The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (31 page)

Meanwhile, Pierre Fayol began to play mind games with the increasingly demoralised Germans. He already had a German-speaking propaganda team in the area, consisting of a Russian Jew, Joseph Bass (of Network André), Otto Ernst, Guillaume Dest, and Fayol’s wife, Marianne. He set them to work producing a stream of leaflets titled
Deutscher Männer in Waffen—Wahrheiten der Woche
(roughly ‘German men at arms—Truths of the week’). The leaflets were widely distributed wherever German soldiers gathered. The ‘André’ group also produced
(
Tovarichi
or ‘Comrades’) for the benefit of Russians who might be induced to desert from the Wehrmacht.

Sometime around the end of July, the promised Jedburgh team arrived by parachute. It consisted of a French officer, Captain Foncroise; a Scottish officer, Captain Hallows; and a radio operator called Williams. To the delight of one and all, Captain Hallows arrived wearing a kilt.

London asked Fayol to look at the best way to put the railway out of action between Le Puy and Saint-Étienne. There was also the related business of harassing the Germans as they tried to move about, and in particular preventing them from breaking out of the Haute-Loire and reinforcing those resisting the Allied invasion. All in all, there was plenty to do.

On 1 August, Lieutenant Alfred Morel, the most senior gendarme in Yssingeaux, made an important decision. He could no longer serve the Vichy government. He joined the Resistance. It was a sign of the times.

• • •

Pierre Fayol soon had a plan for blocking the railway line between Le Puy and Saint-Étienne. The railway was single track only, making it a comparatively simple target. Fayol’s plan would involve two teams. One
would sabotage the track itself at the Chamalières bridge, about twenty kilometres northwest of Yssingeaux, where the railway line crossed the Loire. The other team would then set about derailing the locomotive as it arrived at the bridge. That should leave the line well and truly blocked.

On the night of 2 August they struck. The first team used explosives to rip a huge chunk out of one side of the stone arch bridge, leaving the track unsupported. When the ancient Mikado-type steam locomotive tried to cross the bridge, its massive weight would do the rest.

The second team boarded the train before it reached the bridge. The plan included—at some risk to the maquisards—making sure the French train crew suffered no harm. So the maquisards took over the driver’s cabin and prepared to stop the train at the right moment. The crew were one thing: the passengers were another. As far as the maquisards knew, the passengers were Germans. (In fact they were Milice, but that would do as well.) The passengers could take their chances in the subsequent train wreck. When the train came to the bridge, the Resistance team stopped it at the weak point and threw two Gammon anti-tank grenades into the cabin to immobilise the engine, then got themselves and the crew out of the way of the explosion.

The broken locomotive crashed through the weakened bridge and sat jammed in the gap in the arch left by the earlier sabotage work. In Fayol’s words, the railway line between Le Puy and Saint-Étienne was now ‘indisputably cut’.

Fayol’s success did not pass unnoticed. Although he had been appointed head of the Yssingeaux sector on 24 June, the formal letter of appointment must have sat on somebody’s desk for over a month. On 8 August, the author of the letter, Lieutenant-Colonel Vanel, the Canadian who had parachuted into the Plateau and who now controlled the Resistance for the Ardèche, had added a handwritten PS at the end: ‘Allow me to congratulate you on your successful sabotages in the last few weeks.’

A week later, on 15 August, the regular French Army began its first serious assault on the European mainland. A massive Allied force, mostly French and under French command, landed on the Mediterranean coast of France on a 150-kilometre front from Nice to Marseille. The Americans arrived first, on 15 August, while the Free French forces landed next day. They then pushed north, through Provence. The occupying Germans were now being squeezed from both sides.

