The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (33 page)

Metger then talked to the leaders of the
milice,
and to some representatives of the civilians. He explained the situation to them, underlining the fact that the surrender would not go ahead without
their approval. Following a discussion, they agreed that they would go along with Metger. He then took the decision.

Sometime around midnight on 21 August, Metger surrendered. In the final battle, the Germans had lost seventeen men killed, while Resistance losses were seven dead. It was as inexpensive a result as either side could have hoped for.

For Pierre Fayol, the job was not yet done. His orders included ensuring that some sort of civil government filled the gap left by the departing Germans. Clément Charbonnier had already been appointed prefect-in-waiting for the Haute-Loire. Fayol went to Charbonnier’s house and told him his time had come. Fayol says simply: ‘I escorted him to the prefecture, and installed him.’

• • •

General de Lattre de Tassigny’s Free French Army forces wasted no time. They had landed on the Mediterranean coast of France, 200 kilometres south of Le Chambon, on 16 August, a day after the first American forces. On 31 August a young Swiss volunteer, Hans-Reudi Weber, was making his way from a Bible class in Le Chambon to his home at the guesthouse Faïdoli. To his astonishment, he found a solitary French tank parked at the side of the road. The tank commander was waiting for a radio message from an overflying plane. The message would give him his next destination. Meanwhile, he was the first Free French regular soldier on the Plateau.

On 3 September, five years to the day since the outbreak of war, General de Lattre de Tassigny’s main force reached Saint-Agrève and drove on to Tence, by way of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Contemporary photographs show scenes of wild rejoicing, with French tricolour flags flying from every building, crowds lining the streets cheering and waving, and soldiers in Free French Army uniforms waving back at
them from trucks and tanks. The Plateau was now in the hands of not just the Resistance but the government of General de Gaulle. The German occupiers, and their Vichy French stooges, were no more. The next day, 4 September, the Free French Minister for the Interior, André Philip, spoke to the people of Le Chambon from the steps of the war memorial. His wife, Mireille, who had been one of the leading Resistance figures in Le Chambon, and had stayed there through most of the Occupation, stood in the crowd. Now they were reunited, and the Plateau was free. It was a great day.

For the Jews, mostly children, still in Le Chambon, it was not such a joyful time, however. A week earlier, on 27 August, the Russians had led the world’s press into Maidenek camp in Poland. This was the first of the Nazi death factories to be liberated. What had previously been a terrible rumour had become an even more terrible fact: the Nazis had been systematically murdering people on an industrial scale. Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions. Here was the proof: a stunned and horrified press inspected gas chambers and crematoria inside an electrified barbed-wire fence and guarded by fourteen machine-gun towers. The handful of survivors told stories of bodies stripped then burned to ashes.

The raiding gendarmes had told the hostel managers in Le Chambon that the Jews were being ‘transferred’ to Poland where they could ‘live in peace’, and the children still on the Plateau had clung to a dream of being reunited with their families after the war. Now many of them would have to face the fact that their parents and grandparents, older brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, all of those packed off in trains heading ‘east’, might have been murdered. Would they ever see their families again?

• • •

On 9 September Hitler unleashed his second ‘secret weapon’, the fifteen-ton V-2 rocket. It was bigger and deadlier than the V-1 ‘doodlebug’
flying bomb, and it began its destructive career by falling into the London suburb of Chiswick. The V-2 was another fearsome weapon, but it was never going to win the war. The Germans were well and truly on the run all over Europe.

When the Germans surrendered at Le Puy and Estivareilles, the FFI found itself with 120 German prisoners on its hands. They were handed over to the French police, who were told they should be treated as prisoners of war. The police housed them in the Château du Pont-de-Mars, a few kilometres south of Le Chambon. Although it was closer to the village of Mars, the chateau was still in the parish of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

André Trocmé was never other than consistent. In the Weapons of the Spirit sermon, he had said: ‘To love, to forgive, to show kindness to our enemies, that is our duty.’ Now he proceeded to live up to his word. He went to the chateau and asked to speak to the most senior German officer. This turned out to be Julius Schmähling, whom he had met when pleading for the release of Roger Le Forestier. Major Schmähling was polite to the point of being obsequious. According to Trocmé: ‘He saluted me and clicked his heels and called me
Herr Pfarrer
[Mr Pastor].’ However, Schmähling was not yet ready to admit total defeat. ‘The fortune of war will change,’ he told Trocmé. ‘Our Führer has more than one trick up his sleeve. For now, strategic retreat. Then, one of those offensives—and he knows their secret—that throws everybody back into the sea. Like at Dunkirk! Haha!’ This was not the point of the visit, so Trocmé changed the subject. Would the major like Trocmé to conduct Protestant services for the prisoners? Schmähling could see no reason why not. ‘Excellent,’ he told Trocmé. ‘I’m a Catholic, but I will give the orders and everyone will come along.’

So Trocmé began a regular routine. He would conduct his usual service in the church at Le Chambon on Sunday morning, then repeat the service in the afternoon at the chateau. He would even use the same
sermon in both places, spoken in French in the morning and in German in the afternoon. The German prisoners packed the services, although that was probably attributable more to being ordered to turn up than to any burning desire to hear messages of peace and reconciliation.

Trocmé’s actions went down badly with both the Germans and the people of the Plateau. On the French side, the mood of the time was vengeful. All over France, ‘collaborators’ were attacked, even killed. Women accused of fraternising with the Germans had their hair shaved off, or worse. German prisoners made easy targets. In the popular view, Trocmé’s actions were tantamount to aiding the enemy.

