The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide

by Peter Grose

  Catherine Cambessédès attended the church service on that Sunday morning. The memory of it is still vivid, as she shows in this account written in an email to me more than 70 years later.

  In the church you could have heard a pin drop. I was only fifteen, yet I clearly remember my mood going from lost and frightened to safe and calm. Can you imagine what a sermon like that meant to us at a time of fear and despair? To be told, in church, that if the military situation had changed, our source of inspiration had not: it was still to follow in the steps of Jesus and the New Testament. We were not lost. We still had a direction. The day remains one of the most illuminating of my life, similar in feel to when I heard De Gaulle speak his message that we’d lost a battle, not the war. When everything seemed lost, there was one man who refused to give up.

  In the fevered atmosphere of France in the days immediately following the Armistice, it was the kind of rallying cry that the country needed, and which it certainly wasn’t hearing from inside its borders. As Catherine recalled, five days before Trocmé and Theis’s declaration, on 18 June, de Gaulle had called on all Frenchmen not to be demoralised, and to continue the fight. De Gaulle repeated his message the day before the pastors’ joint declaration. The two pastors and de Gaulle may have chosen different weapons for the forthcoming battle, but their message was the same: Resist, don’t give up. Resist. Resist. Resist.

  There is any amount of evidence that Trocmé’s views were widely sought, and respected, in and around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Olivier Hatzfeld, who taught history at the New Cévenole School, later wrote that whenever an issue arose on the Plateau, the first response was: ‘Does Trocmé know about it? What does he say?’ or ‘Trocmé will have to be informed.’ Now Trocmé and Theis had spoken, with all the considerable force of personality at their command. The message was simple and direct: Stick to your moral principles, stick together and share what you’ve got. But, above all, resist, resist, resist.

  • • •

  The next day, Charles Guillon resigned as mayor of Le Chambon. He, too, was entirely clear-headed about it. In his letter of resignation to the council he wrote that after the Armistice there were two possibilities. The new Vichy government could find the terms unbearable and decide to resume fighting. Or they could surrender. In the first case, continuing the fight:

  I have a mission which has been conferred on me by the organisation of which I am secretary general, the agreement with the French government concerning prisoners of war and refugees. I simply can’t manage two jobs at once. But I can easily be replaced as the head of the commune. Because with you, municipal councillors, and in spite of the swelling population, the material wellbeing of the community is assured for the days to come. All the refugees have a roof, the whole population knows where its next loaf of bread is coming from, and they know where to find enough food to get by.

  In the second case, surrender: ‘The running of the community passes officially to other hands, or the council stays in place and carries out orders. In that second case, I do not believe I have the right to remain at the head of your council.’ He would remain a council member, but not mayor. Mayors were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Vichy government, and Guillon would have none of it. The truth is that Guillon hated the Armistice, and thought it shameful and probably illegal. However, he realised that as mayor of a small village on a remote plateau in France he could make little difference. From Geneva he could carry on the fight far more effectively. He would have a ready-made network in the Church, among his political contacts, in the UCJG, even in the Boy Scouts, plus access to money and contacts, particularly American contacts.

  He stayed in Le Chambon for three weeks, expecting a visit from Boegner, with whom he could ‘set up a coordinated plan of action for the reorganisation of work in the unoccupied zone’. When Boegner failed to turn up, Guillon left for Geneva, arriving on 1 August. He then wrote a long ‘Letter from France to her friends’. It was not intended for publication, being more of a private meditation. It was written at the suggestion of Tracy Strong, secretary general of the Universal Alliance of the YMCA, who was about to set off for the United States. The letter was addressed to Willem Visser ’t Hooft, secretary general of the provisional committee of the newly created World Council of Churches in Geneva.