• • •

The second tragedy affecting the Plateau began on 4 August. Two Resistance fighters, Jean Mercy and Edmée Debray, had been imprisoned in Le Puy for some three months. In the feverish atmosphere of the time, there was a real risk that the two men might be summarily executed at any moment. Dr Roger Le Forestier decided to go to Le Puy to plead their cause. Everyone advised him against it: Le Puy was the last piece of German-held territory in the entire Haute-Loire, so he would be crossing the ‘front line’ between the very jumpy Germans and the equally jumpy Resistance. His chances of being shot at by either side were high. Both his wife, Danielle, and André Trocmé begged him not to go. However, Le Forestier was not one to change his mind easily. He prepared a makeshift Red Cross flag, which he draped over the roof of his car to brand it as some sort of ambulance. That would protect him, he believed.

On his way to Le Puy, Le Forestier gave a lift to two maquisards. That in itself was foolhardy, given that they were headed for the local German headquarters. Worse, he failed to ask them if they were armed, or to check them for guns.

Against the odds, the trio arrived safely in Le Puy. At about 3 pm Le Forestier parked his car in the main square, and all three men got out. Their timing could not have been worse. The Resistance had chosen this particular moment to rob a bank in Le Puy, grabbing several million
francs. The Feldgendarmerie swooped on the area, sealing it off and searching everything and everybody that moved. When Le Forestier returned to his car, the police had already searched it and found two pistols, carelessly and unforgivably left there by the maquisards. They promptly arrested Le Forestier. Possessing guns was a capital offence. The machinery of tragedy had been set in motion.

On the same day that Le Forestier made his ill-fated trip to Le Puy, the Resistance carried out another execution. Jean Rambaud, a student from Tence, was taken to a disused quarry between Tence and Le Chambon, and shot. He was accused of being an informer.

• • •

Jean-Pierre Trocmé peers out of his photographs as the spitting image of his father. He was the oldest of the three Trocmé brothers, a rather serious young man who was also a good scholar, talented pianist and promising poet. On the evening of Saturday, 12 August, he went to a poetry reading in Le Chambon given by the established French actor Jean Deschamps. The reading included a powerful and haunting rendition of ‘Balade des Pendus’ (‘Ballad of the Hanged Men’), the most famous work by the fifteenth-century poet François Villon.

Villon had been convicted of killing a priest, and he is reputed to have written the poem in prison while awaiting his own execution. In the poem, Villon visualises himself as one of a group of hanged men swaying in the wind.

Now here, then there, as the wind changes

It tosses us around to its pleasure …

While he read this, Deschamps swayed back and forth in imitation of a body moving at the whim of the wind. It was a compelling
performance. The whole poem is a plea for forgiveness and understanding. It concludes with the lines:

Prince Jesus, who is Lord of all,
Keep us from the tyranny of hell:
Let the devil have no claim over us.
Men, make no mockery here,
But pray that God absolves us all.

Nobody can say with certainty what led Jean-Pierre to tie a piece of cord around his neck the next day and attach the other end to the toilet tank lever high on the bathroom wall. The most probable explanation is that he wanted to discover for himself what it felt like to have a noose around his neck and to sway in the wind. ‘Balade des Pendus’ was part of his school curriculum, and he might have been asked to recite it, or comment on it, at any time. Perhaps he could match the power of the Jean Deschamps reading if he knew the feeling at first hand?

Whatever the explanation, André and Magda Trocmé returned from a Sunday afternoon walk to find Jean-Pierre dead, his body suspended in a crouching position above the lavatory, his feet touching the floor, with the noose still in place. They tried to revive him, but it was too late. When Dr Riou examined the body, he was in no doubt as to the cause of death: Jean-Pierre’s neck was broken, probably as a result of falling while still wearing the noose. There seems to be little question of suicide: there was no note, no history of depression and the bathroom door was not locked. He had been facing the bathroom mirror, probably studying his efforts to reproduce Deschamps’ powerful performance, when he slipped.

The Trocmés were distraught. There is no account of Jean-Pierre’s death in Magda’s memoirs. She left it to her husband to speak for them both. André Trocmé even lost his faith in God, however briefly.

I could no longer pray because my prayer sometimes bounced against an angry God who told me: ‘It is because you went into hiding and because you have been afraid of death. I took your son instead of taking you.’ At other times my prayer simply disappeared into nothingness and I stopped praying because I could not have a dialogue with a God who did not say anything, who was elsewhere, in another world.

