The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (15 page)

Whatever the chief of police made of this, it did not stop the authorities from pressing on. At four thirty on the morning of Tuesday, 25 August, Auguste Bohny, who ran The Shelter, was woken by a fearful pounding on his front door. Gendarmes, eight of them, had the house surrounded. With them was a police Inspector of Security from Le Puy. At the time, Bohny was looking after a group of children from The Wasps’ Nest, but they were sleeping in the communal dining room and the games room rather than in the bedrooms.

Bohny made his way to the front door by way of the cellar, as he normally did. What did the gendarmes want? They wanted to see a
Monsieur Steckler, to check his papers. Monsieur Steckler was at The Wasps’ Nest, not The Shelter. Bohny would take them there, if they would give him a minute to get dressed. He dressed ‘at speed’ and they duly covered the few hundred metres between the two houses. At The Wasps’ Nest, the gendarmes told Steckler to pack his bags (but not his shaving gear).

When they got back to The Shelter, they found that the most senior gendarme had decided not to wait around outside and had marched into the house. He hadn’t got far. One of the staff, Joseph Godefryd, had bailed him up and harangued him non-stop until his boss’s return. At this point the gendarmes seemed uninterested in the boys, who were sleeping in the games room, but wanted to check the two girls, who were sleeping in the dining room. The girls turned out not to be on their list of names.

Bohny now challenged the gendarmes. These young people were under his protection, this was Swiss government property, and he would not allow any further action without confirmation from the chief of police himself. There’s a mug born every minute, and Bohny was lucky enough to be surrounded by nine of them. The gendarmes accepted Bohny’s demand and all eight gendarmes plus the Inspector of Security left The Shelter at around 6.30 am.

Bohny now woke the children, fed them a good breakfast and bundled them out the door. They headed straight for the woods. When the gendarmes returned at 9.30 am the place was empty. They were furious, and threatened Bohny with arrest. Meanwhile, they had brought a bus to the village—it would take more than a car to accommodate their expected haul of Jews, they thought—and in it sat the unfortunate Monsieur Steckler, alone. Well, not quite alone: the bus was surrounded by villagers wishing Monsieur Steckler well, offering him food, even a bit of precious chocolate. The sympathetic crowd looked on as the bus set off for Le Puy. That afternoon, Bohny
received a letter from the Social Services in Le Puy. Monsieur Steckler was only quarter Jewish. He could go free, as he did the next day.

Despite this setback, the authorities weren’t finished with Le Chambon. At five o’clock the next morning the gendarmes were back at The Shelter and The Wasps’ Nest. They kept coming back every day for the rest of the week, always leaving empty-handed. The children had all been dispersed. By Saturday the gendarmes were totally exasperated. They summoned André Trocmé to the town hall and demanded that he lead them to the hidden Jews. If he refused, he would be arrested, along with Édouard Theis and the directors of the three children’s homes. No deal. And no arrests.

On Sunday, notices were posted all over the village announcing that anyone who sheltered foreigners without declaring them would be sent to a concentration camp or heavily fined. Nobody responded.

On 3 September, private houses were searched for the first time. No result. On 10 September the village was given advance warning: the penalty for hiding a foreign Jew was two to five years in prison. Yet still no one came forward. Nothing happened.

After three weeks the police gave up. They had searched the houses and the surrounding forest without catching so much as a single refugee. The story was the same all over the Plateau. Between 19 August and 13 September, French gendarmes based in Yssingeaux mounted no fewer than 35 raids, looking for Jews. They found one, whom they later released.

The whole thing was a fiasco. In a document understandably marked ‘secret’, the company commander of the gendarmes, Squadron Leader Silvani, set out the results from the commune of Le Chambon. They had checked the papers of 879 individuals on the roads, in buses and on trains, and a further 496 individuals in hotels and hostels, and had raided 625 private homes. The result: two arrests. The report shyly omits the fact that of the two arrested, one, Monsieur Steckler,
had been released the next day. So 2000 searches had produced one arrest. Silvani concluded: ‘This proves that the Jews we were looking for have left the Plateau.’

