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

by Peter Grose

  Hanne Hirsch was reunited with Max Liebmann (see below) very soon after her arrival in Switzerland in February 1943. At first they both helped to run refugee camps there. They were married in Geneva on 14 April 1945, and Hanne gave birth to a daughter in March 1946. After the war, she learned that her mother had died in Auschwitz. The Liebmann family moved to the United States in 1948, with only $70 to build a new life. They succeeded. She and Max now live in comfortable retirement in a suburb of New York and keep in regular contact with friends from Le Chambon.

  Max Liebmann learned after the war that both his parents had died in Auschwitz. Living in Geneva, and with a small child, he and his wife, Hanne Hirsch (see above), decided to look for a better life in the United States. There they quickly prospered. Max found work straight away. Later he went to business school to learn accounting, and made even more rapid progress. He retired as vice-president of his company, but that was not his only vice-presidency. At the time of writing he was senior vice-president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors.

  Pierre Piton disappeared from view after the war, and I have had real difficulty establishing what happened to him. When he first came to the Plateau and the New Cévenole School, he had intended to train as a missionary. He appears to have at least partly fulfilled this ambition: he left for Africa after the war, where he is thought to have helped to set up businesses in local communities. He did this, not as a colonial entrepreneur, but as a kind of one-man Peace Corps. If anyone reading this knows more, please write to me care of the publishers of this book, and I will expand this entry in future editions.

  Oscar Rosowsky’s story has one of the happiest endings of all those who took part in the Plateau adventure. When the war was over, he fulfilled his lifelong ambition to become a doctor. He went on to become president of the General Medical Council of France. He lives with his Italian wife just south of Paris, not far from Orly airport. One room of his apartment is devoted to his medical books and equipment, while another contains memorabilia of his career as a forger. He is still funny, mischievous and a joy to know.

  Pierre Sauvage, born in the Saint-Agrève hospital on the Plateau in 1944, moved with his family to New York in 1948. He returned to France, where he fell in love with film at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. The director Otto Preminger brought him back to New York as a story editor. His most important work involved returning to Le Chambon with a camera crew, as a result of which he wrote, produced, directed and appeared in his remarkable documentary telling the Plateau story. In the course of his research, he discovered the original of Trocmé and Theis’s 23 June 1940 joint declaration, which led to the documentary’s title, Weapons of the Spirit. Released in 1989, it won numerous awards, notably the DuPont-Columbia Award in Broadcast Journalism (sharing it with Ken Burns’s series The Civil War). After its release, Pierre continued to fight for recognition of the Plateau’s World War II rescue activities. For five years he ran a memorial exhibition in the heart of the village of Le Chambon, Expo du Carrefour (Crossroads Exhibition). He argued (ultimately successfully) for the creation of a proper museum and Place of Remembrance. In 1982 he set up the Chambon Foundation, based in Los Angeles, and later the Varian Fry Institute. He lives in Los Angeles with his entertainment lawyer wife, Barbara M. Rubin, and continues to make documentaries; Three Righteous Christians, to be released in 2014, is the source of the quotes from Abbé Glasberg (p. 77) and Madeleine Barot (p. 78).

  Édouard Theis remained headmaster of the New Cévenole School until his retirement in 1963. He is another of the forgotten men of this saga. He was overshadowed by André Trocmé (literally—Trocmé was slightly taller) and seldom receives the credit he deserves. Yet he was an active forger, he and his wife, Mildred, hid refugees in their own house, and he was an important passeur, working with the Cimade to smuggle refugees into Switzerland. He tended to be reserved—it is completely in character that he told nobody how or where he hid himself when he left Le Chambon in 1943. He died in 1984. Both Édouard and Mildred Theis were recognised by Yad Vashem in 1981 as Righteous Among the Nations.

