In 1946, the OSE had the idea of starting a newspaper in its homes, to be written by the children; they called it Lendemains, tomorrows. The poems and stories that appeared are about sport, friendship, holidays and sometimes Palestine, and they have a curiously detached tone. Almost none are personal. So it is oddly shocking, looking through the back numbers, to come across a poem about the death camps. It is unsigned. ‘My parents went up in the green flames,’ it starts. ‘I dreamt that their bones rattled in my ears / Dancing and flaring / Vile assassin worm . . . Vile worm with a black soul / Do not expect my pardon.’ Another child described himself as a ‘suitcase of whom no one has asked their opinion’. Like the adult deportees returning to France after the war, many of these children preferred to keep quiet, mistrusting their listeners. And like the deportees, who felt marginalised in a country now busy celebrating the heroic resisters, they felt, as the children of people who had allowed themselves to be deported, inferior. They were suspicious, wary, guilty; they wanted to be like other children, but for many this was not possible. They found the very concept of Jewishness troubling, since Jewishness had meant death. In order to live, it was better to forget. It was not a question of how, after the Holocaust, to be Jewish, but how to live at all.
In the immediate wake of the war, reuniting these orphaned children with relatives, however distant, seemed to many the best solution. Aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents were identified and approached, and the children were sent off to Poland, Cuba, America or Canada, wherever Jewish families had survived or been offered refuge. For some this experience turned out badly. Encouraged to forget the past, not talk about what had happened, they found their new ‘families’ alien. Their own had vanished; it was inconceivable to imagine another one. Paradoxically, the children who, having no one to take them, remained in the OSE’s homes, where they lived among other children with the same sense of loss and guilt, did better. They mourned together.
Nor did all the children who rediscovered their parents alive thrive in the new reality of post-war France. Very young when taken away, loved and looked after by kindly, soft women, they found their own gaunt, exhausted, prematurely aged, grieving mothers, endlessly rehearsing the past and incapable of being proper parents again, infinitely troubling, particularly when they themselves now spoke only French, having forgotten their childhood language. Some would later say that they wished that they had never found them. The title of one child survivor’s memoir is poignant and revealing: ‘Not everyone has the chance to be an orphan’. Others would say that they grew up feeling that whatever they did, like Annette Dreyfus, they could never live up to their parents, while at the same time often being conscious, as one of the Roanne girls wrote, that in their parents ‘there were scorched lands, arid zones, disaster areas’. Their parents were not the people they remembered. They always looked, wrote Carole Zalberg, who had spent a year hidden by a farmer’s wife on the plateau, ‘as if they were waiting for something, tiptoeing through this life in such a way that death would have no trouble catching them’.
Very quickly, the hidden children from the plateau scattered. By the winter of 1944, when the snows again cut the villages off from the outside world for weeks at a time, many of the houses in which they had sheltered were shuttered, awaiting the tourists they all hoped would return the following summer, to walk in the forests once again and pick mushrooms and blueberries. Le Chambon looked smaller, quieter.
The older children were the ones who went sooner and further. Max and Hanne had a baby daughter and moved to New York. Rudy Appel also went to the US. Not knowing that he would have been eligible for a scholarship to college, he worked as a furrier until his command of four languages got him a good job in an export company. Joseph Atlas and his brother, having studied chemistry, decided that Europe had become a ‘cemetery’ and left with their mother for Santiago.
It was the girls from Roanne who first decided that they wished to be a part of the new Israel. At a party of young Zionists organised in le Chambon soon after liberation, a ‘jamboree Juif ’, for which Genie and Liliane’s mother made œufs à la neige, floating islands, they talked of what they could do as pioneers. So many of their relatives were dead – almost the entire Polish side of the Schloss family, while Ruth Golan had lost 90 members of hers – that they, like Joseph, felt that Europe had become one vast Jewish cemetery.