  ‘If people saw Munich [in 1938] as an act of wise diplomacy,’ Guillon wrote,

  then it was a fateful date in the moral history of France. Diplomatic victories are not necessarily moral victories. Here is the question we must ask ourselves. What part can we still play? Our duty is to be ready for anything: our duty is to save the soul of our country and to work to the limit of our ability to save the Christian church. We [in France] appear in the eyes of others to have shown weakness of character, but we still have a soul and we will defend it [Guillon’s emphasis]. If you ask me now what we are going to do, I tell you we will make ourselves something to be reckoned with. This means we should not only draw up a list of those who have survived, but also draw up a list of those on whom we can count in the future to carry out a clearly defined mission. We are French, and we intend to stay that way.

  • • •

  The first big wave of refugees came from Alsace-Lorraine, on the border with Germany. Some were evacuated by the French government and placed in refugee camps in southwest France. Others left under their own steam, and some of these found their way to the Plateau. The pace quickened with Hitler’s strike against the Low Countries on 10 May. French, Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourgeois civilians fled south. Some, of course, were Jews, but the Jews were not a distinct group: most of the refugees were simply civilians trying to get away from the fighting. Again, some found their way to the Plateau. As will be maddeningly true for the rest of this narrative, there is no trustworthy record of numbers. In his letter of resignation as mayor, Charles Guillon had written to the councillors of Le Chambon about the ‘swelling population’, adding that ‘all the refugees have a roof’. So there must have been a significant number of refugees settled in Le Chambon by that date, 24 June 1940. On 14 July, Guillon wrote to Visser ’t Hooft:

  I have had to take care of many thousands of refugees, and right now I am still full of Belgians, people from Luxembourg, some Dutch refugees and, naturally, French refugees. I have an entire refugee camp of Protestant Belgians. In spite of the bad times, there is not too much disease among the crowd of refugees.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, Guillon seems to be exaggerating the refugee numbers, though not the overall problem. There is no evidence that ‘many thousands’ of refugees had arrived in Le Chambon by July 1940. Among other things, it is hard to see how they could have got there in the first place, or where they could be accommodated after they arrived. However, given that Guillon’s role, agreed between the international YMCA and the French government, included looking after refugees, it is highly likely that he began steering some of them towards the Plateau as early as the summer of 1940. So sometime before July the Plateau’s role as a World War II refuge had begun. At the time, the village of Le Chambon had a population of about 900. With the arrival of the tourists in summer, this number usually swelled to around 4500. If, as we have heard, the ‘majority of the tourist population’ stayed on, that would add perhaps 2000 extra people. They were now being joined by a trickle of refugees, which would soon become a flood. In July 1940 the combination of overstaying tourists and new refugees could indeed have run to ‘thousands’. So although Guillon’s claim might have benefited from rewording, it was probably grounded in reality. At various times, Guillon named seven national groups in this first wave: French, Spanish, Dutch, Belgian, Austrian, Luxembourgeois and German. He made no mention of Jews.

  3

  Camps

  The word ‘camp’ has an appalling resonance in any story of the Holocaust. Yet without the internment camps set up by the Vichy government, events on the Plateau might never have taken the direction they did.

  As we have seen, wel
l before the outbreak of World War II, the French had set up camps to accommodate Spanish refugees from the civil war. The Papeterie camp near Tence on the Plateau was one example. By the end of 1939 it was empty again, and sometime around May 1940 the French government decided to use it as an internment camp for enemy aliens. On 22 June some 70 German civilians were locked up there. This was the day Pétain signed the Armistice, and in the general confusion the commandant of the camp decided to look the other way while all 70 escaped. The local gendarmes from Freycenet, Tence and Yssingeaux quickly nabbed 43 of them, but the remaining 27 were still on the loose eight days later.

  A representative of the German embassy inspected the camp on 29 July 1940 and asked the non-Jewish Germans if they would like to be repatriated; a few said yes and were packed off on trains home. On 25 August another 132 German civilians arrived at the Papeterie. They were mostly anti-Nazis who had fled from Germany to France, and they were predominantly Jews. So the non-Jewish numbers shrank while the Jewish numbers swelled, until the camp was almost entirely filled with German Jews.

