The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (20 page)

It is impossible to know exactly what triggered off the next step, but it is a fair guess that high-level string-pulling did the job. Boegner’s protests in particular may even have travelled as far as the desk of Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister, perhaps passed on to Laval by Bousquet. Boegner had had repeated meetings with Laval over the years, so the two men knew each other. There is no record of a direct approach by Boegner to Laval on this occasion, but Laval was nevertheless implicated on 15 March, when the camp commandant summoned the three prisoners and told them they were to be released that morning and put on the train home at 10 am. The release order had come from the office of the prime minister himself, the commandant said. The three men should gather up their belongings then come back to sign a few papers and they would be on their way.

This proved to be easier said than done. When the three men read the paper to be signed, they found it contained a clause requiring them to swear allegiance to the government of Marshal Pétain and to undertake to obey its orders. As school headmaster, Roger Darcissac had no choice. He was a public servant paid by the government; if he didn’t sign, he would lose his job and be unable to support his family. So he signed, and left on the five o’clock train.

However, the two pastors refused. It would be a breach of the Ninth Commandment, they explained, which forbade bearing false witness. The camp commandant urged a bit of cynicism on them. Just sign, he said, nobody will pay any attention afterwards, it’s just a formality. The two pastors stuck to their position. To the commandant’s astonishment, they returned to their prison hut, where their fellow inmates couldn’t believe what they were hearing. You’d let a worthless promise on a piece of paper stop you from getting out of here? You must be mad.

Given the power politics now apparently involved, we can only assume that the camp commandant went back to whoever had issued
the original release order—Laval’s office, perhaps—for further advice. The next morning, he summoned the two men again. He had new orders. They could leave without signing the paper. They were free.

We can only guess at whether the following fact was known to the camp commandant at the time of the men’s departure, but it was almost certainly known to whoever ordered their release. A few days later, all the prisoners in the camp—about five hundred men—were packed onto trains and deported to Poland and Silesia. There is no record of any of them being heard from again.

• • •

On 18 March 1943, two days after the release of the two pastors, Boegner wrote to Trocmé: ‘I  have heard this instant that you and Édouard Theis are to be released. I want you to know straight away how glad I am. Your parish, the school, and the Church all need you.’

Boegner may have been delighted, but the release of the three men sowed a seed of doubt elsewhere. Until November 1942, it is fair to say that Trocmé’s views, shared by Theis and other pacifist pastors, dominated the thinking on the Plateau. Resist, yes, but without violence and hatred. In fact, love your enemies. So how could evil be overcome? Answer: with the power of reason. Talk to your enemies, make them see sense, that was the way forward. The fact that the pastors had been released peacefully by this very process meant that it had been given fresh credibility. But that, in the eyes of some, presented a problem.

The change that was about to take place in the dynamics of the Plateau is brilliantly echoed in a classic film. All Westerns are morality plays, and
High Noon
has a pretty good claim to being the greatest Western of all time. Grace Kelly plays the brand-new Quaker bride of the former town marshal, played by Gary Cooper. The newly married couple leave town at a brisk trot in a splendid horse-drawn carriage.
But Cooper knows that a man he sent to prison is returning to town that day with a couple of henchmen, sworn to kill him. He decides he can’t run away and, over Grace Kelly’s protests and threats, turns the carriage around and goes back to town to face the killers, alone.

Grace Kelly watches the ensuing gunfight fearfully through a window. She is a Quaker and abhors all violence. She naturally fears for her new husband’s life, and she looks on powerlessly. Now two of the killers have Gary Cooper trapped inside a saddlery shop. Cooper is outnumbered and caught in their crossfire. He’s never going to make it. Then, to our shock, an unseen gun fires and one of the killers falls, shot in the back from close range. Gary Cooper has a chance. We switch to Grace Kelly, holding a smoking Colt .45 behind the window. It is one of the bleakest moments in all film history because it seems to say, eloquently and powerfully, that fine principles are one thing, but in the end violence is the only answer.

At first there had been something approaching a deal between André Trocmé and the Resistance that violence was to be avoided, particularly any violence aimed at the unarmed and convalescing German soldiers in the village. In his book
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sous l’occupation
(
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon under the Occupation
), Pierre Fayol writes: ‘Pastor Trocmé, Léon Eyraud and myself were all agreed that not only should no action be taken against the unarmed men but also that the young people should not do anything reckless that would have grave consequences for the village.’ Oscar Rosowsky gives a slightly different slant to this in a contribution he made in 1990 to a symposium,
Le Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Accueil et Résistance 1939–1944
(The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Welcome and Resistance 1939–1944). He told his audience:

There was agreement at the beginning between the Resistance and André Trocmé that it was acceptable to give the impression that
this region was peaceful, one where the opposition remained strictly spiritual. This view of Le Chambon was also the one adopted by the national leadership of the Reformed Church and, we now know, by Mark Boegner.

In other words, it suited the newly forming Resistance to lull the Vichy and the Germans into believing that the Plateau was a peaceful haven of high-principled pacifism and not a bubbling source of violent trouble. That cover story would give the Resistance time to recruit, arm, organise and train. It would also mean that the rescue operation could continue. In Rosowsky’s view, Trocmé’s arrest, and the probability that he would be arrested again, threatened that timing:

If the pastor had been deported, there was a risk that reprisal actions against the convalescing German soldiers stationed in Le Chambon would get out of control, because the general tactic at the time consisted of hitting back every time someone was hit. The whole action strategy up until then of clandestine refuge and silent preparation for the battles to come, which was the policy of the Secret Army, was placed in danger.

Presumably, though, this is far from the whole story. Surely André Trocmé presented a bigger problem than that for the Resistance? All guerrilla armies depend on the support of the local population, particularly the rural population: the Viet Cong needed the peasants, the IRA needed the Catholics, the jihadists today need the villagers. The Secret Army would need the support of the local rural population. Yet André Trocmé opposed all violence. His often-stated fear was that the civil disobedience he preached would transform itself into armed insurrection. If that happened, there was a chance he might feel obliged to denounce the
violence of the Resistance from the pulpit. He had a long history of consistency, after all. And if he denounced the Resistance, then his unique authority might threaten the absolutely vital support of the local population for the maquis.

Fayol was clearly aware of this. He wrote: ‘The pastor Trocmé was a conscientious objector, not just in matters military but in the true sense of the word, objecting to anything which offended his conscience. He knew that his words would be listened to.’ Rosowsky also hinted at this same problem:

Trocmé clung to the idea of a liberation that could be achieved without any military participation. From this point of view, there was a conflict not only with the tradition of military resistance by French-speaking Huguenots but also with all those who were rejoining the various sections of the Resistance.

Trocmé’s arrest and release in early 1943 planted the first tiny seed of a previously unthinkable thought. After his return, Trocmé continued to preach anti-government resistance and civil disobedience. In the past, his tactics with the authorities had included marching into the lion’s den and demanding to be heard. There was a genuine risk that he would do this once too often, and that the authorities would simply arrest him, intern him, then deport him, as they did to so many others. That would unleash forces that the Secret Army would rather have kept in their box. Timing was everything, and Trocmé’s activities put that timing at risk.

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.

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.