The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (24 page)

The Secret Army leaders set themselves a recruiting target. By the end of 1943, they wanted 400 armed, trained and willing men on the Plateau, all ready to take on the Germans. Fayol began recruiting Secret Army cells, known as
sizaines
. These were groups of six soldiers, consisting of a leader and five men. It was vital that the groups were
kept separate, and that men in one group knew nothing about any of the other groups.

At first they had limited supplies. They had a few Sten submachine guns smuggled in from Britain, some maps and some compasses. The Sten gun was much beloved by commandos, and by partisans, throughout World War II. It was a simple, close-combat weapon firing 9-mm rounds from a 32-round magazine. The maquisards learned how to strip it and clean it, how to maintain it and how to fire it. Because the gun was simply made, it presented few opportunities to go wrong. Best of all, the Germans also used 9-mm ammunition, so it fired captured rounds beautifully.

It may have been a handy weapon, but there were too few of them to go around. Proper training was a further problem. The early Sten guns made a dangerous racket when fired, loud enough to alert the gendarmes, the Germans and the neighbours. Ammunition was also scarce, so there was little opportunity to practise firing live rounds.

Training took place at night, and consisted of finding the way in total silence around a triangular course with sides three kilometres long, in the dark, without a light, using only a compass. It was hardly adequate preparation for guerrilla warfare against a tough and ruthless enemy. Still, it was a start.

• • •

When researching this book, I put the same questions to everybody I talked to: Were there any informers on the Plateau? Were there denunciations? Did anybody from the Plateau spy for the Germans or the Vichy? The response was universal. No, no and no again. There was no fifth column. Nobody snitched. Nobody broke ranks. The Plateau stayed solid.

The only mildly dissenting voice is that of the excellent Protestant historian François Boulet. In his book
Histoire de la Montagne-refuge
(
History of the Mountain Refuge
), he says that the chain of events that led to the most horrific episode in the whole story of the Plateau began with a French informer. Boulet is a painstaking and thorough researcher. He doesn’t name the informer or give any details, but I would happily bet that he knows what he is talking about.

In his version, ‘somebody French from Le Chambon’ wrote to the German military police in Saint-Étienne to let them know that an Austrian named Kaller, who had deserted from the German Army, was hiding in a guesthouse in the village. On the morning of 23  April  1943, by coincidence Good Friday, two German military police from Saint-Étienne arrived in Le Chambon on their motorcycles and made a beeline for Inspector Praly’s office. They were looking for an Austrian deserter called Kaller, they told the policeman. Could the inspector lead them to him? The three men scoured Praly’s files, looking for a foreigner named Kaller aged between 30 and 35 years. No luck. Clearly Kaller was living under an assumed name, probably with false identity papers.

The House of Rocks was unlike other shelters on the Plateau. As it had the status of a mini-university, it was generally for older students rather than the schoolchildren transferred from the camps. In fact, the ages ranged from seventeen to 35. The manager, Daniel Trocmé, was an earnest young man who saw the role as a test of his ability to do something worthwhile with his life. The House of Rocks could accommodate as many as 50 students in 32 rooms, and the students came from all over Europe. For the two military policemen, it sounded like a good place to start looking for their deserter with false papers.

So the policemen hopped on their motorcycles and set off for the House of Rocks, which was on the edge of the village of Le Chambon. There they questioned all the students. Name? Place of birth? Date of birth? Okay, now let’s see your papers. There was no sign of the
elusive Monsieur Kaller, but the policemen were visibly disturbed by what they had seen and heard. They were particularly suspicious of Daniel Trocmé. ‘You speak German too well to be French,’
⁴³
they told him. ‘You’re certainly using forged papers, and you’re definitely Jewish.’ They returned to the village on their motorcycles and had lunch at the Hôtel du Lignon. Then they headed out of Le Chambon towards Saint-Agrève, clearly very unhappy.

