The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (11 page)

Thanks to Cuthbert, she was no longer eligible for a full career in the diplomatic service, so she moved to Paris and worked as a foreign correspondent for the
Washington Post
. When war broke out she briefly volunteered for the French Army ambulance service, and found herself in the Unoccupied Zone after the Armistice. She managed to escape to England. Winston Churchill had just created the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine organisation with orders to ‘set Europe ablaze’. She didn’t hesitate when they approached her. The so-called Baker Street Irregulars could see solid talent straight away, and put her on a ‘fast track’. She hardly needed any training in clandestine work, and in August 1941, they sent her back to the Unoccupied Zone, with a cover job as the
New York Post
’s correspondent in Lyon. America was not yet at war with Germany so, as an American citizen, she was able to enter the country legally and operate under her own name.

Hall’s orders were straightforward. She was to report on the situation in France, military and political. She was also to seek out likely recruits for a future resistance movement. At the same time, she was to act as a courier, passing on instructions from the SOE in London to agents in the field, and she was to assist those agents to obtain the correct false papers and whatever else they needed to allow them to function. She did all this with remarkable zeal and proficiency, while keeping up a steady flow of perceptive, whimsical and occasionally sarcastic reports for the
New York Post
on life in the Unoccupied Zone. Within the SOE it was said: ‘Whenever we need a new operator, or a new station, we ask Virginia Hall.’ Her base in Lyon was about 120 kilometres northeast of Le Puy, and she visited the town several times in 1941, presumably to look at the possibilities of the mountains of the
Haute-Loire as a hideout for resistance fighters, as well as to carry out her usual work as a foreign correspondent. Subsequent events suggest that she liked what she saw.

• • •

During the winter of 1940–41 the number of Jews and other refugees finding their way to the Plateau went from a trickle to a gentle stream. Many of them arrived in the village of Le Chambon knowing only one thing: the pastor could help.

Magda Trocmé recalls her next arrival—Berthe Grünhut, known only as Madame Berthe—who offered to do the cooking and housework in exchange for lodgings. This slightly threw the normally unflappable Magda: the cooking wasn’t complicated, and in general there wasn’t much food to cook anyway. Furthermore, Madame Berthe proved to be a lousy cook. Magda still took her in, and she stayed with them throughout the war. She was given her own hiding place in the basement.

Madame Berthe’s story is a remarkable illustration of the level of secrecy that prevailed on the Plateau. In her memoir, Magda wrote of Berthe: ‘She was often very upset because she didn’t know where her husband and children were.’ In fact, as the Trocmés discovered after the war, Berthe’s son Egon was also living in Le Chambon, something she never told them.
That
was how closely secrets were guarded on the Plateau.

A Dr and Madame Mautner arrived, refugees from Vienna. As a foreign Jew, Dr Mautner had no chance of being allowed to practise medicine, so he became a househusband. For the rest of the war he did the cooking and housework at home while his wife worked as a dressmaker in Le Chambon. Magda Trocmé loaned her a sewing machine, which stayed busy throughout the war. Dr Mautner spoke in a thick Austrian accent, and he came to the presbytery regularly to
borrow the Trocmés’ laundry boiler. His heavily accented request—the French equivalent of: ‘Can ve haf der boil-vasher, pliz?’
¹⁷
—provided the Trocmé children with endless amusement.

A desperate French woman fled to Le Chambon from the Occupied Zone to escape a possible death sentence. She had been caught giving help to English soldiers. From 24 August 1940, three months after Dunkirk, the Germans posted notices all over the Pas-de-Calais region announcing: ‘Any person who protects, hides or assists in any manner a soldier of the English or French army risks the death penalty or forced labour.’ Notices plastered all over the Paris Métro in October 1940 were even starker: people who sheltered anyone English without declaring them risked being shot. There were rewards for handing in or denouncing such people. The young woman stayed with the Trocmés a few days before moving on.

A certain ‘Monsieur Colin’ moved in. He had been in the furniture business in Berlin, and had prudently abandoned his real name, Cohn. He arrived in Le Chambon alone: he had no family left. He was understandably jumpy, and whenever anyone a bit suspicious arrived at the presbytery, Monsieur Colin always did a better than average job of hiding himself. This in itself was not without risk. When the Vichy police arrived to search the house one day, he hid in a notoriously rickety part of the attic, which miraculously held together while the police thudded about impotently below.

