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

by Peter Grose

  It is important to make clear that throughout the conflict the Resistance wished Trocmé and his family no harm; indeed, quite the opposite. His arrest, deportation and subsequent death would be a disaster for them all. For that reason alone, members of the Resistance were anxious that he should remain safe. But always in the background was the thought that his arrest might wreck the timing of Resistance plans. So, with Trocmé’s arrest, began the first tiny glimmer of the unthinkable thought: for his own sake, for his family’s sake, and for the sake of the Resistance, Trocmé must go.

  10

  Switzerland

  Praly, the policeman, struck for the first time on 25 February 1943. The villagers of Le Chambon had noted with something approaching amusement that Praly regularly walked from the Hôtel des Acacias to the post office and sent off large envelopes, presumably containing reports on their activities. Something had to come of all this, and on 25 February (while Trocmé, Theis and Darcissac were still in Camp de Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux) trouble finally arrived. It was a repeat of August 1942. The usual collection of buses and gendarmes assembled in the middle of the village. All school classes stopped, and the children and teachers were ordered to assemble at the town hall.

  Jacob (‘Jack’) Lewin had been transferred from Gurs internment camp to Le Chambon in September 1941. He had moved around the various houses, including The Wasps’ Nest and The Shelter, but after the August 1942 raid he had been moved to a farmhouse. He was apprenticed to a master carpenter, a Monsieur Astier, and had been working there four weeks when the knock came on the door.

  On 25 February Monsieur Praly of the National Police arrived at the workshop with some other policemen to arrest my brother and me. ‘At last,’ Praly said to us, ‘I’ve got you.’ We were taken to the town hall and guarded there by the police. We had to wait there for a long time. I don’t know how many people were arrested. Eventually they put us all on a bus and we set off in the direction of Le Puy. Dr Le Forestier followed us in his car. However, they let us go because we were too young. Dr Le Forestier drove us back to Le Chambon.36

  In fact, eight people were arrested in the raid, including the unfortunate Monsieur Steckler, who had already been arrested and released in August 1942. As with the earlier occasion, he turned out to be only one quarter Jewish and that was enough for him to be released. Jack Lewin’s older brother Martin remained in custody and was sent back to Gurs to await deportation. However, he managed to keep himself well hidden inside the camp from 28 February to 4 August. Then he was sent back to Le Chambon.

  The raid was not exactly a triumph for Inspector Praly, but in combination with the arrest of the pastors and Roger Darcissac, it produced two results. In the growing mood of disillusionment with the Vichy government, sympathisers began to appear in unexpected places, not least among the gendarmes themselves. Madeleine Barot, one of the founders of the Cimade, tells the following story:

  When the gendarmes from Tence received an order to arrest somebody, they were in the habit of dawdling along the road and making themselves highly visible. Then they would stop at a café just before they reached the steep path up to The Flowery Hill and say loudly to each other that they were going to ‘arrest a few of these dirty Jews’. A lookout post set up inside a woodheap in front of the house would give the alarm. When the gendarmes arrived, the people they were looking for would have disappeared. Often the runaways hid in an underground passage in the forest nearby, after we showed them where it was. It was the sort of hiding place that had been used by persecuted Huguenots.37

  Other warning systems sprang up. Magda Trocmé recalls in her memoirs that the phone would ring at the presbytery and an anonymous female voice would say: ‘Attention! Demain!’ (‘Watch out! Tomorrow!’) Then the phone would click, and the line would go dead. Magda never knew who made these calls. It was probably some comparatively junior official in a town hall somewhere, or in the prefecture in Le Puy. In any case, Magda knew what it meant. There would be a raid tomorrow, so she was to get the children out into the woods first thing in the morning and wait for the buses to go away empty.