  André Trocmé, as we have seen, must have regarded the years after the war as something of an anticlimax. His intellectual skills were never in doubt, but his political skills were sometimes lacking. His confrontational style ensured there was no shortage of enemies in high places, particularly ecclesiastical high places in France. Nevertheless, he had friends: he was twice nominated (by the Quakers) for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was quite an international figure, travelling widely, including attending the 1958 Hiroshima and Nagasaki Conference to oppose the development of the H-bomb. He was also a very public opponent of the Algerian war. He retired from the MIR at the end of 1959, and in May 1960 took up work as a pastor in Geneva, with his own parish of Saint-Gervais. Again, his furious energy kicked in, and he raised funds for, set up and managed the Saint-Gervais-Philippeville Diesel School, which taught local Algerians to repair and service diesel engines. He retired from Saint-Gervais in 1968, and died on 5 June 1971. Shortly before his death, he was named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. He refused to accept the medal unless it was awarded to the whole village and not to him alone. It was not his only distinction: he also received the Rosette de la Résistance, awarded for ‘remarkable acts of courage that contributed to the resistance of the French people against the enemy’. He must surely be the only high-profile pacifist ever to receive it.

  Magda Trocmé worked alongside her husband through their years as joint secretaries of the MIR in Europe. When they moved to Geneva, she taught Italian at the University of Geneva School of Interpreters, and at the high school in Annemasse, just across the border in France. After André’s death, Magda stayed on in Geneva for six years, then moved back to France, to Paris. She was much in demand internationally as a speaker, travelling in Europe as well as the United States and Israel. In 1981 she was awarded an honorary PhD from Haverford College, Pennsylvania, sharing the platform with Rosa Parks, hero of the American civil rights movement. In this period, she devoted herself to putting her husband’s memoirs into some sort of order, as well as making a start on her own. In 1986 she was named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, receiving the award at the Israeli embassy in Paris. She died in October 1996.

  Nelly Trocmé Hewett came to the United States in early 1947 as an au pair for a Quaker family in Pennsylvania. She attended Earlham College and graduated with a degree in English and French. In 1951 she married an American, with whom she had three children. They moved to Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, where Nelly now lives. At first Nelly tutored French privately, then in the mid-1950s began teaching French in college-prep schools. She retired from teaching in the 1980s and has three grown grandchildren. She is a tireless communicator, and maintains regular contact with innumerable survivors of the Plateau, as well as taking a lively interest in Plateau affairs.

  Appendix 1

  HUGUENOTS

  The preceding chapters tell the story of what happened on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon between 1940 and 1944. This appendix deals with the whole history of the Plateau and its Huguenot character. It is an attempt to uncover an answer to the most puzzling question of all: why did the Huguenots of the Plateau risk their own lives to save Jews?

  For the better part of 2500 years, the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon stayed out of trouble by being off the beaten track. After the Stone Age, the first known inhabitants were four tribes of Celts calling themselves Vellaves (roughly ‘mountain people’) in the west, Ségusaves in the north, Helviens in the east, and Gabales in the south. They seem to have coexisted peacefully, an early example of the tradition of neighbourly live-and-let-live on the Plateau. The Celts and their prehistoric predecessors left very little behind: a couple of stone monuments known as dolmen and a scattering of basin-like sacrificial stones. Compared with the prehistoric treasure troves elsewhere in France, such as Brittany and the Dordogne, the Plateau is bare.

  There are a
few villages with telltale ‘-ac’ placenames, suggesting that Caesar’s Roman legions included the Plateau in their conquest of Gaul. There is Chavagnac near Saint-Agrève, Champagnac near Fay-sur-Lignon, Arnissac and Bronac between Le Chambon and Yssingeaux, and more. However, other than these names and a couple of stretches of characteristically straight Roman road, the Romans also left no traces behind. There is no triumphal Roman arch, no amphitheatre and no bathhouse. The Romans left the Plateau pretty much as they found it.