Monsieur Colin proved to be a major asset to the household. Because he had been in the business, he was an expert furniture maker and repairman. A fair bit of the Trocmé household was, according to Nelly, falling apart. She recalls:

Monsieur Colin could take a bunch of sticks and repair a desk, or create a new desk with some planks, or a folding desk. We were crowded and in our bedrooms we had folding desks against the
wall so we could do our homework and then go to bed. Monsieur Colin did everything that needed to be done. He was silent and non-communicative, and rarely smiled. He was not a happy man.

Simone Mairesse arrived in Le Mazet with her mother and her sister Gabrielle and stayed with relatives. She was amazed to discover that the Trocmés lived a few kilometres away in Le Chambon, as she had known the family since before the birth of Nelly fourteen years earlier, and had been Nelly’s first babysitter. Simone was pregnant, and her husband had gone off to war, so she knew he was in danger. She learned of his fate in the most terrible way. Sometime after her arrival at Le Mazet, someone wrote to the Trocmé family, enclosing a press cutting about a charming officer, Maurice Mairesse, who had taken a bullet wound to the thigh that had cut an artery. He was dead. It fell to Magda to break the news to Simone of her husband’s death. Devastated, she looked to the Trocmés for comfort and support. Then devastation turned to quiet fury. What could she do? The Trocmés had an answer: she could work with them saving refugees, most of them Jews. Simone was persuaded. She came to the presbytery with her sister every week to do some sewing. But she also took on a vastly more important role: she scoured the Plateau looking for safe houses. It would become a full-time job.

Not all of the new arrivals endeared themselves to their protectors. Magda recalls:

One day, a lady from Paris and her family were due to arrive. I said to Simone: ‘See if you can find somewhere.’ She found a place between Fay-sur-Lignon and Le Chambon, very high up on the mountain, near a water mill, very well hidden. That day the weather was bad, with drizzling rain. I  went up to the railway station to meet the lady, who arrived with her son: her husband would come
later. Imagine my surprise, after I’d given her all the directions to find the farm, when she became angry. ‘But Madame Trocmé,’ she said, ‘how do you expect me to go on foot in this weather?’ I said: ‘Madame, are you trying to tell me that it’s raining? My friend Simone spends her nights running up and down the mountain trying to find these houses for people like you. Do you think she does it only when the weather is nice?’ Happily, not all the Jews were like this one.

By June of 1941 the Plateau was ready for a serious influx of refugees. It was just in time. On 2 June the Vichy government passed a new law to replace the statutes of 3 and 4 October. This time they really piled on the pressure. As well as all the previous restrictions, Jews were now barred from banking, stockbroking, money lending, gambling, real estate, advertising, radio, publishing, art dealing, the movie business (including, bizarrely, working in cinemas), show business, even forestry. Any Jew who attempted to earn a living in any of these professions could be imprisoned for six months to two years and faced a hefty fine. If he or she lied or used false papers to get a job in the forbidden areas, the prison sentence rose to between a year and five years, and the fine doubled to between 1000 and 20,000 francs.

Almost two months later, on 22 July, the Vichy government passed its ‘Aryanisation’ law. This allowed for the confiscation of all Jewish property, most notably Jewish-owned businesses, but also private property. Jews now found life and work next to impossible. That was the whole idea.

• • •

From May 1941 onwards, the refugees arriving on the Plateau were made up of two groups. The first consisted of people (mostly Jewish)
who made their own way there. For some it was only a staging post on the way to what they hoped would be total security in neutral Switzerland or Spain, or less dangerous parts of France like the Cévennes. Others were happy to sit out the war in the comparative safety of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. Some chose to retain their real names and identities. Others felt more secure with false names, false papers and false backgrounds—non-Jewish backgrounds, naturally. In one way or another, all of these arrivals were outside the law, so they all needed to be kept hidden. Those who needed false papers turned mostly to headmaster and forger-in-chief Roger Darcissac. The illegals were not all Jews. Some were French men and women who had fallen foul of the authorities in one way or another. Later, they were joined by members of the Resistance on the run.

