The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (17 page)

Curtet recalls that ‘Madame Grabowska’ arrived in Fay-sur-Lignon understandably very distressed by both the disappearance of her husband and by her experience in Rivesaltes internment camp. She
stayed for a while in the presbytery, recovering her health, before moving on to the Hôtel Abel, and finally to an apartment nearby. She was, says Curtet, a popular figure in the village. She also did a good job of maintaining her false identity: two years later, the villagers of Fay-sur-Lignon were astonished to find out that the charming spinster who had been living so happily among them was in fact married to a deported Latvian Jewish husband, whereabouts unknown, and was the mother of ‘Jean-Claude Plunne’, the eminent forger.

Oscar Rosowsky was still only eighteen years old when he arrived in Le Chambon. He was also slightly built, so he could easily pass for a schoolboy. After leaving Marcelle Hanne’s apartment, his first ‘home’ in Le Chambon was the guesthouse Beau-Soleil, which acted as a dormitory for the New Cévenole School. Oscar had returned Jean-Claude Pluntz’s borrowed papers to his friend, and had created a new identity for himself as Jean-Claude Plunne, deliberately taking a name that sounded almost identical to the old one in case anyone remembered it.

Beau-Soleil was Oscar’s introduction to the clandestine world of Le Chambon.

An extraordinary couple, Monsieur and Madame Barraud, managed Beau-Soleil. Monsieur Barraud was a carpenter and joiner, and a communist, who left to join the maquis in 1943. There were twenty boys from the school in residence, plus a few young kids. There were some amazing people. One of them was Marc Eyraud, who went on to become a French movie star. There were the two Pupier brothers, sons of the famous Pupier chocolate family from Saint-Étienne. There was a young Jew called Roger Klimovitzky, four years older than us, who was high up in the Boy Scouts, and who had been a soldier. Then there was Madame Barraud’s daughter Gabrielle, who had applied for a job as a teacher. We quickly became mates.

• • •

In their sweep south to occupy the remainder of France, the Germans had bypassed the Plateau. Given that they covered more than 300 kilometres to Marseille on the Mediterranean coast in eleven days, the three weeks it took them to get around to occupying the Haute-Loire suggests that the area was not a high military priority. They didn’t have far to come, either—the Demarcation Line was only about 150 kilometres north of the Haute-Loire. They finally arrived in Le Puy on 5 December 1942. On 15 December the most senior officer of the Haute-Loire occupying force, Major Julius Schmähling, arrived in Le Puy and took command. It was an entirely bloodless operation.

Although the Germans set up a garrison in Le Puy, the Haute-Loire’s capital city, they did not occupy the whole department. In particular, the Germans did not occupy the Plateau at all. No German Army units were stationed there at any stage during the entire war. However, German Army uniforms now appeared on the streets of Le Chambon for the first time, in slightly odd circumstances. Mountain air is famously healthy, and the Germans decided Le Chambon would make an ideal convalescent home for soldiers, particularly those returning from the Russian front. In December 1942 they took over the Hôtel du Lignon in the main street of Le Chambon, and installed anything from twelve to twenty soldiers there. The soldiers were all unarmed. In general they were the ‘walking wounded’, and no doubt they were grateful to put as much distance between themselves and the Russian front as they could. The villagers and the soldiers ignored each other. The Hôtel du Lignon was right next door to the guesthouse Tante-Soly (Aunt Soly), which was packed with young Jewish children. German soldiers occasionally sheltered in Tante-Soly’s doorway on rainy days, but otherwise they left the house and its young guests alone. If the German soldiers had been very alert, they might have picked up on
the fact that the headquarters of the Resistance was just across the street from their hotel. Nevertheless, the number of watchful eyes in Le Chambon now grew. There is no police station (
gendarmerie
) in Le Chambon to this day. However, at the beginning of November 1942, Prefect Bach considered a plan to set up a seasonal gendarmerie there. It would operate from 1 July to 30 September each year, the main tourist season, when the village was packed with non-locals. Nothing came of the plan, but sometime around the end of 1942 the powers-that-be decided that Le Chambon could not be left entirely to its own devices. Somebody should be keeping an eye on things. So they installed a plainclothes Inspector of Police in the town.