Four days later, on 27 April, four German non-commissioned officers were taking an evening stroll outside the village of Le Chambon. It was about nine thirty at night. Around 500 metres from the village, on the Tence road, they came on two students from the New Cévenole School, Roger Debiève and Jacques Marchand, painting something on the road. It turned out to be a huge ‘V’—Churchill’s famous victory sign—and the forbidden double-barred Cross of Lorraine. They topped this off with a giant ‘1918’, the year of Germany’s defeat in World War I. The four German soldiers grabbed the two teenagers and marched them off to Inspector Praly’s office. The little party arrived there at about ten o’clock at night.

A German officer, a lieutenant, now joined them and demanded to know the captives’ names. Praly questioned them and, having established who they were, passed their names on to the German officer. The whole questioning process took about an hour. The officer left, after telling Praly without any explanation that he could let the two teenagers go. The next day, the lieutenant sought out Praly and told him: ‘Do nothing about this affair, because I’m going to let the German police know about it and they’ll arrange with me to come here.’

Around the end of May 1943, two German military police went to the House of Rocks and arrested a young German called Ferber. The military police were usually on the lookout for deserters.

The significance of all this is not so much the raids and arrests themselves as who carried them out. Up until now, French gendarmes had done all the raiding. But the gendarmes were deliberately sabotaging their own efforts (as testified by Madeleine Barot in Chapter 10), while others were ready to sabotage the raids for them (for example, there is good evidence that someone in Prefect Bach’s private office was tipping off those about to be raided by the Vichy forces). Faced with this, the Germans now brushed the gendarmes aside and took over the job of raiding and rounding up for themselves.

Things were clearly getting a whole lot more dangerous. Oscar Rosowsky and his host Henri Héritier discussed the problem. Rosowsky’s forgery equipment was seriously incriminating: it needed a more secure hiding place than the little room in the barn. Héritier had an idea. He had fourteen beehives, but the bees had set up house in only twelve of them. What about using the two spare hives to store the forgery kit? It would take a Gestapo man of more than ordinary courage to stick his hand in there.

On 8 June, three French con men dressed as policemen arrived in Fay-sur-Lignon. They were there with the connivance of the German authorities. The ‘policemen’ managed to swindle 110,000 francs from a rich Jewish father and son from Marseille, Armand and André Nizard. They then ‘arrested’ them both and handed them over to the Germans. The gendarmes in Fay-sur-Lignon refused to intervene. The normally sharp Daniel Curtet, pastor in the village, hesitated for several days before reporting the matter to Emile Romeuf, the head of Franco–German relations for the area. Curtet’s hesitation was probably recognition of a simple dilemma: if he explained the circumstances of the swindle, he might have to answer a whole lot of awkward questions about other Jewish refugees in the village.

Prefect Bach got to hear about the affair and tried to intervene. It was all to no avail. The two Nizards were shipped to Drancy holding
camp outside Paris then put on the train to Auschwitz. They never returned.

• • •

The refugees sheltering on the Plateau were now faced with that classic dilemma so beloved of animal behaviourists: fight or flight. For many, flight seemed the better choice. The arrest of Ferber from the House of Rocks meant that the German police of the RSHA (ReichsSicherheitsHauptAmt or Reich Security Main Office, which included the Gestapo) now had their hands on someone who had plenty of beans to spill. If the Gestapo went about questioning him with their usual brutality and thoroughness, he would be very likely to tell them all. So from the end of May 1943, the House of Rocks was totally compromised.

Some of its residents could see the writing on the wall. Pastor Curtet recalled:

I often hid two Austrian Jews, Lipschutz and Schmidt, who left the House of Rocks when they realised that Daniel Trocmé was being naively over-confident. After the grilling of the House’s management around Easter 1943, the two Austrians were sent to me and I understand that they did not return but kept constantly on the move, changing their address all the time, and turning up at my house in the middle of the night. In June 1943 they were established at the parish hall, which was always open, and from which I heard them move out around five in the morning.

However, most of the residents at the House of Rocks remained in place. Daniel Trocmé was given plenty of warning that there was trouble ahead. ‘Oscar Rosowsky and Jacqueline Decourdemanche saw Daniel Trocmé in person and told him that the residents of the House
of Rocks should be dispersed,’ Pierre Fayol wrote later. ‘Grouping them all in the one place put them all in danger, a danger which Daniel Trocmé didn’t want to accept.’