The commander of the group of gendarmes specifically targeting Le Chambon agreed. His report concluded:

On the advice of people we can trust, all of them living in Le Chambon or the surrounding area, none of the foreign Jews we were looking for are still in the commune or living nearby. Nobody has seen these Jews. The Chaumargeais sector of the commune of Tence, rumoured to be sheltering Jews, was searched minutely, day and night, without result.

By the prefecture’s own reckoning, three months of diligent raiding throughout the whole department of the Haute-Loire had produced not very much. Draft 6483(2) of the prefecture’s report dated 30 October 1942 states:

In accordance with the instructions of 3 August (and subsequent):
160 foreign Jews have been located—
85 arrests have been carried out, 73 are still in custody—
75 Jews, of whom 7 were foreign workers and 5 minors, got away—
among these, 8 including the 5 minors have been authorised to move
      to Le Chambon in the care of Swiss Aid.
16 have been recaptured, of which 2 were caught in the Haute-Loire,
     8 at the Swiss border, and 5 are still in Switzerland.
²⁶
So 46 out of 160 are still on the run.

This puts the best face on what was essentially a disaster. The 85 Jews arrested included 73 picked up in two raids in the northwest of the department, well away from the Plateau. What’s more, these Jews
were hardly well hidden: they were already penned up in two labour camps for foreign workers, at Brioude and Saint-Georges-d’Aurac. The 73 were shipped off to the euphemistically named Collection Centre in Montluçon, not far from the town of Vichy, presumably to await ‘deportation’. In summary, the prefecture had managed to arrest only 85 out of 160 foreign Jews they had identified and whose names and addresses they had, and 73 of the 85 were not exactly on the loose: they were already locked up in labour camps. The gendarmes had managed to find only two of the 75 who had given them the slip. It was not exactly a triumph. Indeed, if the raids had any effect at all, it was to add eight young Jews to the ‘transfer’ population of Le Chambon. Otherwise, despite Bach’s threats, the Plateau’s rescue mission continued undisturbed.

It is worth taking a look at the number of Jews that the likes of Bach were chasing. As we know, there were no records kept, so everything is dependent on anecdotal memory and guesswork. The numbers that follow probably exclude the children released from the camps. But even in the middle of 1942, when both streams of refugees were flowing into the Plateau, the numbers were surprisingly low. In his memoir, André Trocmé writes:

How many Jews were in Le Chambon in the summer of 1942? Not too many: 100 to 150 at most. We knew them all. A  lot of farms sheltered them. Others were scattered around the village or in the seven refugee houses. We had two of them at our place.

• • •

By late 1942, although the atmosphere on the Plateau was clearly getting tetchier, things could have been worse. The Quakers, the Cimade, the OSE and the Red Cross continued to win the release of children from the camps and transfer them to the Plateau.

Then, at the end of 1942, three closely related events changed everything. On 8 November, Allied forces, largely British and American, landed in the French territory of Algeria in North Africa as part of ‘Operation Torch’. The Vichy French resisted, but their hearts weren’t in it, and the Allied forces, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, soon established total control. A large Allied force was now hovering over southern Europe, and an Allied invasion of mainland Europe, probably via France, looked imminent.

Operation Torch also showed the Germans that the Vichy French weren’t exactly snarling rottweilers when it came to resisting Allied invasions. What if the Allies mounted an attack on the Unoccupied Zone of France? Would the Vichy French be able to throw them back into the sea? The omens weren’t good. So Hitler decided that if southern France was to be defended against Allied attack from North Africa, the only way to do it was with German troops. He ended the sham of the ‘Unoccupied Zone’ and took over the rest of France. On 11  November, German troops raced south, meeting no resistance. Within days, the whole of France was in German hands, with the exception of a small chunk in the southeast corner, which was occupied by the Italians. There was no longer an Unoccupied Zone. This was naturally unpopular with the French people, and had the effect of turning the whole of France into hostile territory for the Germans, while making de Gaulle and his Free French Army, in the eyes of the French population, seem like a more useful bet than the marshal.