The various police forces in France are still pretty labyrinthine, and it would take a whole chapter to explain them all, now or then. Suffice to say that there is a municipal police force answerable to the local commune, and a national military force called the
gendarmerie,
which does work that in other countries would be left to the regular police force: investigating crime, policing the roads and so forth. In general, the gendarmes operate in rural areas. They report to the local prefect, as the representative of the central government.

There is also a national police force, known until 1949 as the Sûreté Nationale, which does the same work as the gendarmerie but concentrates its attention on the larger cities (those with a population of over 10,000). Prefect Bach decided to make an exception to this division of labour. Although it would have been normal to use the gendarmerie to police the rural Plateau, Bach decided instead to send a city policeman to Le Chambon. Léopold Praly was an inspector of the National Police. His job would be to report goings-on in the town to Prefect Bach, and hence to the Pétain government. Were there any Jews there, for instance? Praly moved into the Hôtel des Acacias, sharpened his pencils, filled his pen with ink and got ready to write some reports.

• • •

Things were now changing throughout France. The introduction of the STO forced labour law in February 1943 turned all young Frenchmen into potential fugitives. The Germans were insistent: young German men were being diverted away from factories to put on military uniforms and fight, particularly on the Russian front. These factory workers had to be replaced by young men from the occupied countries, including France. The Führer had ordered it. This led those same young men to go into hiding. They formed their own maquis.
³¹

The fact that the whole country was now occupied meant that there was no longer any need to be squeamish about armed resistance. The Germans (and, to a lesser extent, the Italians) were unambiguously the enemy. They were there to be attacked. So while the pacifist pastors of the Plateau continued to preach pacifism and non-violence, their voices found a less ready audience in a population beginning to get a whiff of victory and liberation.

On the Plateau, the raids that had started on 25 August and continued for three weeks afterwards sent a clear signal: the Plateau was no longer safe. The residents could not trust the Plateau’s isolation to keep the enemy away; and sure enough, within a few months the enemy was right there among them, in the form of Inspector Praly and his reports, and in the visible presence of uniformed German soldiers now walking freely on the streets of Le Chambon.

Finally, it was clear that the Jews on the Plateau were no longer safe. It also meant that it was not enough just to keep the Jewish refugees out of sight. They needed to be moved out of harm’s way, and that meant getting them from the Plateau to Switzerland. The great rescue operation was no longer simply about running legal shelters for children released from the camps and hiding ‘illegal’ Jews in scattered farmhouses. From now on the Plateau would have
to be one end of a dangerous and treacherous pipeline, with its other end in Switzerland. The operation would need forgers to supply false papers, guides to lead parties safely across the mountains, and money to keep the rescue mission running smoothly. Happily, it was able to meet all three needs.

Despite the absence of accurate figures, there seems to be near-universal agreement that the number of ‘illegals’ in the Le Chambon area was comparatively small up until the end of 1942. André Trocmé estimated the number at ‘between 100 and 150’ in the summer of 1942, and this probably didn’t increase by much until after 11 November and the German push south.

There were other non-locals on the Plateau, of course. There were the mostly Protestant holidaymakers and second-home owners who opted to stay on when war broke out, some of whom stayed for the duration of the war. There were the city children who regularly stayed in guesthouses on the Plateau during summer holidays and whose parents agreed should stay on after the outbreak of war; some of them may still have been there three years later. And from May 1941, when The Wasps’ Nest children’s home opened its doors, there were the various Jewish ‘transfer’ children released from the camps, perhaps as many as 200 by the end of 1942. So anybody looking at the village of Le Chambon’s core population of 900, and then at the number of people living in and around the village at the end of 1942, might have come to the conclusion that there were thousands of refugees. Not so.

However, after 11 November, refugees began to arrive more quickly. The Rosowskys and the Fayols were typical of these arrivals. Once they had found accommodation, they needed ration cards to buy food and other essentials, and they needed ‘clean’ identity cards and supporting documents in order to survive round-ups. There was only one way to get them: forgery.

