The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (27 page)

Parties of children and adults continued to flow down the two ‘pipelines’ to Switzerland (and were sometimes led to their border crossing by Pastor Theis). Despite the absence of the two pastors from Le Chambon, it was rescue business as usual right across the Plateau.

• • •

By the autumn of 1943, the Secret Army on the Plateau was beginning to look like a serious force. Bonnissol’s ‘Zinnia’ network had no fewer than fifteen active sections, each of them made up of between nine and seventeen armed and trained men, a total of 193 men around Yssingeaux alone. There were also auxiliary services. Pierre Fayol set up a medical service of six doctors willing to help, including Roger Le Forestier, the only one trained as a surgeon. A chemist volunteered to provide medicines. So in the battles to come, the wounded knew
they would get help. Fayol’s wife, Marianne, headed a social services unit. She had begun by collecting clothing to pass on to the men of the maquis. That expanded into a rudimentary service offering financial and moral support to families in trouble. And, of course, Oscar Rosowsky, Sammy Charles and Jacqueline Decourdemanche continued to produce false papers.

The men of the maquis lived in the countryside, either camped out in the forests or else in abandoned farmhouses. They now trained hard. A typical day began at 7.30 am with physical exercise, followed by breakfast at eight. At eight forty-five there would be a lecture, perhaps on military theory and tactics, then at nine forty-five a practice military exercise. At eleven there would be a course, perhaps in morse code, followed by lunch. At two thirty there would be another course, perhaps in armaments and explosives. At four, more physical exercise. At six, a course in English, followed by an evening meal. At 9 pm, a patrol, a march or, rarely, an actual attack.

All this Resistance activity could hardly pass unnoticed by the neighbours. The Secret Army depended heavily on the discretion of the farmers, and overwhelmingly the farmers protected them. Not all, however.

In October 1943 the authorities came to the conclusion that Prefect Robert Bach was not policing his area with the kind of zeal the Vichy government and the Germans wanted. He was replaced on 16 October by a senior policeman from Clermont-Ferrand, André Bousquet. Bousquet’s brief was to clean up the area and get things back under control. Within two days he received some rare help. On 18 October a group of nine farmers wrote to his office in Le Puy.

For some time, a gang of communists pretending to be
réfractaires
dodging the STO has arrived in dribs and drabs and set themselves up in the area of Lizieux and Meygal. Since then, numerous thefts of
vegetables and chickens have been committed by these undesirables. We see them lurking about at night in the villages, pretending to be guarding them. People living in isolated houses mostly give in to them, and sell them or give them food. We are certain that there are dangerous fugitives from justice among them.

The letter went on to name those in charge of this group of miscreants. There was a Monsieur Valdener, a barber from Yssingeaux, and his brother-in-law, Monsieur Bonnissol, who went under the name of Dumas. One group occupied an empty house at Robert in the commune of Araules. There was another at Faurie, while the most important had taken over an abandoned house at Meygal near Troussaire. The last lot were armed and dangerous. They were being provided with supplies by a family of foreigners living at Sagnes in a house called Le Sergent. The letter concluded with a plea: ‘In the name of the peace-loving people of this region we ask you, Monsieur Prefect, to give the necessary orders very soon to rid the region of these undesirables.’

The letter was a rare piece of treachery and, as we shall see, it was probably a factor in the fate of Jean Bonnissol. The letter underlined the problem of feeding the maquis. Stealing food from farmers was unlikely to win friends, but buying it was in effect black marketeering. The farmers had to declare the whole of their harvest to the authorities, and account for it. However, a friend in the right place could work wonders. In Tence, Pierre Bernard combined the functions of primary school teacher and inspector of harvests. He simply arranged for the farmers to sell to the maquis, while he signed off the necessary declaration of (reduced) harvest. Everyone was a winner.

• • •

By the autumn of 1943, Gestapo raids were taking place all over Occupied France, particularly in the larger cities. The Gestapo’s main
target was now the Resistance, but if the raids managed to catch a Jew or two, so much the better. Oscar Rosowsky had never given up his ambition to train as a doctor, and on 15 November he enrolled with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Strasbourg. The university had conveniently moved from Strasbourg to Clermont-Ferrand, about 125 kilometres northwest of the Plateau. At this stage Rosowsky was posing as an Algerian Frenchman from the Alsace.