  The second effect was more far-reaching, and it was reinforced by subsequent events. In the August 1942 raid, the gendarmes had searched the children’s homes as well as private houses. After raiding the Flowery Hill home, for instance, they produced a list of 26 names of foreign Jewish children who were alleged to have left the area illegally. At least, the two searching gendarmes said, they had looked in every room and couldn’t find them, although all their belongings were still there. Now, in the February 1943 raid, the schools had been emptied and the children had been told to assemble at the town hall. If schools were no longer a sanctuary, clearly there was nowhere safe on the Plateau.

  Ironically the various children’s homes were easier to target than the schools. The prefecture knew the names of the children transferred to homes from the camps; indeed, they were there with the prefecture’s permission. Once a month the various homes were required to submit a list of their residents’ names to the authorities. In return, they received a token sum from the prefecture. So while they might have had more children in residence than they were admitting—and this they almost certainly did—they nevertheless had to come up with a credible list of residents’ names every month. So the authorities had a pretty good idea of the identities of those staying in the homes, including who was staying where.

  The schools represented quite a different problem. While almost all the children sheltering on the Plateau went to school, somehow the two headmasters, Roger Darcissac and Édouard Theis, never managed to get their school registers up to date. No doubt it was a combination of pressure of work plus the sheer difficulty of keeping up with the many comings and goings among the children. That must surely have been the reason why so many children who attended the primary school or the New Cévenole School never found their way onto the register. Nobody would be so untrusting as to suggest that the two headmasters deliberately left names off to keep them away from the prying eyes of the authorities, now would they?

  Sometimes their forgetfulness went beyond the register. For example, on one occasion, schoolchildren all over France were required to write a letter of appreciation to Marshal Pétain, praising the wonders and benevolence of the Vichy regime. The pupils in Le Chambon did as they were told. But—and this is surely one of those lapses that happens in even the best-run institutions—the refugee children’s letters were never sent with the others. Inadvertently, I’m sure, Darcissac and Theis spared the authorities all the trouble of collecting refugee children’s names from the signatures on the bottom of the letters.

  • • •

  Of course, all these children’s homes, guesthouses and hostels constantly needed money. Food was not free, nor was rent, bedding, furniture, electricity, heating, clothing or schoolbooks, while adult staff were needed to cook, clean and manage. Add to this the fact that nowhere was safe anymore, and two questions demanded an answer. Where would the money come from, and where could the refugees go that was safe? Both questions turned out to have the same answer: Switzerland.

  Officially, Switzerland didn’t want the refugees. On 13 August 1942, at about the time that raids and round-ups started in earnest all over occupied Europe, the Swiss closed their borders. The arguments sound familiar: Sorry, we’re full. The refugees are bogus—they’re all spies. Or communists. Or (whisper it) they’re Jews and we’re a bit anti-Semitic here. In particular, the Swiss government would not accept that Jews were political refugees entitled to political asylum. So the refugees were unwelcome and would not be allowed in if the Swiss could help it. That was the official policy.

  However, under pressure of international public opinion, the Swiss softened their stance. In August and September 1942, thousands of refugees, mostly Jews, crossed from what was then the Unoccupied Zone into Switzerland. Then, on 26 September, the Swiss announced that they were again tightening the rules, restricting entry to the elderly, unaccompanied chi
ldren, pregnant women, the ill, and families with children younger than sixteen years. They tightened this further in December, saying they would accept families only if they had children under six years.

  Then a convention sprang up. The Swiss police, customs officers and military at the regular border crossing points could be tough, applying the rules and turning people back when they could, even handing them over to the Vichy police for internment in Rivesaltes, followed by deportation. But the Swiss authorities away from the border were much less zealous. If you could make it across the border and into Switzerland, most of the time things would be fine.