The 1939 White Paper, with its strict limits on immigration into Palestine, was still in force, so the girls took courses in nursing and teacher training in Geneva, then went to a camp in Provence where Mossad was preparing young Zionists to enter Palestine illegally. They were on one of the first boats, so old and leaky and overcrowded that it nearly sank, and when they did reach Haifa, two British destroyers were waiting for them. They spent a year in a camp in Cyprus, but were back as soon as Israel’s statehood was proclaimed, and lived for the next few years in considerable hardship in a kibbutz on the border with Lebanon, where they took their turn as guards and built a village and a farm out of a stony, treeless hillside on which nothing thrived.
Pierre Bloch went back to Lyons with his parents, but he could not imagine wanting to live among Gentiles again. He studied for a while, then, when the state of Israel was founded, he joined a kibbutz and helped to guard the border. He was, he says, a ‘Zionist de cœur’, by absolute conviction. He was annoyed when people suggested that after the war, the hidden children, like Trocmé’s sparrows, flew off from the plateau without gratitude or regret. It was not so. ‘We left like the survivors of an inexplicable and unacceptable nightmare. We felt that our only way forward was to forget – even the good things.’ For many of the plateau’s hidden children, it would be years before they made their way up the mountain again. But they did come, and when they came, they brought controversy with them.
No European country has been more interested than France in the nature of memory and history, how it is understood, recorded, perceived, written and transmitted. Ever since Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the Annales School in 1929, the question of how the past is remembered in the present, how it entwines itself around contemporary thought, has fascinated French historians, long given to theory and abstraction. In what have been called the ‘memory wars’, ‘militants of memory’ have picked obsessively over the past, ferreting out conspiracies, questioning, accusing. There are said to be some 10,000 ‘lieux de mémoire’, sites of remembrance, a concept particular to France, with their implied suggestion that memory is a fluid, living phenomenon, something in permanent evolution, a structuring of forgetfulness. These lieux are most often places, but they can equally be ideas, things and even people.
In the immediate wake of the war, the French, struggling to find meaning for the occupation years, were encouraged, not only by de Gaulle but by all the political classes, to believe that Vichy had been the work of a small number of traitors, more misguided than evil, drawn into treachery by the Germans. In what Henry Rousso famously came to describe as the Vichy Syndrome, a first phase of mourning – for the calamitous defeat, the 90,000 dead and the two million made prisoner, the humiliating occupation and the purge of the culprits – was followed by a second, more comforting period in which France as a whole was perceived as having been a nation of resisters. When, in 1964, the Resistance leader Jean Moulin’s ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris, they were accompanied by a magnificent cortège, complete with bell-ringers, flags and veterans. During these years, almost nothing was said about the fate of the Jews, not least because of the desire of the survivors to reassimilate themselves into post-war French life. Beate and Serge Klarsfeld’s monumental work of recording and tracing those deported and killed by the Germans was only just beginning.
This myth of French heroism could not last. May 1968 saw the French young in a mood to question everything. De Gaulle, who above all others had done his best to suppress the role of the collaborators, died in 1970. It was no coincidence that Marcel Ophuls’ Le Chagrin et la Pitié was rel
eased in 1971, with its 280 minutes recording daily life in Clermont-Ferrand under occupation, a city consumed by indecision and selfishness and not at all united in resisting the invader. In 87 weeks the film was seen by 232,000 people, though it would be ten years before it was put on television – for which it had originally been commissioned. Robert Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, based largely on German and American archives, since many of the French were closed to him, was finally translated into French and published in France in 1973.
Paxton was not the first to chronicle the lives of the Jews during the war – Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews and Joseph Billig’s Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives had appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s – but it was Paxton and his co-author Michael Marrus who meticulously pulled the myth apart, showing exactly how all the major figures in Vichy, and many minor ones across France, had sought real collaboration with the Nazis, in the hopes of carving out a role for France in Hitler’s new Europe. Pétain, Paxton showed, had not been a senile old man; there had been no ‘double games’ intent on shielding the nation from the cruelty of the invaders. On the contrary, Vichy had consistently offered more than Germany asked for, more and also sooner. The debates triggered by Paxton and Marrus on how the French really behaved during les années noires, have played a part in French political life ever since.