• • •

Until Oscar Rosowsky’s arrival on the Plateau, the principal forgers were Roger Darcissac, Édouard Theis, Mireille Philip and Jacqueline Decourdemanche, the secretary at the New Cévenole School. All of them remained active in the forgery business after November 1942, and some (notably Decourdemanche) worked with Rosowsky. But there can be no doubt that the genius of the Plateau’s forgery industry was Rosowsky, and he combined this remarkable talent with a manic energy. He was quick, clever, thorough … and tireless.

The creation of Rosowsky’s forgery bureau was almost an accident, part of a conversation in November or December 1942 between four of the Beau-Soleil’s young guests. Rosowsky started the ball rolling. ‘I was telling them how I had used an art pen to trace the missing quarter of the official seal on the photograph on my first identity card, for Jean-Claude Pluntz.’ Gabrielle Barraud (known as Gaby), daughter of the Beau-Soleil’s managers, immediately saw a new possibility. Tracing was too slow, and too difficult. Primary school teachers regularly used a primitive hand-printing press to produce multiple copies of material for their pupils. It consisted of not much more than a large felt roller with a layer of gel wrapped around it. Gaby explained how it worked. ‘They write a text on the gel with special coloured ink, and then they print it off for their students. They can roll off 50 copies at a time, and they hand them out to their students.’

Rosowsky picked up the idea. If he could get hold of some tracing paper, he could place it over the official seal or stamp on a genuine document, then trace it very accurately with the special ink. The trace could then be transferred to the roller, and bingo, 50 official stamps or seals were ready for their new home on somebody’s fake identity card or other document. ‘I was pretty skilful at the time,’ says Rosowsky. ‘I told them: leave me alone and you’ll see. In half an hour I can copy even a complicated French official seal.’

Best of all, as Gaby told them, the printing kit used by the primary school teachers was in almost universal use and therefore readily available. A  stationery shop in Tence stocked the necessary rollers, gels, and a range of inks in blue, red, violet and black—the colours used by the official stampers, sealers and pen pushers in the various town halls, prefectures and police stations. Previously on the Plateau, creating forged official stamps had involved painstaking work with engraving tools, cutting copies of the stamps out of copper, rubber or linoleum. But with Gaby’s ink and roller, they could reproduce any official stamp they needed, all in a matter of minutes.

The other two members of the group now chimed in. Louis de Juge was a free-spirited young Protestant who was already in touch with the Resistance. He was the son of a senior French officer in Toulon, and came from a wealthy Protestant family from the Camargue. His mother had left him in Le Chambon in 1940. She wanted to rejoin her husband in Brest, with Louis’s brother and sister. But Louis was in the middle of a love affair, and he wanted to stay in Le Chambon. His family left him behind but refused to support him, so he earned a living as a supervisor at the school while he worked on his baccalauréat. Roger Klimovitzky, the fourth member, was an ex-soldier; he, too, was in contact with the Resistance. Now all four could see the possibilities of setting up a full-time forgery factory. They agreed to take the idea to Léon Eyraud, the local Resistance leader.

Rosowsky made the case to Eyraud.

I explained that soon everybody was going to need false papers. The STO had just been announced. People would soon need false papers. A Resistance was now being organised, and they would need them, too. The children and the Jews who were going to head off into the mountains, they would need them. Everybody needed them.

Eyraud jumped at the idea. So did other members of the Resistance. This in itself was something of a miracle. As Rosowsky said later: ‘They were all a bit paranoid, a bit mistrustful, every man for himself.’ But they quickly accepted the young forgers, and this acceptance was a major step forward for the entire enterprise. The Resistance had access to a network of sympathetic officials in town halls and prefectures all over France, and it had other forgery teams who could exchange information. The Plateau’s forgery bureau would not be operating alone.

The bureau began with a staff of three, all residents of Beau-Soleil: Rosowsky, de Juge and Klimovitzky. Gaby Barraud continued to support the forgers, but she ceased to be a key member of the team. They worked from the guesthouse. This meant working in the open, where everybody could see what was going on. It also meant storing their highly incriminating forgery tools in a cupboard where they were likely to be found in even the most perfunctory search. The situation couldn’t continue, and in March 1943 the forgers agreed that they had to move from Beau-Soleil. Rosowsky succeeded in finding a new home at his first try.