The second group consisted of people (mostly children) freed from the camps by the Cimade, the Quakers, the Red Cross or the OSE. They were almost all Jews, but they came to the Plateau with the full knowledge of the Vichy authorities. They only became illegals if they assumed a false identity or tried to leave the Plateau, for instance to escape to Switzerland. In the language of the day, they were ‘transferred’ to the Plateau, mostly to Le Chambon. They did not need to be quite so hidden, and they provided good cover for the illegals.

From the point of view of those doing the hiding there was some danger, but things could have been worse. In Germany, and in the occupied countries, the Germans regarded as criminals those networks that organised ‘pipelines’ and forged papers to help Jews or Allied airmen escape, and there were dire penalties. In the Unoccupied Zone of France, under the Vichy authorities, things were different. A pre-war French law, passed on 2 May 1938, required everybody to inform the prefecture if they had ‘foreigners’ staying with them, and it was an offence to fail to declare them; however, this law was rarely
used against foreign Jews, or anybody else.
¹⁸
In general, Vichy law took a dim view of people who made or carried forged papers, but it was not nearly so ferocious when it came to hiding Jews or even Allied airmen. In theory, the penalty for ‘harbouring an escapee from an internment camp’ was three months to a year in prison, but it was a threat that was very seldom carried out—possibly never. If you were caught with false papers, or could be accused of making them, you were in big trouble. If you were caught sheltering Jews, particularly Jews with false papers, then the Jews were certainly in trouble, but nobody much bothered the shelterers. As we shall see, this all changed at the end of 1942. But for the time being, sheltering Jews on the Plateau, even Jews who arrived illegally and had false papers, was not a high-risk occupation.

• • •

When the Jews of the Palatinate in Germany—including Max Liebmann and his mother—were rounded up and deported on 22 October 1940, it took more than one train to hold them. There were between 6500 and 7500 of them to be transported in a single day, so no fewer than seven trains formed a convoy headed for Gurs in southern France; in theory, next stop Madagascar. Also among them was fifteen-year-old Hanne Hirsch. She travelled with her mother, three aunts, an uncle, a few cousins and her 91-year-old grandmother. They went three days without food or water, but at least they were in proper passenger cars, with seats. Later, Jews were transported in cattle cars.

The winter in Gurs proved too much for Hanne’s grandmother, who died in January, three months after their arrival. Hanne’s oldest aunt was over 70 and almost blind. She died the next month, in February. Conditions were terrible for Hanne and her surviving family, as she describes.

You vegetated. The food was no different from what they got in concentration camps. We got maybe half a pound of bread for 24 hours, and something that looked like coffee in the morning. For lunch we got some watery vegetable soup, mostly root vegetables, some stuff that you feed to animals but not to humans. We had some chickpeas and sometimes a tiny bit of meat in the evening.

However, there was some relief. A worker from the Swiss Red Cross, Elspeth Kassé, had talked her way into the camp and actually lived there. She was assigned one of the barracks, and she fed the teenage inmates in rotation.

Hanne continues:

I had a job in the office. I was the mail person. I went around the barracks. One morning I was waiting at the gate, and this slightly older boy was there, someone from the camp. We walked together up to breakfast, and back down. People thought we were brother and sister. They would ask him, after I left: ‘Where’s your sister?’ We were
very
good, very good teenagers.

Thus did Max Liebmann first meet Hanne Hirsch. Despite their chaste behaviour, not everyone was convinced of their virtue. People react to malnutrition in different ways. Some people become skeletal. Others swell up with an excess of fluid in the body. Hanne suffered from this condition, known as oedema.

I was really blown up. One day my mother was in the latrine and she overhead this lady, Frau Stein, saying: ‘I don’t understand Frau Hirsch’s daughter Hanne. She’s pregnant! She’s pregnant from this Liebmann guy.’ Frau Stein was in charge of some sort of social service thing that we’d invented for ourselves, and she would sometimes
ask me in the office would I do this or that for her. After that, I did exactly nothing for her.