With Paxton too, after a quarter of a century of neglect, the fate of the French and foreign Jews in France finally emerged from the shadows. Among the remains of the 15 victims of the war symbolically brought around the flame to the Unknown Soldier in November 1945, not one had been a Jew. No one, not even the Jews themselves, had chosen them to be distinguished as a special category. In the years of heroic ‘résistencialisme’, the déportés politiques, men and women arrested and deported for their resistance work, had fought hard to separate themselves from the deported Jews. To have fallen into German hands for an act of resistance was noble; to have been picked up as a victim was shameful. Even the dead, guilty of passivity, were not immune from shame, having let themselves be corralled by the anti-Semitic laws. Simone Veil, the Jewish politician and lawyer deported to Auschwitz, spoke of this neglect as a second death, that of being forgotten. Even the many associations of survivors were full of ambiguity, laying much emphasis on the need for their members to have ‘conformed to French honour’. Résistants were entitled to compensation; the Jews were conceded it.
But now, in the wake of Ophuls and Paxton and Marrus, after the release of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour film about the death camps, and after the steady work of the Klarsfelds, a new phase in the Vichy Syndrome opened. It brought with it studies, books, university theses. By 1985, there were 240 scholars working in the field. It also brought enduring controversy, as arguments about the uniqueness of the Jewish experience were batted backwards and forwards, passionate, bitter and quarrelsome, with macabre battles about who had suffered most. And it brought dozens of lieux de mémoire, as the sites of Vichy’s repression were discovered and honoured. The Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives in Vichy itself is not one of them, and it is not to be found on any map. On the corner of the main square, on the third floor, is a shuttered flat where Pétain once stayed. It remains untouched and has apparently become a place of pilgrimage for the Maréchal’s supporters.
One of the lieux is Rivesaltes, the camp near Perpignan from which 2,250 Jews were deported to Auschwitz between August and October 1942, the camp from which Rudy Appel had escaped, and where Auguste Bohny had done so much to look after the small children before moving to le Chambon. The idea was to honour not only the Jews, but the Spanish republicans, the Gypsies and later the Harkis from Algeria who had been interned there, with a fine museum and a fitting memorial. But the local commune ran out of money and Rivesaltes today looks much as it must have done when the first Jews arrived in 1940, a sandy, hot plain with a few umbrella pines and olive trees, the majestic, snowy Pyrenees in the distance. A row of stones bars the entrance to where the museum was to have been. There is a wind farm nearby, and some kind of military installation.
At Vénissieux, there is nothing but a small plaque, almost impossible to find, concealed by a trailing plant.
At Gurs, 200 kilometres to the west, greater efforts have been made to recreate a camp, with one of the 382 wooden barracks freshly reconstructed, a short stretch of railway track showing where the trains arrived, a visitor centre and a ring of stones. The cemetery alongside is well tended, with its 1,072 graves, most of them belonging to the elderly men and women from Baden and the Palatinate who did not long survive the horror of the journey that brought them here. Hanne’s grandmother Babette, lies here, as does her aunt Berta.
Finally, over 40 years after the war ended, those most responsible for the persecution of the Jews in France were tracked down and brought to trial. Klaus Barbie, thought to have sent some 14,000 people to their deaths, among them Dr Le Forestier, was unearthed hiding in Bolivia, extradited and in 1987 sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1991. His trial was the first at which ‘crimes against humanity’ were in the dock in France. René Bousquet, who as secretary general of the Vichy police was the man most culpable, after Laval, for the deportation of the Jews, and who had been sentenced to five years of national indignity after the war for having been part of the Vichy government, was brought to trial again in 1993, but was shot by an unhinged publicity-seeker as the trial began. Darquier de Pellepoix, the third and perhaps most violent and angry of the heads of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, was found in Spain but died before he could be extradited. And Maurice Papon, who as secretary general of police in Bordeaux had deported thousands of Jews and resisters to the Nazi camps, was finally sentenced to jail in 1999. These trials had been a long time in coming, but they did what nothing else had quite done before: they allowed witnesses to tell their stories, and in so doing these now elderly men and women became the heroes of the day, speaking symbolically for the dead.
