The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (25 page)

The sentry at the Hôtel du Lignon didn’t want to let her in, but Magda spoke reasonable German and was a well-known figure in the village. Finally, the sentry relented.

There were two or three officers sitting at a table by a window on the first floor. I approached them, and they asked me what I wanted. I told them I wanted to know which of them had been in Le Chambon for a long time. One of them said to me: ‘I’ve been here for weeks.’ I said: ‘Remember the German soldier who was about to drown in the Lignon?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘I remember it very well.’ I said: ‘It was one of the students from the House of Rocks who saved him.’ ‘Yes, I remember it perfectly.’ ‘Well, this morning the Gestapo arrived …’

Before Magda could finish, the Germans butted in. They had nothing to do with the Gestapo, they said. Magda was unfazed. ‘It’s a matter of honour,’ she told the officer. ‘I am a woman. You are an officer. We are both people of honour. I’m simply asking you to tell the truth, to testify that the rescue took place during your time in Le Chambon.’ Two German officers reluctantly agreed to accompany Magda back to the House of Rocks. They walked, one on each side of her, while she pushed her bicycle. They had not gone far when Magda met two girls from her Christian Union, both on bicycles. Could the German officers borrow their bicycles? If it was important, yes. So this rather odd trio of cyclists, Magda and two German officers on girls’ bikes, pedalled back to the House of Rocks.

This time it was not so easy for Magda to get inside. When she first arrived she had been dismissed as unimportant. But now it was apparent that she spoke German, and that she was talking to two German officers, whom she had brought back with her. She certainly couldn’t just slip past. She made the two German officers repeat their promise to tell the story of the rescue in the river. Meanwhile, she asked one of the police officers if she could talk to Daniel Trocmé. No, she was told. But come back at midday and you can talk to him then.

She came back as ordered, with her son Jean-Pierre. This time an entirely different scene greeted her. The students were lined up in single file on the outside staircase, with Daniel Trocmé at the head of the queue. She went over to him. As she did so, she could see on the balcony at the head of the stairs two or three of the raiding policemen beating up a young Dutch Jew, shouting at him: ‘Pig Jew! Pig Jew!’

Daniel tried to reassure Magda. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’ll go with my students. I’ll do my best to explain these things to them, and I’ll defend them for as long as it’s possible. Please write to my parents and tell them what happened.’ He then offered a little wry humour. ‘You know I love travel,’ he told Magda. ‘I’m not afraid, and
it’s my duty.’ Then, in dribs and drabs, the students climbed into the lorries, and were driven away.

In all the horror of the situation, there was one happy moment. When Magda walked into the dining room after the lorries had gone, she saw Luis (‘Pepito’) Gausachs, the Spanish student who had saved the German soldier from drowning. The two German officers from the hotel had kept their word.

As well as taking Daniel Trocmé, the German police took away eighteen students: five Spanish, three French, two Dutch, two German, two Belgian, two Luxembourgeois, one Austrian and one Romanian. For inexplicable reasons, the Germans left five students behind, including Gausachs. Another eight students had either prudently made themselves scarce or were simply away for one reason or another. So thirteen avoided arrest.

There was predictable uproar. Prefect Bach wrote to the staff officer of the German occupying force in Le Puy—presumably Major Schmähling—demanding the release of those arrested. He received a reply from a Captain Lange:

In response to your letter on the subject of the imprisonments carried out by the security forces, the Staff Officer informs you that after communicating by telephone with the Head Liaison Staff Officer, he was informed that he could not be given any information, as the Security Service in Clermont-Ferrand knows nothing about it, and that this affair arose with Vichy. The Liaison Officer recommends that you get in touch directly with Vichy.

On 30 July, Maurice Leroy, Inspector General from the French Ministry of Education, wrote to the head of the French military demanding that Daniel Trocmé be released, adding that Trocmé ‘does not have a single drop of Jewish blood in his veins but he has German
blood—his maternal grandmother was German’. Others wrote along similar lines. It did no good.