On 25 November a German soldier brandishing a submachine gun burst into Rosowsky’s lecture theatre and shouted: ‘Raus! Raus!’ (Out! Out!) to the assembled students. The performance was repeated all over the campus, until hundreds of students and lecturers were packed into the university courtyard. They could hear shots, and yells. Some of the students started ripping up their papers.

Rosowsky spotted a narrow staircase and managed to slip away. However, his troubles were far from over. The French had set up a checkpoint outside the university, manned by two civilian police and a
milicien
.
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The milicien’s job was to inspect the identity papers and do any searching. Rosowsky recalls:

I was a bit worried. I handed over my identity card, and then the milicien started his search. He was very professional. He started low down with my legs, listening for the sound of ammunition cartridges rattling when he passed his hands over my pockets. Then he came to my right pocket, and he heard a sound exactly like revolver cartridges in a metal box. He beamed, like a successful hunter. He shoved his hand in triumphantly, and pulled out a box of lozenges for a sore throat. His friends started laughing at him. Having made a fool of himself, he shoved me away, giving me a kick in the arse for good measure. If he had continued his search, it would have led to my sleeves and the fur collar of my jacket stuffed with samples of false papers. I decided then and there that Clermont wasn’t the place to
be. I caught the train back to Le Chambon that night. I still treasure this box of Gonacrine, to which I owe my life.
⁴⁸

• • •

The Secret Army now began to plan. They drew two lines on the map. One line ran in a right-handed arc around the peaks of three mountains, Meygal, Lizieux and Mézenc, and along the ridge of the valley of Les Boutières. If that line could be held, then the vital route from the Plateau through to the Rhône Valley could be kept open or closed, as required. The other line ran roughly east to west following the ridges above the Loire valley, and commanded the two key lines of transport: the main road RN 88, which linked Lyon with Le Puy via Saint-Étienne, and the railway line, which linked the same three towns. Ultimately these transport routes led to the Mediterranean coast and important ports like Marseille. If they could be cut or blocked, the Germans would have two fewer routes to use for moving supplies and reinforcements when the Allied landing came. So controlling both the road and the railway line would be essential once the invasion became reality.

On 5 October 1943 the Resistance mounted its first serious attack. Led by Bonnissol, they sabotaged the railway line at the Vaure bridge between Beauzac and the River Lignon, using explosives supplied from Britain. The attack targeted a particular train, which was carrying a contingent of German SS. Having halted the train the Resistance now set about machine-gunning the trapped troops. Result: no Resistance casualties, and ‘many’ Germans wounded or killed.

Less impressively, on 30 October they launched a punitive attack on a tobacconist near Désaignes. This may not have caused the Germans too much grief, but it left the maquis well stocked with tobacco. They ‘requisitioned’ the tobacco ‘in the name of the French Resistance’. This was followed by pinprick raids on a collaborationist petrol station and
a shop. The shop raid ensured that the maquis were well stocked with blankets, cooking utensils and shoes.

On 21 November, the maquisards mounted a very well-planned raid on a dairy in Saint-Agrève. The dairy had been supplying the Germans. The fourteen Resistance fighters came armed with six Sten guns with two loaded magazines each, four pistols, four quarter-kilo packs of plastic explosives, twenty packs of ‘808’,
⁴⁹
a box of detonators, a dozen explosive caps, five 30-minute fuses and five two-hour fuses. At midnight, two men cut off the telephone lines. They then tried to break in, but failed. So they woke the nightwatchman and demanded to be let in. When he refused, they stood in front of the door and fired three bursts from one of the Sten guns. The nightwatchman then opened the door. The maquisards now had to hurry, but by 12.45 am they had laid their explosive charges, four on half-hour fuses and three on two-hour fuses. The dairy was entirely put out of action, and the maquisards escaped with ‘60 kilos of butter of excellent quality’.

