The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (19 page)

André Trocmé was in a meeting with youth leaders of the parish when two gendarmes knocked politely on the front door of the presbytery at around suppertime on 13 February 1943. Magda Trocmé answered the door, and the two men asked to speak to her husband. This didn’t surprise her much. ‘The entire world always wanted to talk to my husband,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘I told them that he wasn’t there, but that I was completely up to date with his work and what he was doing. If they had any questions, they could ask me.’ This didn’t suit the gendarmes at all. ‘No,’ they said, ‘it’s something entirely personal.’ Well, he wasn’t there, she told them, so they would have to wait. They could sit in André’s study.

Both Trocmés had talked to numerous inmates of internment camps over the years and they knew one thing with absolute certainty: it’s best to have your bags packed in advance, because if you have to leave, it will be in a hurry. So back in August 1942, after the first big raid on Le Chambon, and after the threats to André from Prefect Bach, they had packed a suitcase of clothes in case he was arrested. However, in the intervening six months the weather had grown colder and the clothes were pulled from the bag one at a time whenever they were needed. The bag was now empty. Magda continues:

My husband arrived home very late. I was in the kitchen, knitting. When he came in, he went straight to the study and found himself face to face with the two gendarmes. You won’t believe me but I’d forgotten all about them! A few minutes later, he came in to me and said: ‘It’s happened. I’ve been arrested.’ I said: ‘Oh, no! The suitcase is empty.’ One of the policemen said: ‘Which suitcase?’ I told him: ‘You see, we’ve been ready for this arrest. I prepared a suitcase for my husband with everything he’ll need if he’s going away. But it’s been so cold I’ve used up all the clothes in it.’ The policeman said: ‘We’re in no hurry. You can do whatever you want.’ By the time we’d repacked the suitcase, it was suppertime. That evening we were going to eat vesces.
³³
I’d been cooking them myself for three hours, and they were still pretty hard. They bounced on the plate like marbles. Anyway, I said to the gendarmes: ‘It’s dinnertime, would you like to eat with us?’ They were very surprised. As gendarmes, they weren’t used to being invited to dinner when they went to arrest somebody. I didn’t do this out of generosity. It was dinnertime, that’s all. They were very embarrassed. One of them had tears in his eyes.
³⁴

Magda then asked the gendarmes if it would be all right to tell a few senior people in the parish that André had been arrested. There would be problems if he left without saying goodbye. Emphatically not, said the gendarmes. No one should know that they had arrested Monsieur Trocmé. Magda did not find out until later that there were five police cars lurking outside, and that someone had cut off the presbytery’s telephone.

As it happened, that night Suzanne Gibert, André’s goddaughter, had something she needed to tell the Trocmés. She arrived at the presbytery and saw the gendarmes, then ran straight into the village to alert everybody. Soon people began arriving at the presbytery with gifts for the pastor. ‘It was really very moving,’ Magda writes. ‘At one
point, someone arrived with a roll of toilet paper, which was hard to come by at the time, and very valuable. Much later, when my husband opened the package in the camp, he found on it handwritten Bible verses full of encouragement and counselling patience.’

Among the last gifts to arrive was a candle, another rare and precious item. The Trocmés didn’t have any matches to light it. One of the gendarmes fished a box of matches out of his pocket and placed it on the table with the other gifts. ‘That’s a gift from me,’ he said. ‘And I will be making a report explaining how all this happened.’

By this time, villagers and students from the New Cévenole School had arrived and were standing in two lines outside the presbytery, forming a guard of honour. André Trocmé marched out of the presbytery between the two lines, while the students sang Martin Luther’s towering sixteenth-century hymn ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’. The pastor climbed into the waiting police car.

The gendarmes hadn’t finished with Le Chambon. They now proceeded to arrest Édouard Theis and Roger Darcissac. All three men spent their first night in captivity in the gendarmerie in Tence, only a short distance away. They had been arrested on a Saturday night, and they were moved on Sunday to the regular prison in Le Puy. There they slept on beds without sheets, and had to endure the demoralising sound of a heavy key turning the heavy lock of their cell doors. On Monday they were moved to the Camp de Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux near Limoges. This involved a lengthy train journey, with a change of trains at Lyon. They were spared the indignity of handcuffs, but the three men walked between two guards; passers-by could only take them for common criminals, a strange experience for two pastors and a headmaster, and one that left them feeling humiliated.