Under pressure from the French government, the Paris headquarters of the RSHA looked into the whole episode, and reported on it no fewer than three times: on 27 August, then on 1 September, and again on 18 November. Each time they came to the same conclusion: the House of Rocks was a nest of ‘loathsome undesirables’, a bunch of ‘German haters’ who hid German deserters, STO dodgers and Jews. These reports are quite revealing. Given that of the nineteen people arrested only seven were Jewish, it is clear that the Germans saw the raid as part of their struggle against the burgeoning Resistance movement, rather than as a simple round-up of Jews.

The raid on the House of Rocks also marked the end of the Plateau’s reputation as a sanctuary. All sorts of things finished with it. When André Trocmé, Édouard Theis and Roger Darcissac had been arrested in February 1943, the uproar that followed was enough to convince the Vichy authorities that they would be better off letting the three men go. The raid on the House of Rocks demonstrated that the Germans were deaf to this kind of protest. In the past, passive resistance had worked. Not anymore.

Clearly, the ‘safe’ houses were no longer safe. If machine-gun-toting German police could march into the House of Rocks unchallenged and arrest anybody they chose, then where did that leave The Wasps’ Nest, The Crickets, The Flowery Hill and all the other shelters? While courageous farmers scattered across the countryside might still offer their barns, outhouses and spare rooms to hapless refugees, concentrations of refugees in guesthouses and hostels looked increasingly dangerous. It made raids like the 29 June affair look all too easy, and all too tempting for the Germans.

• • •

Of the eighteen students arrested in the 29 June raid, four—all of them Spanish—were not deported. Pédro Moral-Lopez and Sérafin Marin-Cavre were released, from Fresnes prison on the eastern fringes of Paris;
⁴⁵
Félix Martin-Lopez and Jules Villasante-Dura were released from Royallieu-Compiègne internment camp, 80 kilometres northeast of Paris. All four survived the war.

The last letter from Daniel Trocmé to his family was sent on 10 July, less than two weeks after his arrest. It came from the camp at Moulins, not far north of the town of Vichy. At Moulins, the Jews were separated from the rest of those arrested and sent separately to the camps in the east. None returned. Five of the arrested students are known to have been part of convoy 57, which pulled out of Paris-Bobigny station at nine thirty on the morning of 18 July, bound for Auschwitz.

Two French Protestant students arrested in the raid on the House of Rocks miraculously survived the war. Jean-Marie Schoen lived through Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. Pastor André Guyonnaud emerged alive from Dachau.

Daniel Trocmé was not so lucky. From Moulins, he was moved to Frontstalag 122 at Royallieu-Compiègne. He was then deported to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, and moved internally to Mittelbau-Dora. Dora was a division of Buchenwald camp, whose inmates worked as slave labourers in underground factories building secret weapons. Conditions were appalling. Around 60,000 prisoners passed through Dora, of whom 20,000 died there—9000 from exhaustion, 350 hanged, and the rest from disease and starvation. In January and February 1944, 2000 of the most sick and disabled Dora prisoners were moved to Maidenek camp in Poland, and Daniel Trocmé appears to have been one of them. On 2 April 1944 he was murdered at Maidenek. The Germans never stopped believing he was Jewish.

• • •

There are two hotly disputed versions of a (relatively minor) event in the chain that led to André Trocmé’s departure from Le Chambon in mid-1943. Here is Oscar Rosowsky’s account, set out in his contribution to the 1990 symposium
Le Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Accueil et Résistance 1939–1944
.

It was vital that Trocmé should leave and go into hiding. The idea came to me to invent the very real threat of a young Resistance fighter taken prisoner and ‘turned’, who could have undergone a change of heart and warned Léon Eyraud of the dangers of arrest by the Gestapo, of which the pastor would be the object. I headed back to the farm at La Fayolle to draft the main points of this letter, in which we decided also to name Dr Le Forestier. He was going to be asked to confess to his role in a minor anti-German provocation when he gave a fat German orchestra conductor a morning serenade with his car horn in the middle of Le Chambon after this bloke plonked himself in the road and prevented the doctor from passing.

Léon Eyraud liked my idea. I don’t know by which route or how in the end he informed André Trocmé and Dr Le Forestier. But the latter never again indulged in troublemaking in public, and André
Trocmé, who was under strong pressure at the time and in the same direction from the Reformed Church, accepted that he should go into hiding until the Liberation.

So in this version it is a forged letter from Oscar Rosowsky that does the trick.