The timing of remembrance in Israel was different, but its path has been somewhat similar. In the first years of the new Israel, when the girls from Roanne and Pierre Bloch were helping to guard the frontier, many young Zionists blamed the Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, on the passivity of the European Jews in allowing themselves to be slaughtered instead of dying with weapons in their hands. The survivors, arriving on boats from Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s, felt ashamed, much as the French survivors did. Then in 1953, Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, was founded in Jerusalem to correct what David Ben Gurion feared was the ignorance of the generation born after the war, and a remembrance law was passed to recognise individuals worthy of the title of Righteous Among the Nations, Justes, men and women who, at risk of their own lives, had saved a Jewish one. If Paxton’s book marked a defining moment in France, it was Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961 that caused a shift in perceptions in Israel. ‘I stand before you, Judges of Israel,’ the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, declared, ‘but I do not stand alone. I have behind me six million accusers.’ Victims were now witnesses. Schoolchildren were urged to memorise his words.
The story of le Chambon and the villages of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was known and talked about in Israel in the 1950s, but it was not until the early 1970s that serious efforts were made to identify individual rescuers. One of the first was Joseph Bass. After him came André Trocmé, and a little later Magda, Daniel Trocmé and Edouard Theis and his wife Mildred. ‘André was the leader,’ Theis would say. ‘I was the disciple, the follower. I was second fiddle.’ As Justes, they received a medal, and a tree was planted on the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in their honour. Since then, a commission continues to sit to determine, as with the Justes of all nations, whether names submitted by local committees did indeed act at risk to their own lives, and disinterestedly, not in hope of gain.
As of 2012, France had 3,513 Justes, 14 per ce
nt of the total number, but the number rises year by year as new rescuers are identified. The two bishops, Saliège and Théas, the Abbé Glasberg, Père Chaillet, Madeleine Barot are all Justes, as is Jean Deffaugt, the brave mayor of Annemasse, and Georges Loinger, who took so many children across the mountains. Fifty-nine of them are pastors, 80 are policemen.
The Haute-Loire has 87 Justes, 70 of them from the plateau: 47 from le Chambon, 10 from Mazet, 6 from Fay and 5 from Tence, making the area the place with the highest concentration in the whole of France. Mme Déléage, Roger Darcissac, Léon Eyraud, Daniel Curtet, Georgette Barraud and her daughter Gabrielle, and M and Mme Héritier are all Justes. But there are omissions: Miss Maber is not one of them.
Afterword
When, soon after the war, Madeleine Barot of Cimade was asked to name people who should be honoured for the work they had done in saving the Jews, she refused. It would be wrong to glorify their deeds, she said, because they had chosen not to glorify them themselves. And she wanted no part in the ‘shameful’ exploitation of the past. These sentiments were largely shared by the inhabitants of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, who chose to remain as silent about their wartime exploits as they had during the centuries of religious persecution. But they did not stay silent for ever. Of all the mémoires contestées, a phrase much loved by French historians, the versions of what actually happened in le Chambon, Tence, Fay and Mazet during the years of German occupation are among the most rancorous. And when these memory wars finally broke out, they did so with extraordinary intensity.
During the fifties, sixties and seventies, the plateau returned to its pre-war existence. More Sylvester pines were planted, more tractors were bought to replace the handsome beige and white local horses, the Darbyists retired to their private lives and the summer tourists returned to walk in the forests. Beneath the peaceable surface, however, feelings were stirring. The more the myth of le Chambon grew – the more Pastor Trocmé was honoured, the more there was talk of pacifism and the selfless behaviour of pious Protestants – the more uneasy the inhabitants of Tence, Fay, Mazet and the hamlets of the plateau began to feel.
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