  Conditions in the Papeterie camp were generally benign, but the same could not be said of the camps elsewhere in France. In 1939 the French had built one of their largest camps at Gurs, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, about 40 kilometres from the Spanish border. It was created to hold refugees from the Spanish Civil War. The Gurs camp may have begun its life as a well-intentioned rudimentary shelter for desperate refugees, but it quickly became little better than a concentration camp. It was already filled to bursting with Spanish refugees when, in early 1940, well before the German invasion, the French government rounded up 7000 ‘enemy aliens’, many of whom were German Jews who had fled from Nazi persecution, and locked them up in Gurs along with the Spanish.

  After the German invasion of France, the German Schutzstaffel (popularly known as the SS) added to the problem with one of their nuttier schemes. SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant-colonel) Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the logistics of dealing with the ‘Jewish problem’, got it into his head that all the Jews of Europe could be rounded up and packed off to the French colony of Madagascar, where they could presumably be counted on to die of a combination of starvation and tropical disease. So between 6500 and 7500 Jews from the Baden area of Germany were crammed into trains that set off through Occupied France, then through Vichy France, to Gurs, next stop Madagascar. It is the only known example in the Nazi era of Jews being deported en masse from Germany and sent west, not east. Nineteen-year-old Max Liebmann was better prepared than most for what happened. He worked in the Immigration Office of the Jewish Community in Mannheim, Germany. He also spoke a little French.

  The director of this office was the contact between the community and the Gestapo. The telephone rang the day before. ‘Come down!’ So he went over to the Gestapo and he was told: ‘Look, tomorrow you will be arrested and deported to France.’ He came back and said: ‘Now we are going to close our offices, because tomorrow we will be deported.’ So I went home and said to my mother: ‘We’re going to pack now, because we are going to France tomorrow.’ She didn’t believe me. Then she saw me pull out two suitcases, and it dawned on her that I wasn’t kidding.

  On October 22nd 1940 every Jew in the Palatinate, Baden and the Saar [German regions along the border with France] was arrested, and given one hour to pack. They were very polite. My mother had to sign over to the German government everything that was in the apartment, including the house that belonged to my grandmother. It all had to be legal. Then they picked us up, took us to train stations and put us on the train. Fortunately the train went towards France. My father was already working in France, in Nice. First stop was Lyon. The French had no idea we were coming. The Germans never notified them. The fellow who was designated transport chief—this was his first train—didn’t speak French, so I came out with him. It turned out that the French had no idea who we were and what this was all about. So the train continued, and we ended up in Gurs.

  Conditions in the camp were horrendous. There were 382 flimsy huts, each 25 metres square, packed into a barbed-wire-fenced compound 1400 metres long and 200 metres wide. Each cabin had to accommodate up to 60 people—so in a full cabin each person had a space 64 by 64 centimetres in which to live, sleep and store his or her possessions. The thin tar and fabric walls and roof leaked rain, wind and snow, and offered no protection from the cold. The sanitary arrangements don’t bear thinking about. Food was scarce, and of poor quality. In the compound, the mud was ankle deep. Rats thrived, and disease was rife. In the first year more than 1000 cases of typhus and dysentery were reported. This was all glossed over with some breathtaking euphemisms. Camps like Gurs were referred to as Centres d’Hébergement Surveillés (Supervised Accommodation Centres).

  Conditions in Gurs were a great deal worse than those in the Tence camp. However, overcrowding appeared not to bother the French authorities. On 22 October, the Vichy government closed the Papeterie camp and moved its remaining inmates to Gurs. By the end of the first week of November, Tence had been cleared.

  While conditions in camps like Gurs were appalling, these were not extermination camps. The food and accommodation may have been dreadful, but there were no executions and no sadistic treatment of prisoners by the guards. The inmates were even allowed visits from aid organisations.

