The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (10 page)

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,
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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?

For Trocmé it was a bolt from the blue. ‘These children, will we have to house them, feed them, educate them?’ he asked Chalmers. ‘Who will be in charge of them?’ Chalmers was blunt. ‘Find the houses, and the carers,’ he told Trocmé. ‘The Quakers and the Fellowship of Reconciliation
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will find the money.’

• • •

Every month the twelve Protestant pastors from the parishes of the Plateau met. The meetings were known as
pastorales
, and they were pretty informal—the pastors would discuss the events of the world, any problems they had, and any issues they felt like sharing. Nobody kept minutes, so it is an educated guess that at the next meeting Trocmé reported to his fellow pastors the reaction of the Quakers to the possibility of using the Plateau as a place of refuge. He would surely have told the assembled pastors that here was something they could all do to help, and subsequent events suggest that they were unanimous in their support.

For the devout Huguenots of the Plateau, there was a startling precedent. In the Bible, Numbers 35:9–34, God gives Moses a very specific set of instructions, which Moses is told to pass on to the children of Israel. The Israelites are to set up six cities of refuge which would offer protection to people in trouble. Later, God spelled out the details to Joshua, the leader of the Israelites: ‘And when he that doth flee unto one of these cities shall stand at the entering of the gate, and shall declare his cause in the ears of the elders of that city, they shall take him into the city unto them and give him a place, that he may dwell among them’ (Joshua 20:4).

So the Plateau had its marching orders. There would be more than six cities—or, rather, villages—of refuge, but that was all to the good. In each of those cities, according to the rules, someone in danger must be automatically taken in and looked after. It was all in the Bible.

• • •

There is simply no reliable way of knowing when Jews first began arriving on the Plateau in significant numbers. No records were kept, official or unofficial; nobody asked questions; nobody gossiped; nobody was in charge; nobody had a policy, or a plan, or a piece of paper laying down the rules. The process was haphazard, spontaneous, clandestine, burgeoning and unstoppable.

Looking at likely dates, we know with some certainty that Jews came to shelter on the Plateau soon after the Armistice of 22 June 1940. We even have quite a detailed account of the arrival of the first Jew on the Trocmés’ doorstep. In her unpublished memoir, Magda Trocmé says the first Jew was a German woman who simply rang their doorbell unannounced one evening. Magda gives no date for this unexpected arrival. Other elements of the story demonstrate that it was winter, and that the Armistice had already been signed. So that locates the event somewhere in the winter of 1940–41. It is clear from what follows that, although she may have been the first Jewish refugee to ring the Trocmés’ doorbell, by the time she arrived other Jews were already sheltering in the village. Nelly Trocmé knew of at least one other Jew, Elizabeth Kaufmann, who had arrived in Le Chambon, encouraged by Hilde Hoefert, the German teacher at New Cévenole School. Certainly
Magda Trocmé’s account suggests that the new arrival had some clue that the Plateau was already acting as a shelter for Jews.

Magda’s story is both touching and revealing. The Jewish woman told her that she had made her way from Germany, that she had wandered all over France, first in the Occupied Zone and then in the Unoccupied Zone, not knowing where to go. Then she had heard that in Le Chambon there was a pastor who might be able to take her in. So there she stood, soaking wet and frozen on the doorstep of the presbytery, wearing only summer sandals on her feet, with snow pouring down outside.

Magda invited her in. There was a fire in the kitchen. She could warm up, dry her sandals, have something to eat. Magda would make up a bed for her. Then, tragedy. The woman was so tired and distressed that she put her sandals too close to the fire. They suddenly burst into flames. Like everybody else, the Trocmés were rationed to one pair of shoes each a year, so they had no shoes to spare. Magda began a frantic search in the village, knocking on doors and asking if anybody could spare shoes about the right size. Finally a Madame Monnier came to the rescue with a spare pair.

However, Magda now had a serious problem. What should she do with her refugee? She usually had a bit of extra food on hand, so she could feed an extra mouth for a day or two. But food was rationed, and two or three days were her limit. She went to the town hall for advice. The official she spoke to was totally unhelpful.
¹⁵
‘He told me it was impossible,’ Magda recalled. ‘He already had French Jews [in the village] and if I was going to bring in German Jews, the whole village would be in danger. He insisted that I send her back to wherever she came from. Send her back? Where? I was desperate.’

Magda knew there was a prominent Parisian Jewish woman staying in the village, sheltering there because the cities were too dangerous. She tracked her down. ‘I explained to her that I had this Jew at the
house, that I didn’t know what to do, and that I needed her help. She was exactly like the man at the town hall. Not only did she refuse to help me, but she grabbed hold of me and told me that a flood of foreign Jews would endanger the French Jews already in place! So I was pretty discouraged.’