The third development was that the Russians started to push the Germans back on the Eastern Front. Over a year earlier, on 22 June 1941, Hitler had invaded Russia. The German Army initially rolled over Russian opposition, and began to close in on Moscow and Stalingrad. But, like Napoleon before him, Hitler never quite managed to deliver the fatal blow, and the battle dragged on through the bitter winter of 1941–42, then through the spring and into the summer of 1942. The
Russians consolidated, and by the middle of 1942 they were holding their ground. As early as May 1942, Marshal Zhukov, field commander of the Red Army, was beginning to claim the odd victory over German forces. By the end of 1942, the badly mauled Germans were on the back foot. The Russians were pushing them out.

In other words, around the end of 1942, Hitler started losing the war. And that made him desperate.

• • •

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the changes that took place in France at the end of 1942. Quite simply, the occupation of the whole country,
²⁷
instead of the northern three-fifths, changed everything.

Let’s start with Pétain. As we have seen, in the beginning he enjoyed widespread acceptance, at times adoration, as ‘the man who saved France’. Although France had been soundly defeated, Pétain had managed to negotiate a deal with Hitler whereby he hung onto some control of two-fifths of the country, and was nominally in charge of all of it: even the occupied Northern Zone was theoretically under the control of the Vichy government, though in practice Germany wrote the rules there and made sure they were obeyed.

But now that the whole country was occupied, Pétain’s claim to be the saviour of the nation no longer had any real basis. Meanwhile, de Gaulle’s Free French Army took control of a succession of French colonies. With the Allied capture of Algeria in Operation Torch, it was clear to the French population that the Allied side increasingly looked like the winners. Pétain’s authority and popularity did not evaporate overnight, but by the end of 1943 they were in terminal decline.

With this decline came some real uncertainty on the part of the Vichy officials, in the gendarmerie and in the various departmental
bureaucracies. Very early in the war, the left-wing deputy André Philip—who had voted against Pétain and the Armistice and moved his family to Le Chambon, before joining de Gaulle in London—said in a speech at a wedding that after the eventual liberation of France those who supported Pétain would be shot as traitors. At the time it seemed completely mad. Who in 1940 could imagine that the all-conquering Germans would be kicked out of France in a little over four years, and that with their departure Pétain’s Vichy regime would be consigned to the dustbin of history? But now, in late 1942 and early 1943, with the Germans on the back foot, it was a different story. The least that could be said was that this one could go either way. So the French police, the gendarmerie and the bureaucrats quietly concluded, not collectively but individually, that it might be prudent to take things a bit easy.
²⁸

Last but not least, it was increasingly clear that there was no French government
in France
to be loyal to. Up until the occupation of the Southern Zone, there was a good case to be made that the Vichy administration was the only legal government of France, and that any Frenchman who sought their overthrow was at best misguided and at worst a traitor. But after the Occupation, did that still hold good? De Gaulle had set up a government in exile in London (with André Philip as his Minister for the Interior). Maybe that was the legitimate government? In which case, anyone clinging ostentatiously to the side of the Vichy government had better watch out!

In particular, the occupation of the whole of France gave a different complexion to the idea of armed resistance. Up until the end of 1942, with the World War I hero Pétain leading a French government, taking up arms against the authorities looked positively treasonous, not to mention dangerous. But with the fading power of the French government, and the rising sense that the German enemy
could
be beaten, armed resistance looked like a much more attractive option.

This last eventuality was one of the great fears held by André Trocmé and Édouard Theis, the two leading pacifist pastors of the Plateau. They had preached non-violent resistance. As Trocmé said in his ‘weapons of the spirit’ sermon: ‘To love, to forgive, to show kindness to our enemies, that is our duty.’ There was no ambiguity: violence against the Germans was as much to be condemned as violence against the Jews.

Robert Bach, prefect of the Haute-Loire, was one of the first to sense fresh trouble ahead in the wake of the extended Occupation. On 23 November 1942, twelve days after the German push south, he sent a formal note to the head of the gendarmerie of the department of the Haute-Loire.