in Paris, where the lists of the returnees were posted, in the hope of finding his father. Aaron never came.

  But Madeleine Dreyfus did. She was sent to Belsen at the end of May 1944, and lived in a barracks with 600 other women, feeling humiliated and diminished by her agonised craving for food. Liberated by the Allies on 15 April 1945, she endured an 85-kilometre walk and a 15-day train journey with virtually no food, seeing many of her companions die. When she reached Paris, on 18 May, she was skeletal. She arrived home in Lyons the next day; Raymond and the children were waiting. Twenty-one-month old Annette did not know who she was. Told to kiss her mother, she obediently went over to a photograph of Madeleine and kissed that instead.

  Almost at once, Madeleine went back to her work as a child psychologist, with all the determination and absorption that had carried her through the camps; she chose to behave, said Raymond, as if the ‘whole nightmare had never taken place’. It made none of her children happy. Later, Annette would say that she grew up resenting the children her mother worked with and seemed more interested in. ‘I was jealous. How could I not be?’ She dreaded the reunions of survivors, everyone admiring and praising her wonderful mother. She was, says her aunt, ‘a very sad little girl’.

  Dorcas Robert, the feisty café owner from Yssingeaux, also survived the camps. She returned to the plateau together with her assistant Rose at the same time as Dora Rivière, the doctor from Saint-Etienne, as part of a group of 299 French women exchanged for 600 German prisoners of war. Dorcas was one of a handful of women to emerge alive from Ravensbrück’s infamous Jugendlager, where the inmates were sent only to die, and she had been led out twice to the gas chambers before being reprieved. Dora had worked in Ravensbrück’s infirmary. Though Yssingeaux feted Dorcas’s arrival with bunting and a parade, and she discovered that her children had been well cared for, she did not find what she had hoped for in post-war France. She renamed her café Le Restaurant du Patriote, and was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance, but ill health and local rivalries kept her from the political future she had dreamt of. ‘I am heartbroken at all these injustices,’ she wrote bitterly to the authorities. ‘We fought, we made sacrifices, but our victory has been stolen from us and we find ourselves in a still more rotten democracy than the one before the war.’ She died less than five years later; Berthe, her eldest child, was only 15.

  But for one of the rescuers, the end of the war brought contentment. Having fought her way north with the Allies, Virginia Hall went to work for Radio Free Europe, interviewing refugees from behind the new Iron Curtain. Returning to the US, she joined the CIA. She was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the first civilian woman to be so honoured, but declined a public ceremony, telling President Truman that she was ‘still operational and anxious to keep busy’. She kept her long hair piled up in a bun on top of her head and stuck a pencil through it. She married Paul Goillot. He was considerably shorter than her and much less well educated, but they laughed. When she reached 60, Virginia retired to a farm in Maryland, which reminded visitors of a turreted French chateau. She planted her garden with bulbs, raised five French poodles and several cats, made her own goat’s cheese, and became a crossword addict. Her bookshelves were filled with spy stories, but about her own story she refused to speak.

  Annette Dreyfus was not the only girl to find post-war France a sad and unsettling place, nor Simon Liwerant the only boy to wait for parents who never came back. There were many unhappy children in France in 1945.

  As the war ended, the OSE and the other welfare organisations took stock: they estimated that there were some 5–6,000 Jewish children who were now orphans, whether hidden in non-Jewish homes around France, or over the border in Spain or Switzerland. They needed to be traced, restored to their proper names and identities, and a future found for them. The OSE alone had 4,401 names on a card index of ‘abandoned Jewish children’. Some of them had forgotten their real names; others did not even know that they were Jewish. Most of them were not French at all, but Polish, German, Russian, Austrian or Romanian, the children of tailors and leatherworkers, travelling salesmen and tinkers, doctors and businessmen and miners, come to France in the welcoming years of the Front National. Their short lives had been marked by exile, camps, loss of parents, clandestinity. Some had no memory of their families. They had to be taught how to live with the past, to remember and find their childhoods, to be helped to come to terms with feelings of humiliation, hatred, revenge. They had to be given a taste for life; they had to learn to trust.

  Soon, the OSE’s social workers, Madeleine Dreyfus and Liliane Klein-Liebert among them, were back on their bicycles, visiting and collecting the children they had so successfully concealed in villages and farmhouses. On the plateau, Tante Soly and Faïdoli and the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole produced their Jewish pupils; the Darbyists those hidden in their attics and stables. Not all the men and women who had taken in children wished to see them leave, and there were battles around France over relinquishing some of them, and accusations of forced baptisms and conversions. And not all the children, happy and safe with the families who had taken them in, wanted to leave. But there was a strong feeling in the French Jewish community that these children needed to rediscover their Jewishness, receive a Jewish education, become, as they saw it ‘un homme Juif nouveau’, a new Jewish man.

  The OSE opened 25 homes to look after them.

  From Switzerland came the 1,500 or so who had been smuggled over the border, of whom 569 were known to have lost their parents. The Circuit Garel had 900 hidden children. The liberation of Buchenwald brought a group to France, many of them originally from the ghettos of Poland and Hungary. Reading t
he files on the children in the OSE’s archives in Paris, you get an extraordinarily vivid picture of just what they had been through: the fractured families, the long journeys on foot or by train, the separation from parents and brothers and sisters, the hiding places in barns and lofts, the hunger, and above all, the fear. In these dossiers, kept on every child, are the few facts known about each of them: the names of their parents and siblings, where they were caught, what camps they were sent to, when they were deported. Sometimes there are photographs, grainy black-and-white pictures of grandparents in Warsaw or parents on their wedding day. Some are police photographs, taken in Gurs or from identity papers.

  Deciding what to do with these children was not easy. There were questions of guardianship, the tracing of relatives. The US offered visas, then stalled; Australia and Canada volunteered to take 100, South Africa a number of children under 12.

  The children themselves were not easy. They were often closed in, secretive, regarding adults as enemies, for adults had crushed their parents. The more disturbed accepted nothing, neither comfort nor affection. Teachers working with the children reported incessant nightmares and crying, lack of initiative, fear of argument, insolence; the older girls were said to be ‘neurasthenic’, the boys unstable. Most had a terror of abandonment. At an OSE congress held in 1946, there was much talk about how these ‘railing, undisciplined, baffling’ children could be coaxed back to life. In the homes, the staff did what they could to remain calm and loving, but were constantly ambushed by surprises. When one woman decided to replace the bell that normally woke the children in the mornings with a more soothing flute, four furious 14-year-olds said to her: ‘You take us for snakes.’