The run of luck could not continue forever. It ended on 15 December, when the Gestapo arrested Bonnissol. It is a measure of the resilience and good organisation of the Secret Army that they carried on undisturbed. For the record, Bonnissol escaped the fate of many Resistance leaders arrested by the Gestapo. He was first sent to Fresnes prison, then moved to Compiègne, before being put on a train to Auschwitz on 25 August 1944. He escaped from the train, and managed to make his way back to Saint-Étienne in France. After the Liberation, he was appointed president of the Épuration Légale in the Haute-Loire, the French legal body which investigated ‘collaboration’ during the war.

By the beginning of 1944, the war was starting to go seriously badly for Germany. On 24 December 1943, President Roosevelt felt confident enough to announce publicly that General Dwight D. Eisenhower would be supreme commander-in-chief for the forthcoming Allied invasion of Western Europe. The British general Bernard Montgomery, hero of El Alamein and conqueror of Germany’s legendary Irwin Rommel, would be his field commander. Clearly there was major trouble ahead for the Germans.

On 4 January 1944, the Russians pushed the Germans back across the pre-war Polish border. On 19 January, the Russians broke through at Stalingrad, ending the two-year siege of that city. On 20 January, Allied aircraft dropped 2300 tons of bombs on Berlin, the biggest ever raid on the German capital. On 22 January, the Allies landed at Anzio in Italy, around 50 kilometres south of Rome. They achieved total surprise, and met little resistance from the Germans.
⁵⁰
Men and matériel poured ashore. The Allies were now established on the mainland of Western Europe. To make matters worse for the Germans, the winter of 1943–44 was particularly severe. In appalling conditions, they began the long, bitter retreat from their eastern conquests.

The same harsh conditions applied to the Plateau. The snow was deep, making the roads and the railways slow and unreliable. After a particularly heavy snowstorm on 10 February, the whole Plateau literally ground to a halt. Just about every road was blocked, and they stayed that way, because blocked roads meant no fuel for the snowploughs. Throughout the winter, farmers struggled to feed and shelter their cattle. Food was scarce for human residents of the Plateau, too.

There was also a hint of panic at high level. The Vichy government’s STO law turned out to be the most effective recruiting agent ever invented—for the maquis. Nevertheless, the government now extended the law to all Frenchmen aged between sixteen and 60. The chances of the Vichy authorities enforcing this were pretty slim, but it meant that the derelict farmhouses of the Secret Army began to look increasingly inviting to young and even middle-aged Frenchmen, particularly compared with the heavily bombed factories of a collapsing Germany. The recruitment pool for the Resistance swelled accordingly.

For their part, the Germans continued to pin their faith on some kind of super-powerful secret weapon, which Hitler would triumphantly brandish and use to turn the tide. And, indeed, the Germans were about to produce the deadly V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, but those were never going to be enough to win a war already lost.

The nature of the rescue operation on the Plateau had changed subtly but comprehensively by the beginning of 1944. The camps remained open, and the various rescuers continued to do their best to win the release of children there. But now, more and more often, they attempted to gather up children either before or at the time of their parents’ arrest, operating clandestine networks across France to save the children before they ever landed behind barbed wire. Sabine Zeitoun worked with Madeleine Dreyfus in the Jewish children’s rescue service, the OSE. She describes what happened when children were taken to the Plateau:

Most of the time, the children had already been given forged ration coupons, decked out with an ‘Aryan’ identity and—whenever we could—prepared psychologically for their move into their new family. Madeleine would explain to the children the strict rules which they had to stick to scrupulously throughout the journey: no talking in German or Yiddish, and no speaking to each other using their real first names or surnames. Accompanied by a small group of children, she would set off from Lyon to Saint-Étienne, usually in the train. Then she would change to the wheezing little train that would take them to Le Chambon.

Madame Déléage and her daughter Eva [both residents of Les Tavas, a tiny hamlet in the commune of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon] played an enormous role in smoothing the contacts with the other communities of the Plateau. Sometimes she checked out several villages in advance to find people ready to accept the children. Once she knew there was a place willing to take them in, Madeleine Dreyfus would take the children there.