The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (16 page)

The events of recent days have provoked population movements that cannot fail to attract more foreigners and Frenchmen into the department, particularly Jews. It is vital that I am given very full and accurate information about these arrivals so that, if this happens, I can take all effective steps to limit their numbers so that they don’t exceed our ability to provide accommodation and food. I’m sorry to have to say that among the people leaving their homes for reasons to do with the present circumstances, there will be some suspicious and even dangerous elements, and that their presence in the Haute-Loire could lead to trouble.

He was right about that.

• • •

Pierre Fayol had lived most of his life in Marseille. He was born there in 1905, and he rejoined his wife and son there after his demobilisation from the French Army on 30 July 1940, five weeks after Pétain signed the Armistice. Marseille was in the Unoccupied Zone so, as
a French-born Jew rather than a foreigner, Fayol was in less danger than the many Jews who had fled to Marseille from Germany, Austria and other Nazi-ruled countries of Eastern Europe. However, the Fayol family was well known in Marseille, and Pierre Fayol had stepped forward to do what he could to help Jewish and other refugees. If things got tough, he was a marked man.

This was brought home sharply on 9 June 1942 when a provisional administrator, a Monsieur Foulon, came to take stock of the Fayols’ possessions, including their flat and its furniture. The writing was on the wall. Fayol already had a plan. He had heard about a Protestant pastor in a remote mountain village of the Haute-Loire who was urging his congregation to defy the Vichy government by sheltering refugees, including Jews. Fayol’s cousins, the Coblentz family, confirmed the story. Originally from Strasbourg in eastern France, the Coblentzes had been evacuated south in the early days of the war. They now lived on a farm in Le Crouzet, just outside Le Chambon, and they recommended the Plateau. The clincher came when they mentioned the New Cévenole School: that sounded ideal for the Fayols’ thirteen-year-old son. So in August 1942, at about the time Georges Lamirand was making his ill-fated visit to the Plateau, Pierre Fayol decided to take a look for himself. He went to Le Chambon with his family for a visit.

They stayed in a farmhouse called Panelier, which looked a bit like a small fortress. They were not the only guests. A  promising young French-Algerian writer named Albert Camus had just moved into Panelier with his wife, Francine. Fayol and Camus struck up a friendship that continued for the rest of the war. Camus had moved to the Plateau for the mountain air, which was reputed to be good for tuberculosis, from which he suffered. He spent his time at Panelier working on a novel, which he called
La Peste (The Plague
).
²⁹
Published in 1947, it was a towering allegory set in the small Algerian town of Oran. Bubonic plague strikes, but the people of the town are frozen
in disbelief. The disease becomes a metaphor for the plague of Nazism sweeping Europe. It was mostly written on the Plateau, and in his book
We Only Know Men
the philosopher and historian Patrick Henry says he can hear echoes of André Trocmé in the sermons of Camus’s fictional priest.

On the Plateau, the Fayols also met up with the Coblentz family, Pierre’s cousins, who had already begun to search for somewhere for the Fayols to hide if things got too dangerous down south. All in all, the Plateau looked like the answer. The Fayols returned to Marseille to await developments, their escape plan in place. On 11 November, as the Germans began their sweep south into the Unoccupied Zone (reaching Marseille on 22 November), Fayol knew the time had come to move. Time to get out, and go underground.

As we have seen, there was little or no armed resistance in France before the end of 1942. However, in August 1940, in Lyon, Henri Frenay, a former captain in the French Army, and his remarkable female co-conspirator Berty Albrecht had set up the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Movement), or MLN, which later came to be known as Combat. It operated mostly in the Unoccupied Zone and had six regional networks: Lyon, Marseille, Montpelier, Toulouse, Limoges and Clermont-Ferrand. Pierre Fayol was already in loose touch with the Marseille branch. Now he turned to them for help obtaining false papers. Pierre Chaix-Bryant, who later distinguished himself in the liberation of Marseille, was able to oblige. Fayol became ‘Simon Lehay’.

The Fayols had planned to move in January 1943, but Fayol’s wife, Marianne, wanted to get out straight away, in November. She was proved right. Gestapo raids began on the platforms of Saint-Charles, the main railway station in Marseille, the day after the Fayols left.