  • • •

  Towards the end of 1940, André Trocmé had twice offered his services beyond Le Chambon, and been rebuffed both times. Now he had a third proposal: he would do relief work in the camps.

  By 1940 there were about 50,000 internees living in the camps at Gurs, Rivesaltes, Les Milles, Agde, Argelès-sur-Mer, Le Vernet, Brens and others. The internees were a mixed bunch: they included a smattering of Spanish refugees still stuck there from the civil war, plus communists, and anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians who had fled to the supposed safety of France (including a large proportion of German and Austrian Jews). There were also ‘foreign’ Jews who had been residing in France, and anybody unlucky enough to be considered an ‘enemy alien’. They all faced ‘deportation’. In 1940, in the early days of the Vichy government, everybody assumed ‘deportation’ meant slave labour in Germany. It was not until 1942 that ‘deportation’ and ‘murder’ became the same word, and while there were rumours as early as 1942, it was not until 1944 that the true fate of the ‘deportees’ became known.

  Around the end of 1940, Trocmé called a meeting of the parish council. ‘I pointed out to them how fortunate we were,’ he wrote in his memoir.

  I could easily spend time away from the parish because we had Édouard Theis as part-time pastor, as well as Henri Braemer, a teacher at the high school, and Noël Poivre, a retired pastor. I put it to the council that they should send me on a mission into an internment camp as ‘ambassador’, to distribute food and other aid, which would be collected by us from within the parish.

  With the council’s approval, Trocmé headed for Marseille, on the southern Mediterranean coast. At the time, several relief organisations with Christian connections were based in Marseille or had offices there. Marseille was central to the camps, which were strung out across the south of the Unoccupied Zone, several of them on the Mediterranean coast.

  There were four key organisations doing relief work, but for Trocmé the American Quakers were the most important, as they combined pacifism with Christian humanitarian principles. They also had access to the camps—indeed, they had permission to live inside them—but most important of all, they had access to money. It came from America, and until America entered the war in December 1941, money could still be sent directly to France.

  Another powerful group was the CIMADE (Comité Inter-Mouvements auprès des Évacués, roughly ‘Inter-Denominational Commission for Evacuees’, and usually referred to as ‘the Cimade’). The Cimade was an almost entirely Protestant organisation, though it included some secular supporters. It was set up in 1939 specifically to carry out relief work in the camps. The Cimade’s workers
also had permission to live inside the camps. A third organisation, the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, roughly ‘Child Rescue Service’), was a Jewish organisation that focused on children rather than adults, as did the CRS–SAE (Croix-Rouge Suisse—Secours aux Enfants, or the Swiss Red Cross—Child Rescue). The American vice-consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham IV, was another important source of aid; for ten months, from the summer of 1940 until he was summarily forced aside by his bosses in the State Department, Bingham operated a generous visa system that is credited with making possible the escape of anywhere between 1200 and 2500 refugees,13 mostly Jewish. The American former journalist Varian Fry ran his own rescue network, based in Marseille, which worked closely with Bingham.

  However, it was the Quakers who made the proposal that gave the Plateau its mission. In Marseille, Trocmé began by meeting Burns Chalmers, an American and one of the leading Quakers. Chalmers got straight down to business. He told Trocmé there was no point in his moving into a camp. They had plenty of people doing such work already. Trocmé, he said, was offering something far more valuable. As Trocmé recalled in his memoir, Chalmers went on:

  You’ve told me you come from a mountain village where things are still pretty safe. Our problem is this: we work with doctors and the French officials who manage the camps, and we try to issue medical certificates to as many adults as we can, declaring them unfit for work. If we can’t save the father, we switch to the mother. If the two parents are deported despite all this, we then take the children into our care. Next we get permission for those who are declared unfit to be lodged outside the camps. However, it’s very difficult to find a French community that is willing to run the risk of taking in hordes of adults, teenagers and children who are all compromised in some way. Could you be that community?