They were not charged with any offence. Neither André nor Magda Trocmé makes any reference in their respective memoirs to an interrogation, and I have not been able to find any record of the questioning
of the three men. This in itself is pretty odd. It is hard to see why the authorities would pass up this golden opportunity to put a few pertinent questions to all three of them, but they seem to have decided that locking them up was enough. Without charges and without a line of questions, it is impossible to know just what lay behind the timing of the arrest, or what triggered the arrest itself. However, the intention was very likely to get them locked away where they could do no more damage, and to intimidate them. If that was the plan, it didn’t work.

• • •

The Camp de Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux was a strange place. It was comparatively small, usually holding about 600 people. Some accounts describe it as a ‘concentration camp’, but that goes too far. Its official title was a Centre de Séjour Surveillé (Supervised Accommodation Centre), and it was really an internment camp, rather like Gurs, Rivesaltes and the rest, but with far better conditions. It was not designed principally to hold Jews; instead it was filled with ‘undesirables’, a handy euphemism for political prisoners. About 75 per cent of them were communists. The rest were made up of a mixture of Jews, Freemasons and anarchists. There were inmates of all ages and from all walks of life: factory workers, farmers, public servants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, even mayors and other elected officials.

The arrival in this company of two Protestant pastors and a primary school headmaster might have been expected to create a bit of a stir, but it made next to no impression. A good number of the communists could quote Karl Marx verbatim, particularly his oft-repeated maxim ‘Religion … is the opium of the people’, and they weren’t about to raise their non-existent hats to a trio of pacifist God-botherers. Anyway, if they had any religion at all they were Catholics, and there were already several Catholic priests on hand. Furthermore, non-violence was not part of their agenda: as far as the communists and anarchists
were concerned, nothing important could happen without a violent revolution. After that … well, after the revolution there might be time for peace and brotherhood. But until the streets ran red with blood, things would never get better.

From Trocmé and Theis’s point of view, this was rather like an old-fashioned Christian missionary suddenly coming upon a whole fresh tribe of heathens ripe for conversion. There was work to be done. The two pastors asked the camp superintendent if they could conduct Protestant church services in the camp. The superintendent agreed. After all, he had said yes to the same question from the Catholics, and he was a fair-minded man.

The first service attracted only three people, but the numbers gradually swelled to twenty and then to 40. Trocmé preached peace, non-violence, equality and brotherly love. The listening communists might have had a problem with the non-violence, but the rest sounded fine. They formed discussion groups, and even found coded ways to discuss touchy subjects. There were teaching classes. Roger Darcissac organised a singing group. If the idea of internment had been to silence the two pastors and the schoolteacher, so far so very ineffectual.

And if the idea had been to give the authorities a quieter life, that didn’t work either. The arrest of the three men was followed by something akin to uproar. One of the most significant protests came from Marc Boegner. As we have seen, the head of the Reformed Church in France had not exactly rushed to Trocmé’s support in the past. Indeed, in the early months of the Vichy government, he was inclined to give Marshal Pétain the benefit of the doubt. Boegner served on the National Council of Vichy, a strange, unelected body of 300 representatives appointed to advise the government. But after the round-ups of Jews in 1942, he had seen the light. He wrote repeatedly to Pétain protesting strongly over the Vichy regime’s treatment of Jews.
On 22 September 1942 he had issued a statement read in almost every Protestant church in France. It said:

The Reformed Church of France cannot remain silent in the face of the suffering of thousands of human beings who have found asylum on our soil. Divine law cannot accept that families willed by God can be broken, children be separated from their mothers, the right of exile and compassion be unrecognised, respect for the human person be violated, and helpless individuals be surrendered to a tragic fate.