The Strasbourg cousins had found accommodation for them on a farm at La Celle, about three kilometres north of Le Chambon. The
‘Lehay’ family occupied the first floor of the house, while an old farmer and his nephew lived on the ground floor. It was not exactly five-star comfort. There was no running water, so they had to fetch whatever water they needed from a spring. On the other hand, their accommodation included a sink with a plug, a rare luxury. They chopped their own wood to feed the stove, which also provided the only heat. For Pierre Fayol, one of the big attractions of the house was its layout. The house was built on a forested hillside, with the main door at the back of the building. The raised and doorless front of the house had a clear view of the lane that led from the main road. It would be hard to be taken by surprise, and easy to do something about it.

Fayol had agreed to stay in touch with the Combat organisation. He was highly motivated and a trained soldier, just the sort of man a guerrilla army needs most. The radical pacifist pastors continued to set the mood of the Plateau, preaching love for their enemies. They remained adamantly opposed to armed resistance; among other things, it would put the rescue operation in jeopardy, and their mission was too important for that. Nevertheless, the changed mood in France after Operation Torch and total occupation meant that across the country armed resistance was looking both more inviting and more possible.

The arrival of Pierre Fayol meant that the Plateau had its Secret Army
³⁰
leader-in-waiting.

• • •

Lyon was just south of the Demarcation Line that had separated Occupied and Unoccupied France, so it was one of the first cities occupied by the Germans in November 1942. In the process, it acquired one of the most unpleasant Gestapo chieftains in the whole of Europe, the notorious Klaus Barbie, nicknamed ‘the Butcher of Lyon’.

Virginia Hall, still working as an SOE agent under her cover as a journalist for the
New York Post
, realised that it was time to get out. By
now there were well-established escape routes to neutral Spain, used mostly by Allied airmen shot down over France. The escape routes were well known to Hall through her SOE work. She had a choice of two ‘pipelines’ out of France—the Pat Line and the VIC—and she chose the VIC, because she knew it was less busy at the time.

Details of her journey are hard to come by. However, most of these pipelines involved a mixture of train, bicycle and foot journeys, and being handed on from farmer to villager to town dweller along the way. For someone with a wooden leg, it must have been the purest hell. The last part of the journey was on foot across the Pyrenees, involving a climb to 3000 metres in deep snow. At one point she telegrammed London to report progress, adding: ‘Cuthbert [her wooden leg] is being tiresome, but I can cope.’ Whoever received the telegram was clearly not familiar with her story, but showed a nice line in ruthlessness. ‘If Cuthbert tiresome,’ he replied, ‘have him eliminated.’

Virginia was travelling with two companions, one French and one Belgian. To guide the party to the Spanish border, she appears to have paid a Spanish
passeur
(a French word for ferryman or boatman, but which in this context means ‘people smuggler’—I have occasionally translated it simply as ‘guide’). At the border, they did not have the necessary entry permits, and were promptly arrested and imprisoned at Figueres in Spain, about 30 kilometres from the border, near the Mediterranean coast. She shared a cell with a Spanish prostitute, who was due to be released very soon. Her cellmate agreed to post a letter to the American consul in Barcelona. The consul pulled the necessary strings, and by the beginning of 1943, Hall was back in England awaiting fresh orders.

• • •

Oscar Rosowsky, the forger we first met in the Prologue, arrived on the Plateau at about the same time as Pierre Fayol, in late November
1942. On 17 November, after her release from Rivesaltes internment camp using forged papers supplied by Oscar, Mira Rosowsky returned to the family apartment in Nice. The two Rosowskys discussed their next move. Mira’s husband, Reuben, had been arrested, and neither mother nor son knew where he was. They clearly could not stay in Nice—it was too dangerous. So what next?

Of all the possibilities—try again for Switzerland, try for Spain, try for a safer part of France—the stories of Le Chambon as a shelter for Jews made it sound like the best prospect. The two agreed that Oscar should go there and take a look around. He travelled alone as Jean-Claude Pluntz, using his friend’s borrowed papers. He liked what he saw, and went back to Nice to collect his mother. They travelled together by train. When they arrived in Le Chambon, they went straight to the apartment of Marcelle Hanne, the mother of Oscar’s friends Charles and Georgette Hanne from Nice.