She discussed the problem with her husband. The conversation led the two Trocmés to cross a tiny but important line. As pacifists, they were determined to remain neutral, to love their enemies, to avoid the entanglements of war. But the imperatives of saving this refugee’s life took top priority. They told her in detail how to get in touch with a group of Catholic priests in Annecy, near the Swiss border. They might be able to help. So the woman moved on alone, leaving behind a troubled Magda.

That was a turning point. As Magda wrote in her memoir: ‘This is what pushed us into the clandestine world; now it would be up to us to come up with forged photo identity cards made by Monsieur Darcissac, give false names to people, and tell lies. But they were “legitimate” lies, told to save the persecuted.’

• • •

In fairness to the town hall official (and to Magda’s unnamed ‘prominent Parisian Jew’), it is worth looking in more detail at the law as it stood in France at the time. The new Vichy government had wasted no time in passing anti-Jewish laws. Since 1789 and the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man had guaranteed French citizens equal rights under the law. Not anymore. Within a month of the Armistice, the Vichy government passed ‘denaturalisation’ laws, granting the right to strip naturalised ‘foreigners’ of citizenship. The law may have talked about foreigners, but it was aimed most pointedly at Jews. So who or what was a Jew? On 3 October 1940 the Vichy government passed a law requiring all Jews to register with the police or the prefecture,
and defining a Jew as either someone with three grandparents ‘of the Jewish race’, or someone with two grandparents ‘of the Jewish race’ and married to someone ‘of the Jewish race’. This was a wider definition than the one used in Hitler’s Germany. The 3 October law then went on to bar Jews from serving as officers in the army, navy and air force, and from the press, the public service, the teaching professions and private sector management. The same law excluded Jews from practising the liberal professions like medicine, dentistry, law, architecture, and even veterinary science. The Mémorial de la Shoah (Holocaust Memorial) in Paris holds a draft copy of the law. It is covered with handwritten scribbled amendments, all of them making the various anti-Jewish provisions even harsher. For instance, the clause granting an exception for Jews born in France or Jews who had been naturalised in France before 1860 is crossed out. Handwriting experts are in no doubt about the identity of the scribbler: Pétain himself wrote all the notes and toughened up the legislation.

On 4 October, the Vichy government piled on a particularly vicious new law. ‘Foreign nationals of the Jewish race’ could be interned in special camps on the say-so of the prefect of the department. No charge, no trial: just a nod from the prefect and off you go. They could also ‘at any time be assigned a forced residence’. So by early October 1940 all Jews were, in effect, outlaws. These Vichy laws were harsher than anything passed by the Germans in Germany or proclaimed in the Occupied Zone up to this time.

Although the Vichy law did not spell this out, those Jews rounded up into camps could be and were then deported to Germany, where the German government would know how to handle them. The first train, packed with Jews, left France for Auschwitz on 27 March 1942. The Germans ‘noted the rapidity and scope of French legislation with bemusement, opportunistic glee and even occasional annoyance’.
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At this point the most ferocious Vichy laws were still aimed at ‘foreign’ Jews. While there was any amount of legislation directed at Jews generally—some 28 laws and nineteen regulatory orders over the years—in the early days of the Vichy regime, Jews in the Unoccupied Zone with no ‘foreign’ connection were marginally less vulnerable. So French Jews who made their way to the Plateau were less likely than foreign Jews to trigger raids and reprisals. It is for the reader to decide where his or her sympathies lie: with the town hall official and the unnamed ‘prominent Parisian Jew’, who were already quietly sheltering French Jews in Le Chambon and who feared this program might be derailed by the arrival of foreign Jews; or with Magda Trocmé, unconcerned by whether the refugee was French or foreign, simply concerned to help someone in trouble.

• • •

The Vichy government’s treatment of Jews was well reported to the outside world. On 24 November the
New York Post
published a news item datelined Lyon and setting out the facts. The report quoted a ‘particularly qualified high personality’ who had reviewed the part played by Jews in the professions in France and then decided to lock them out. ‘It is better to prevent than to suppress,’ the particularly qualified source opined.

The report is interesting, but its author even more so. Virginia Hall is one of the most remarkable characters in this entire story. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied French, German and Italian at Columbia University. Tall and slim, with classical features and an aristocratic manner, she seems to have totally bewitched everybody who knew her. Late in 1926, she moved from New York to Europe to continue her studies in France, Germany and Austria, before landing a job as a consular clerk in the American embassy in Warsaw. She might have stayed in the American diplomatic service but for an accident:
she shot herself in the leg while hunting in Turkey, with the result that her left leg had to be amputated just below the knee. The missing part was replaced by a wooden leg, which she named ‘Cuthbert’.