  Geneva became the key. The geography all pointed that way. The city of Geneva is at the far southwestern tip of the huge Lake Léman (also known as Lake Geneva), which drains into France and becomes the River Rhône. The border between France and Switzerland runs down the middle of the lake, which jabs its way deep into territory that might otherwise be French. The result is a long neck of Swiss land poking into France, with Geneva at the extreme tip. The French city of Annecy is a mere 40 kilometres from Geneva, and the major French city of Lyon is only 110 kilometres away. The two sides of the long neck of land form a very long border around a very small patch of ground. Best of all, the Geneva ‘neck’ was at the far northern end of the part of France occupied by the Italians, not the Germans. The Italians were a great deal less zealous than the Germans both in policing the borders and rounding up Jews, which made life simpler for smugglers.

  As is true to this day, in 1942 Geneva played host to a huge number of international organisations. The city was particularly important to the Protestant churches. The various ecumenical movements that eventually became the World Council of Churches were based there. Charles Guillon, now secretary of the World Federation of the YMCA, lived and worked there. Numerous other organisations, including the FESE, the European Fund for Student Support (which funded the House of Rocks in Le Chambon, for example), and the International Red Cross, were based in Geneva. As we’ve seen, the Quakers could send money from America to Switzerland without too much difficulty, and in general it went to Geneva. From there, men like Guillon—‘Uncle Charles’ in all correspondence—arranged to get the money to its proper destination, usually in occupied countries. So Geneva was a hub.

  The first party of Jews left the Plateau for Switzerland sometime in early September 1942, just after the first big raid in August but before the German occupation of the Southern Zone. We have no reliable record of who led it, but it was probably Pierre Galland, one of the first regular guides. The group probably left on 2 September, and there were probably six Jews in the group. A second and similar group left a week later, on 9 September. They all appear to have made it safely into Switzerland. So the ‘pipeline’ got off to a good start.

  In 1943 the operation settled into a pattern. There were two established filières or paths: the western route, through Saint-Étienne and Lyon, and the eastern route, through Valence and Grenoble. Who guided the escaping Jews? Be ready for yet another revelation from the Plateau … they were mostly led by volunteers from no less a group than those pointy-hatted, clean-living, well-prepared, knot-tying devotees of the healthy outdoors, the Boy Scouts. Pierre Galland was a Boy Scout, for instance.38

  • • •

  Pierre Piton was seventeen years old in September 1942 when he came clandestinely to the Plateau. He had been working as an apprentice boilermaker in a factory in the Occupied Zone, but had decided he wanted to go back to school. He was French and Protestant, and he had an introduction to Édouard Theis. So he crossed over to the Unoccupied Zone and headed for Le Chambon. Theis organised some accommodation for him, and then introduced Piton to Mireille Philip. As mentioned, André Philip’s wife had turned out to be a dab hand as a forger, and had become one of the key figures in the Resistance on the Plateau. When she met Pierre Piton, she liked what she saw.

  Mireille Philip clearly knew real talent when she came across it. From her point of view, Piton had a perfect CV. He had resumed his studies at New Cévenole School, with the intention of becoming a missionary, so nothing to excite the authorities there. He was clearly a self-starter, with plenty of initiative. He had a job as a school supervisor, and that would be a good cover story. His tender years meant he could move about without attracting too much attention. Best of all, he had been a Boy Scout leader, so he had all the necessary Boy Scout skills.

  Pierrot Galland, who had run numerous missions from Le Chambon to Switzerland, had recently come to the end of the road. He was grillé (a French expression that translates as ‘grilled’, and means that his cover was blown), so the chain was currently broken and no parties of Jews were being taken to Switzerland. Would Pierre Piton care to take his place, and get things moving again?

  Mireille started him off with a simple task: find places to hide Jews in the surrounding villages. Once he’d proven himself, he moved on to escorting the Jews to their new homes. Every third night he would wait until everybody in the Golden Broom home fell asleep, then he would creep out. The winter of 1942–43 was particularly severe, and the Plateau was deep in snow. Pierre would grab his sled and drag it behind him while he set off to an established rendezvous point in someone’s house to meet that night’s party of Jews, usually a small group of two or three people. First he would make a careful check to be sure they weren’t spies sent by the Gestapo, or by Inspector Praly. Having satisfied himself and swallowed a hot cup of what passed, during the war, for coffee, he would pile the group’s belongings on a sled and lead them off on foot through the snow to their new home.