Even after the arrest of Ferber, Daniel Trocmé continued to resist the idea of dispersing his residents. ‘Straight after this first alert, Daniel Trocmé was warned again,’ Fayol wrote. ‘Unhappily, he believed it was his duty to refuse. On the other hand, five of the residents of the House of Rocks pulled out despite the fact that they had no idea at the time whether they would be able to find another refuge.’

In fairness to Daniel Trocmé, it should be said that he was doing no more than continuing an existing policy on the Plateau. The line taken by his prominent cousin, André Trocmé, together with Pastor Theis and the other champions of passive resistance, was simply to stand your ground. Do the right thing, whatever the law says. But do it openly. Our enemies are human beings, too. Reason with them. Show them a better way.

Then, at about six thirty on the morning of 29 June, fourteen plainclothes German police burst into the House of Rocks. They were heavily armed, with submachine guns as well as the usual side arms beloved of police forces everywhere. They came in two front-wheel-drive Citroëns painted dark grey, together with a canvas-sided truck with bench seats. They clearly meant business: they arrived with guns drawn, and four policemen armed with submachine guns were posted around the house to make sure nobody got away.

There is some doubt to this day as to which police force the raiders came from. All early accounts say they were Gestapo, but they may have been Kripo (Kriminalpolizei) or even German military police (Feldgendarmerie). Without uniforms, who could tell? They had come all the way from Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the large French region of the Auvergne, which includes the Haute-Loire. No matter
who they were or where they came from, they were an unpleasant bunch of thugs.

First they stormed all over the house, throwing open the bedroom doors and barking in German: ‘
Raus! Raus!
’ (‘Out! Out!’) Then they assembled the students in the large dining room and began the interrogations. At about seven thirty, they realised Daniel Trocmé was not there. Where was he? He’s at The Crickets, they were told. A party of policemen went off to arrest him. Daniel had enough warning and enough time to escape into the woods behind the house, but he chose to stay at The Crickets. He was the director of the House of Rocks, and he felt he had to be there with his students. He was promptly arrested and taken back to join the others. Magda remembers that Suzanne Heim, one of the staff at The Crickets, burst into the presbytery, shouting: ‘Madame Trocmé, run, they’ve arrested Daniel Trocmé.’

I grabbed my bicycle and with Suzanne raced to the House of Rocks, where I went in while Suzanne rode back to The Crickets. Why did they let me in? I don’t know … the doors were open, but the doctor had tried to go in to see a child who was sick, and they blocked the way. As for me, I  left the presbytery in such a rush that I hadn’t taken my apron off. Maybe the Germans thought I was one of the staff. I went in through the kitchen and what did I see in the big dining room? On one side of the room was a table with three or four men from the Gestapo
⁴⁴
plus the management of the House of Rocks, including the accountant. Each man from the Gestapo had a submachine gun. On the other side of the room, all the students were lined up against the wall. At the very back was Daniel Trocmé. Did they know that Daniel was someone important?

I tried to approach him, but a Gestapo man shouted at me … I  stopped in my tracks then headed back to the kitchen. Nobody moved. They must have thought I was a cook or a chambermaid. I sat
down. Time slipped away, then the students started to walk past me, one at a time, into a little storeroom at the back of the kitchen. There the Gestapo, who had a large directory list of names, demanded that they identify themselves. When they came back, some of them had black eyes and all of them looked badly frightened. Some of them gabbled: ‘I’ve got a bit of money in my room, go quickly and look …’ or ‘I have the address of my mother, or my fiancée …’ or ‘I have a gold watch, go and take it …’ The poor kids didn’t realise that the Gestapo had already searched everywhere and taken everything.

By ten o’clock the Germans were hungry. Magda managed to rustle up a bit of food—two scarce eggs each, and a bit of bread. In the process, she was able to have a quick word with Daniel. He reminded her that a few weeks ago a Spanish student from the House of Rocks had saved a German soldier from drowning in the River Lignon. ‘Go to the Hôtel du Lignon,’ Daniel urged her, ‘and tell them that the Gestapo are arresting everybody here, and remind them of the rescue … Who knows, we might be able to save a life.’ Magda jumped back on her bicycle and pedalled for dear life into the centre of the village.