André Trocmé’s version of events is the same in spirit but different in method. In his unpublished memoirs, he writes that a young Resistance fighter who had been ‘turned’ came to see him in person. No letter, no Léon Eyraud.

‘I am a double agent,’ the young maquisard began. ‘I  pretend to work for the Gestapo, but I feed them a lot of false information. However, that lets me listen in to the plans of their agents. So, the other day in Valence, they decided to put a price on your life. You are going to be assassinated.’

‘Assassinated?’

‘Yes. The system works like this. The Gestapo tell French criminals that they can free them from French prison and have their sentence suspended. All they have to do is make some troublesome people disappear. It’s a villainous business. If the French police arrest the criminal, the Gestapo insist that he is handed over to them. The Gestapo then change his identity, and he moves somewhere else.’

‘That would explain the recent assassinations of perfectly honest people,’ I exclaimed.

‘You’ve got it!’ the young man replied. ‘By doing this, the Germans don’t stir up anti-German feeling: nothing seen, nothing known! People just don’t see the pattern in these strange assassinations.’

‘Are you telling me now that I’m going to be killed?’

‘If you don’t go into hiding, yes.’

Of course, there is no logical reason why both stories should not be true. However, neither narrative is likely to have made a jot of difference to Trocmé’s decision. What surely turned the tide was the argument put to him by the Reformed Church.

The logic of the situation was clear. The arrest of Daniel Trocmé made the arrest of his much more prominent cousin André something close to a certainty. And that would lead to unimaginable trouble on the Plateau. This was clear to Resistance figures like Fayol and Eyraud, as well as to some of Trocmé’s fellow pastors. In his memoirs, Trocmé set out his belief that Marcel Jeannet, the pastor at Le Mazet, had discussed Trocmé’s exile with Pierre Rozier, president of the Regional Council of the Reformed Church, who contacted Marc Boegner, asking him to intervene.

Boegner did not come to see Trocmé in person, but he sent his number two, Pastor Maurice Rohr, a distant cousin of Trocmé’s. In Trocmé’s account of the meeting, Rohr got straight to the point.

‘With the arrest of Daniel and his students,’ he said to me, ‘we’ve already had enough trouble. How would it help, adding another name to a list of martyrs that’s already too long?’

‘I can serve as an example,’ I told him. ‘I have preached non-violent resistance. I should stick to my post until the end.’

‘The parish is already troubled enough,’ Rohr said to me. ‘You have a price on your head. You know how these executions are carried out. You go for a ride in a car, and your body is found in a corner of a wood. Or they burst into the house at dinnertime, and the death squad from the Gestapo sprays the whole family with machine-gun fire. How can you live with the thought that not only will you be killed, but you could be responsible for the death or injury of your wife, your children and your guests?’ And Rohr listed some recent cases.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Do you think that the parish will stay non-violent if you are assassinated?’ he asked.

‘I don’t believe so,’ I replied.

‘So, be reasonable. Disappear for a little while. The BBC is saying that the invasion is coming this summer. It will only be for a few weeks. It would be mindless to expose yourself to the worst. We want you alive, not dead.’

Trocmé didn’t agree straight away. But in the end he came round to it. Probably he thought that if his arrest led only to his own death, so be it, but if his arrest would lead to armed insurrection and major bloodshed on the Plateau, then it was his Christian duty to do all he could to prevent it. The conclusion was inescapable: time to go. There is no exact date for his departure, but it was sometime in July 1943. He shaved off his moustache, put on a Basque beret and swapped his owlish spectacles for a much larger pair. He carried false papers prepared by Roger Darcissac. André Trocmé had ceased to exist: step forward André Béguet.

His first protector was a Protestant hardware merchant from the village of Lamastre, who drove him in his truck to the parsonage in Lamastre, just beyond Saint-Agrève. Next Trocmé moved to a farm just outside Lamastre, and stayed there three weeks. After that he moved to a large ‘half-farm, half-villa’ between Lamastre and Vemous, still in the area of Le Chambon. He was unhappy there, and wanted to move on. Finally, Magda found him a safer haven much further south and across the River Rhône, at the Château de Perdyer, in the Drôme valley not far from the town of Châtillon. There he waited for Liberation, in every sense of the word.