For the second time in little more than a month, the Plateau was called on to mourn the death of an innocent child. Jean-Pierre was buried alongside Manou Barraud.

• • •

Danielle Le Forestier went to Le Puy in the hope of visiting her husband and perhaps pleading on his behalf. She was refused. She made a second trip, this time accompanied by André Trocmé and Auguste Bohny, the Swiss Red Cross representative on the Plateau. This time she was led to the office of Major Schmähling, the most senior German officer in Le Puy.

To this day there is controversy over what exactly happened, and what was said at the meeting. However, it is uncontroversial to say that Danielle, together with Trocmé and Bohny, was told that a military court had sentenced Roger Le Forestier to death. That sentence had been commuted after Le Forestier had agreed to be deported and to work as a doctor in German factories. He had already left for Germany.

The truth was different. The question is whether Major Schmähling believed his story, or knew it was a lie. In the confusion, chaos and anarchy of France in August 1944, with decisions taken and countermanded on an hourly basis, it is simply impossible to judge what he knew, or even what he believed. But we do know the outcome. Roger
Le Forestier was transferred to Fort Montluc prison in Lyon, and hence into the care of Klaus Barbie, ‘the Butcher of Lyon’.

On 20 August, on Barbie’s orders, 120 Montluc prisoners, including Le Forestier, were taken to the village of Saint-Genis-Laval on the southwestern outskirts of Lyon. While Barbie himself supervised, the prisoners were marched, two by two, into an empty house. First they filled the upper floor of the house, then the ground floor. When all the prisoners were inside, the Germans systematically machine-gunned them all. They then set the house on fire with petrol and phosphorus so that the bodies could not be identified.

The Allied landing on the Mediterranean coast introduced a new element into the conflict. The Normandy landing had involved mostly American, British and Canadian troops. The Mediterranean landing, for the first time, brought the Free French Army as well as the Americans into the fight for France. Led by General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, known to his men as ‘King John’, the Sixth Army Group had already taken the French island of Corsica. Now it marched triumphantly north on the French mainland, absorbing members of the Resistance into its ranks as it advanced. The Germans were now in full retreat.

On the evening of 17 August 1944, two days after the Allied landing, the German forces in the Haute-Loire were told by senior officers in Lyon that their position was, in effect, hopeless. Captain Ernst Coelle, who was in charge of the Russian contingent of Wehrmacht troops in the Haute-Loire, made contact with Lyon for the last time that afternoon. He was told to move his troops out of Le Puy and to head north to join up with the remaining German forces in Lyon. Colonel Metger, the senior German officer based in Saint-Étienne, appears to have been in Le Puy at the time, because the order was repeated to him there. Major Schmähling, who was in command of the Le Puy garrison, discussed the next moves with Metger, his superior officer.
The two men agreed they would move the Le Puy garrison out the next day, to link up with Metger’s troops in Saint-Étienne, before moving on to Lyon. A motorised column would set out from Le Puy before dawn to secure the road as far as Bellevue-la-Montagne, about twenty kilometres north of Le Puy. That would open an escape route for the main body of troops, who would set off at midday. This first convoy would consist mostly of German troops, together with some civilians. As Schmähling did not have enough trucks, some of Coelle’s Russians would have to wait at the Le Puy barracks until the next day.

• • •

All wars produce strange coincidences, bizarre misunderstandings and chance events. This process was now about to sweep up both the Resistance and the German forces in the Haute-Loire. Pierre Fayol’s men had been told that Dr Le Forestier and two members of the Resistance were to be taken in a convoy from Le Puy to Saint-Étienne. Sadly, by then Roger Le Forestier was already in Fort Montluc prison awaiting his fate at the hands of Klaus Barbie, and therefore beyond the reach of Fayol’s well-intentioned rescue efforts. However, the Resistance was not to know this. As far as they were concerned, any German convoy leaving Le Puy would very likely include Le Forestier. They would attack it. They could not know that the German convoy leaving Le Puy on 18 August was not a prisoner escort but the beginning of a full-scale retreat of the Germans from the Haute-Loire.