Boegner kept a logbook of his daily activities. On 14 February 1943, the day after Trocmé’s arrest, he wrote: ‘Received two telegrams last night from Le Chambon telling me of the arrest of Trocmé and Theis. By which police? Where are they? I still don’t know anything, and what can I do? I’m ashamed.’ On 19 February: ‘Went to see Bousquet this morning [René Bousquet, secretary general of the French Police]. He knew nothing about any of this. He promised he would write to me this evening, responding to my questions.’ So we can be fairly sure that Boegner used his contacts within the Vichy regime to demand that Trocmé and Theis either be charged with a crime and tried, or released.

Most histories credit Robert Bach, the prefect of the Haute-Loire, with high-level intervention on behalf of the three men. Some go so far as to say that he too approached Bousquet. But none of the histories quotes from a specific document, and my extensive trawls through the departmental archives in Le Puy produced nothing, so these stories may be apocryphal. What we do know is that on 4 March 1943, Bach sent a report to the central government that included a section headed ‘Public reaction to the internal policies of the government’. After dealing with the STO—which, Bach said, was causing ‘deep emotion’—he concluded his report by dealing with the arrest and internment of Trocmé, Theis and Darcissac. This had been
‘very unpopular’, he wrote. It was particularly unfortunate because things had been going swimmingly on the Plateau after the visit of Lamirand in August 1942. ‘Since [the visit], the population has been won over to the policies of the government,’ Bach wrote. This was complete hogwash, and well Bach knew it. So at least it can be said that he was prepared to lie to his masters to assist the release of the three men. He concluded his report with the words: ‘I am afraid these measures will send this improvement in public opinion into reverse if they carry on too long.’

At the local level, the uproar was even noisier. One of the more popular figures in Le Chambon was the doctor, Roger Le Forestier. He was a remarkable man. Having worked with Albert Schweitzer in Africa, he had arrived in Le Chambon in 1936 and become a key member of the community. Now he was up in arms. He related his actions with characteristic glee and self-mockery in a letter to André Trocmé dated 21 February 1943, and received by Trocmé at Camp de Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux.

We are thinking of you.

The church in Le Chambon is not really like the dove of the Holy Spirit, it’s more like a duck … after its head has been cut off, it still runs about automatically. I found out from elsewhere that the whole of Protestant France knows your story. Some are furious that the Church and Christians are being persecuted anew, others pin their hopes on God. Stay courageous and strong, God is at work.

When I left you, I  went with Daniel Trocmé to Vichy. The following Tuesday I was received by the chief of staff of Monsieur Cadot, who is from the general secretariat of the police and Minister of the Interior. I handed over the letter of introduction right at the beginning, which went something like this: ‘I request an audience on the subject of the internment of three friends. They are respectively
the pastor of a parish with 1200 members, the headmaster of a school with 400 students, and the father of 8, 4 and 3 children.’
³⁵

I had some beautiful phrases at the ready: ‘You have struck at the heart of French Protestantism,’ or ‘You will be handing the martyr’s palm to my friends, and they don’t want it,’ or ‘Their freedom cannot be subject to conditions, because these men of God are all from a single block, they preach the Gospel and Divine law overrules human law,’ etc …, and this one: ‘You have been misinformed by agents who are strangers to Protestantism and the Chambon community.’ Finally I demanded ‘that a serious inquiry be set up, not using sneaky informers’ but involving prominent citizens.

I have learned that the Prefect Bach asked for a similar inquiry, and that it was set up in the last few days.

Finally, I advise you to stay in the camp where you are. There you have men who are sturdy and of mature age to bring to Faith and Salvation. Here there is nothing but a few women who have already been saved. The friends from Le Chambon, whose names are too many to list here, join with me in telling you of their faith and total affectionate friendship.

R. LE FORESTIER

So the outcry functioned at three levels. On the ground, if Le Forestier is to be believed, the whole of Protestant France was up in arms. It all smacked of a return to the bad old days, when Protestants were hunted down and relentlessly persecuted. The authorities had to be stopped before the new persecution got out of hand. At the departmental level, the prefect Robert Bach was unhappy with the spreading row on his patch, and no doubt dreading the thought of receiving endless delegations from Protestants from all over his department demanding the release of the men. And at the highest level, Marc Boegner and others were tugging at any string they could find.