Madame Hanne wrote popular novels. Her best-known book carried the rather unpromising title
Coeur de vache (Heart of a Cow
) and was the story of an Alsatian cattle dealer. It was quite a popular success, and reprinted four times. Her others,
Des princes quand même …
(roughly
Princes Despite Everything
…),
Bourrasques (Squalls
) and
Les cahiers de Simone (Simone’s Notebooks
), seem to have done rather less well. Oscar describes her as having wild hair that stuck out at the sides. She lived alone in a small apartment on the fourth floor of a new apartment block on the Rue Neuve in Le Chambon village, across the road from the Salvation Army headquarters.

Oscar remembers well the first meal Madame Hanne produced at the apartment.

To feed us, she went off to the butcher and came back with a lot of beef offal. She put it all in an enormous pot, which she cooked for hours. There was the liver, the lungs and the heart. It made an
incredible soup, delicious. Then she cooked some potatoes in the coals of the wood stove … We spent four stunning days there.

As described in the Prologue, Oscar and Mira Rosowsky couldn’t stay in Marcelle Hanne’s tiny apartment for any length of time. They needed to find somewhere with a bit more space, and ideally not together so no one would guess they were mother and son (and therefore using false identities). There is no record of who found Mira her new lodgings, but all the descriptions point to Simone Mairesse. Mira Rosowsky, now the middle-aged Turkish Russian spinster ‘Mademoiselle Grabowska’, according to her forged papers, had a great stroke of luck: Simone (if indeed it was her) placed her with the very new pastor in Fay-sur-Lignon, Daniel Curtet.

Curtet was only 25 years old, and unmarried. He arrived at his new parish on 22 October 1942, a month ahead of the Fayols and the Rosowskys. He was one of six Swiss pastors now established on the Plateau: Marcel Jeannet (Le Mazet), Henri Estoppey (Intres), Georges Grüner (Mars), André Bettex (Le Riou) and Daniel Besson (Montbuzat). The Swiss link became vital to the whole rescue operation from early 1943 onwards. The Plateau had a loyal and well-connected ally already established in Geneva in the form of Charles Guillon. Each of the Swiss pastors also had his own network of friends and contacts in Switzerland. They would need every single one of them before much time had passed.

The young Curtet seems to have plunged unhesitatingly into the rescue operation from the moment he arrived on the Plateau. He soon became a willing accomplice in a process that would have been more at home in the pages of a spy novel than in the day-to-day workings of a group of Protestant parishes. At their regular
pastorales
, the pastors would set the password of the month. In the next four weeks, someone might ring one of the pastors’ doorbells and say: ‘I’ve come to remind
you of the
pastorale
in Le Mazet.’ If the pastors’ last get-together had indeed been held in Le Mazet, no problem. Otherwise, handle this particular visitor with caution.

Curtet’s father was also a pastor. Daniel Curtet wrote regularly to his parents, who kept his letters and postcards, so that they form a record of his time on the Plateau. As everybody concerned was familiar with the Bible, Daniel wrote to his parents in a biblical code that now seems perilously easy to crack. For instance, on 23 January 1943 he wrote:

Continuing my study of first names (Mark 13/14b), I seldom come across the name Hans. On the other hand my collection [of names] has grown to include those of the 12 sons of the patriarch, and I have noted with pleasure that my parishioners and the Darbyists love them all.

In Mark 13:14 is the phrase: ‘Let him that readeth, understand.’ In other words, I’m writing in code. ‘I  seldom come across the name Hans’ doesn’t need much interpretation: there are no Germans about. The next is a bit more obscure. The twelve sons of the patriarch in the Bible are the twelve sons of Abraham: in other words, Jews. So what Curtet was telling his parents, in code, was that there were no Germans in the area, but that there were increasing numbers of Jews, and his parishioners were helping them. His non-biblical code didn’t take too much cracking, either: for example, he would refer in his letters to the
chiens au tri
, which might—at a stretch—be translated as ‘dogs at a sorting office’, but otherwise meant nothing at all. However, the French word for Austrians is
autrichiens
, so it would not have taken a genius code breaker to work out to whom Curtet was referring.