  Pierre describes his role:

  I hid Jews in a lot of villages around Tence, Fay-sur-Lignon, Le Volamont, Le Mazet-Saint-Voy, Villelonge and so on … I will give you an example from this last village, where I succeeded in hiding one or two Jews in every farm without a single one of the farmers knowing what their neighbours were doing. I would usually arrive around one in the morning with my two or three Jews and my sled. I had personally warned the farmer in advance and I would wait for him to light a kerosene lamp in his living room … that was the signal. I would open and close the door as fast as I could so that the neighbours wouldn’t notice. Around three in the morning I would head back to Le Chambon at high speed, this time on my sled. When I got close to Le Chambon I needed to keep my eyes open for Gestapo from Saint-Étienne or Lyon. Then I would park my sled and, making as little noise as I could, go back to bed for about two hours, as though nothing had happened.

  I want to single out the village of Villelonge. Everyone in the village hid at least one Jew and one maquisard, all for free, all at risk of their lives or of reprisals. The road sign at the edge of the village should read: ‘Here every farmer hid at least one Jew, one STO dodger or one Resistance fighter.’

  • • •

  Catherine Cambessédès is hugely likeable. She is clever, funny and modest. When I interviewed her, she was inclined to wonder why I was talking to her. She was just one of many, she told me, and others had done much more dangerous jobs.

  In this narrative, we first met Catherine in September 1939, when her parents had rented a large house just outside the village of Le Chambon (and, by coincidence, just across the road from the Héritier farmhouse and what would become the Rosowsky forgery bureau). When war broke out, she and three siblings stayed on with their mother in Le Chambon rather than return to Paris. They would be safer there. Or so they thought. Catherine explains:

  Le Chambon was a hot, hot centre for the underground. There was a little group that was organised by the International YMCA in Geneva. There were four members. We would do errands for the maquis, bringing them clothes (always khaki), bringing them bandages, whatever they needed. And money. They would send me to get money—a suitcase full of money. If [anyone had] opened my suitcase, [they would have known] it was for the maquis. I was asked to join because I was a girl. It was a big advantage. The other three were men. I wasn’t too good because I was scared. The people who di
d this kind of thing could not afford to be scared. When you’re scared, you don’t react very well.

  Catherine’s first mission took a week.

  The first trip was to deliver a message to another maquis. It was written on a tiny piece of tissue paper. I was told that if soldiers made a check on the train, I was to swallow the message.

  On the way to Nîmes there was an alert, so the train stopped. Everyone got off and hid in the bushes. In the distance we could see the plane dipping to bomb the area. When the bombing was finished we all got back on the train and continued down the valley.

  Eventually I did get to Nîmes and stayed with my uncle, who lived there. He kept pumping me with questions. ‘Does your mother know about this? Who are you going to see? Where exactly are you going?’ I couldn’t tell him anything. For a while I thought he wouldn’t let me go.

  From Nîmes I took a train to Ganges, on the other side of the Cévennes, and there I contacted a Monsieur Monnier and told him I had to go to the maquis of so-and-so. He wasn’t exactly eager to take me there as it was 40 kilometres away and he had gone there two days earlier. The only means of transport was his tandem bicycle. But okay, he would take me there at night. ‘Come to my house at 11 pm.’

  It turned out to be an incredible, magical ride. When on earth would anybody ever expect to spend a night cycling through the mountains? The air was balmy and there was a strong scent— lavender, thyme—of flowers as we pedalled until about 3 am. There was a bit of moonlight, fortunately, as we didn’t dare to use a bike light. But Monsieur Monnier knew the way and he was in front, doing the hardest pedalling!