  As in so many parts of Europe, Christianity followed in Roman footsteps. The first Christian evangelists arrived on the Plateau sometime around the third century AD, and by 290 the town of Le Puy had its own bishop. But the Christians proved to be slow starters. Although Christian parishes were established on the Plateau sometime around the seventh and eighth centuries, the first known church buildings did not begin to spring up until around the ninth or tenth centuries, more than half a millennium after the first evangelists had arrived. This tardiness is more evidence of the Plateau’s remoteness and inaccessibility.

  In general, skirmishers and invaders kept their distance. The Muslim Saracens, for example, began an invasion of France in 718 AD, sweeping up from the south along the Rhône Valley, and by 725 AD had fought their way as far north as Autun, about 300 kilometres beyond the Plateau; however, they left the Plateau to itself. It was too remote, too steep, too easy to defend … and there was very little to loot or pillage once you had conquered it.

  By the end of the first millennium AD, the Plateau was functioning more or less indistinguishably from the rest of Europe. Agriculture continued to dominate the European economy, so wealth and land went together. The Roman Church, with the Pope at its head, was God’s earthly agent. It is not clear which ecclesiastical orders dominated the Plateau in the first millennium, though there are records of Benedictines from about the seventh century. In the second millennium, records show that the mysterious order of military monks known as the Knights Templar61 set up shop in Devesset and gradually expanded their parish borders through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  The first 300 years of the second millennium were a time of intellectual and political turmoil all over Europe. Crusaders went off to the Crusades, inquisitors tortured and burned alive supposed heretics, a succession of popes squabbled with a multitude of kings over who was in charge on earth, and King John of England had his wings clipped by his barons, who pressed him into signing the Magna Carta in 1215. Kingships changed hands, either by succession or conquest, and the latter often led to a new set of lords and landowners in the conquered territories.

  The fifteenth century marked the beginnings of the Renaissance, when art and science flourished for the first time throughout Europe. Leonardo da Vinci had yet to paint the Mona Lisa (or invent the helicopter), but a spirit of intellectual curiosity began to eat away at the bleak superstitions of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages.

  This situation remained undisturbed for both church and state until 31 October 1517. On the eve of All Saints’ Day a 33-year-old German monk called Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. His specific target was the decision of Pope Leo X to sell ‘indulgences’—bits of paper that absolved the purchaser of his sins, without repentance or even confession—to pay for the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

  In the language of today’s computer world, Luther’s scandalous attack on church greed and corruption went viral. It was part of the church’s bad luck that the printing press had recently been invented in Germany, in time to spread Luther’s accusations to the wider world. Within months, all Europe knew about the young monk’s anger and disgust. In his lifetime, his books became international bestsellers, with hundreds of thousands of copies printed and sold. Luther’s attack resonated throughout Europe, and led to the creation of breakaway churches—generally known as Protestant or Reformed churches—which did not accept the Pope’s authority, and whose priests and monks displayed an unprecedented interest in simplicity, honesty and modesty. The new church movement quickly took root.

  However, the new teachings of Luther did not take serious hold in the Vivarais-Lignon until sometime after 1528, when a certain Étienne Machipolis preached the Reformation message in Annonay, on the far northeast edge of the Plateau. Machipolis, so it was said, had heard Luther himself preaching in Saxony, so his message came straight from the source.

  It was not all plain sailing. The next year a local priest called Laurent Chazot was burned at the stake, as a heretic, in what is now called the Place du Martouret (Place of Martyrs) in Le Puy. He was accused of preaching support for Luther’s ideas. He seems to have been the victim of a bizarre miscarriage of justice, springing from a case of mistaken identity: he was accused of coming from ‘Le Chambon vers Dunières’, meaning a village in the direction of Dunières, which is fifteen kilometres north of Le Chambon and not at all in the same direction. In the similar-sounding Dernières, two noble families and a priest were known to be ardent followers of Luther. In fact, Chazot was quite a different priest, and not from either Dunières or Dernières. However, the local inquisitors were in no mood to be distracted by petty details, and carted him off to the stake anyway. He has some claim to being the Plateau’s first post-Reformation martyr.

  In 1554 a young theology student named Pierre Bourgeois de Beaux set off from Tence on the Plateau for Geneva, in Switzerland, to continue his studies. He arrived on 15 October. A second theology student, Claude Riou de l’Aulagnier-Grand, followed him, arriving on 8 August 1559. These two students opened up the strong religious and political connection between the Plateau and Geneva, while bringing back to the Plateau the most rigid and fundamentalist forms of Protestantism, as taught by Jean (in English usually rendered as ‘John’) Calvin. What neither the students nor the anti-Semitic Calvin could have predicted was that 400 years later, their brand of Protestantism and the Geneva connection would become vital factors in saving the lives of thousands of Jews.

  • • •

  The word ‘Huguenot’ is the French nickname for a Calvinist. Calvin was born in Picardy in northern France in 1509. He broke with the Catholic Church in 1530 and fled to Geneva, where he continued to teach and preach. There is no record of where or how the word Huguenot first appeared, though it was certainly in use by 1560. It is a slightly derogatory term, originally used in the same way an Englishman today might call an Irishman a ‘Paddy’, or an Australian might call an Englishman a ‘Pom’.

  The exact derivation of the word is still a matter of controversy. There are three main contenders. The simplest is that it is formed from the Flemish term huis genooten, meaning ‘housemates’, and refers to the fact that the early Protestants met in each other’s houses rather than in churches. A rival suggestion looks to an early sixteenth-century Swiss religious leader called Besançon Hugues. Although Hugues died in 1532, he was regarded as the inspiration for the Amboise Plot of 1560, a French Protestant attempt to usurp the power of the French House of Guise and thereby bring about closer ties with Switzerland. As the Amboise plotters were about as popular in France as Guy Fawkes and the Roman Catholic Gunpowder Plotters are to this day in England, to be called a Huguenot (follower of Hugues) was not the obvious first step to winning friends and influencing people. The final—and only flattering—possible explanation is that a long-dead King of France named Hugues Capet was noted for his fairness and respect for the dignity of others. According to this version, the word Huguenot simply means ‘little Hugues’ or ‘those who follow Hugues’. I leave it to the reader to make up his or her own mind. I’d put my money on Besançon Hugues.

  Although the Reformed Church grew rapidly, particularly in northern Europe, Protestants remained a comparatively small minority in countries like France. By the middle of the sixteenth century there were perhaps 2000 Protestant congregations, with 1.5 million adherents, in a total French population of around 15 million. However, the new religion proved very attractive
to the French nobility in particular, so its strength and influence went well beyond its limited numbers. By 1570, Huguenots had their own castles, garrisoned towns, even ports, as well as their own schools and churches.

  Understandably, the Catholic Church decided it could not simply sit back and let the Protestants get away with their impudent rebellion. They regarded Luther personally and his followers as heretics, to be hunted down and destroyed where possible. Thus began the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were fought with the kind of bitterness and cruelty that is made possible to this day when both sides in a conflict are convinced God is with them.

  This time the Plateau did not escape the violence. The Protestants led the charge. In 1567 a Protestant force, recruited from the Vivarais lowlands, laid siege to Catholic defences, first capturing the town of Saint-Agrève, then seizing the Catholic commander in Devesset. They continued their rampage well into the following year. It was a rare military win for the rebels. Elsewhere in France, the Catholics had both the numbers and the military might, and they continued to dominate.

  In 1570 Catherine de Medici, the wife of King Henry II of France, offered the Protestants some respite with the Peace of Saint-Germain, which, in one of its many provisions, specifically named Saint-Agrève on the Plateau as a place of Protestant refuge. The peace did not last. On 23 August 1572 Catholics set about massacring Protestants all over France in what has come to be known as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.62 The bloodbath began at a Protestant royal wedding in Paris and rapidly spread to the provinces, with some 3000 Protestants killed63 in the space of a few days. It is still remembered with bitterness by Huguenots all over the world. The plot had the full support of the French king, Charles IX.