On the German side, the soldiers listening to Trocmé’s message were dismissive. The French would be sorry. The Germans had been fighting communism. The day was fast coming when the Germans would not be around to protect them any longer from Stalin’s hordes.

The Germans were also unhappy about their food. While they had been running the country, they ate well. Now they complained that they were being starved, although in fact they were receiving the same rations as the civilian population of France. Nevertheless, Trocmé decided a little relief work might be in order. It was September, and in France the grape harvest was looming. Trocmé managed to lay his hands on a crate of grapes from the Midi, which he distributed among the German prisoners. This went down particularly badly with his parishioners. ‘The “tourists” started muttering again that, after all, I was a “Boche”,’ Trocmé wrote subsequently.

• • •

Paris fell to the French 2nd Armoured Division on 25 August 1944. By the beginning of September, nearly all of France had been cleared of Germans, and the Allies were pushing on into Belgium. By 9 September they had taken Brussels and were closing in on Germany itself. However, there was an oddity: a handful of German enclaves clung on in France.
The Germans had well-defended submarine bases in the French ports of Lorient (on the south Brittany coast), at Saint-Nazaire (at the mouth of the River Loire), and at La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of France north of Bordeaux. The German garrisons in all three ports decided to hang on, and the Allies simply bypassed them. All three clung to their positions until the last day of the war, 8 May 1945, and then surrendered without a fight.

The island of Oléron, where I live, guards the entrance to the port of La Rochelle. The Germans hung on here, too. I have the front page of
Le Monde
dated Thursday, 3 May 1945, framed and hanging over my desk. The splash headline says
HITLER EST MORT
(‘Hitler is dead’). Down below, but still on the front page, a headline reads:
L’île d’Oléron entièrement libérée
(‘The island of Oléron totally liberated’). The story reads:

On the island of Oléron, the strongest resistance was met in Saint-Pierre from the SS. From Tuesday evening the whole island has been in the hands of our soldiers. 1,500 prisoners were taken, including the commander of the garrison. Our losses were small. The local people suffered very little.

So my home, in Saint-Pierre, must have been within earshot of what may have been the last battle on French soil of World War II. Happily, my neighbours appear to have escaped unscathed.

• • •

Virginia Hall’s movements after the liberation of the Plateau are not easy to trace (not surprisingly; spies tend not to leave a forwarding address). However, we know that on 25 September 1944 she asked to retire from the US Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, saying that her mission was now completed. A  note in the files shows that on
28 September her resignation was accepted. Not for long, though: a second note, written the same day, suggests that she be rehired. Hall replied by reminding them that her six languages—English, Spanish, Russian, Italian, French and German—must surely come in handy somewhere; if ever the US government wanted to create some sort of central intelligence agency to replace the OSS, she would be happy to serve with it in some overseas post. The CIA was yet to be established, but it had at least one talented volunteer waiting in the wings.

Virginia Hall’s sense that her mission was over was understandable. For the people of the Plateau, there was still work to be done. As always, there is maddeningly little information available about the fate of those refugees still left there and who were now theoretically free to go. What is certainly true is that they could emerge, blinking, into the sunlight. They could use their real names and real identities. There was no longer any need to fear the knock on the door in the night. Secrets could be revealed: ‘Mademoiselle Grabowska’ and ‘Jean-Claude Plunne’ could meet openly as Mira Rosowsky and her son Oscar; Madame Berthe could acknowledge Egon. However welcome that change must have been, it still did not mark the end of their problems.

There cannot have been more than a few hundred refugees left on the Plateau after the Liberation. Of the Jews who had found shelter there, many were German, Austrian and Polish, so there was no possibility of returning to their homes, or even to their countries, in September 1944. For them, the war was still going on. So they remained on the Plateau, awaiting developments.

For French Jews, it was a different story. Although their homes may have been vandalised and their possessions stolen, very often the apartment or house was empty and waiting for them. Technically, they were able to return to their homes. Yet there was no quick exodus. People hesitated to move until the war had been finally and definitively won.

The children still sheltering on the Plateau faced the biggest problem. In many cases their parents had been ‘deported’ to the camps, so the odds were high that they had been murdered. In general, the children stayed on with their adopted families until the end of the war and often beyond. An enormous international operation set about discovering the fate of all those sent off to the camps. There were survivors from the camps, but the task of matching them with surviving children in another country was daunting, to say the least. Meanwhile, the children still on the Plateau had to be supported, which required money. Happily, the money could now arrive openly from the United States or Switzerland. It no longer had to travel in unmarked suitcases.

Oscar Rosowsky fell seriously ill at about the time of the liberation of the Plateau. He contracted typhoid, and for fifteen days lay in a semi-coma, with high fever. Russian doctors in Le Puy treated him successfully, and within three months he was back on his feet. He worked briefly as a journalist on the newspaper
Lyon Libre
, but his real ambition never changed: he still wanted to be a doctor.

Like many members of the Resistance, Pierre Fayol was quickly absorbed into the regular army, the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur or FFI. He became second-in-command for the Haute-Loire. Fayol was a trained soldier, but some of the Resistance were not. Many of those who lacked formal training were now sent off to French military schools. Their new military careers would not involve quite as much action as they had seen in their maquisard days. General de Gaulle’s government planned quite a different future for them. France would soon need a strong army of well-trained and disciplined soldiers … to occupy Germany.

• • •

When the European war ended on 8 May 1945, the exodus of refugees from the Plateau began in earnest, and continued until well into 1946.
Some were able to return home. Dr Mautner, who had borrowed the Trocmés’ clothes boiler so often, returned with his wife to his native Vienna, and resumed practice as a doctor. Many of his old patients returned to him. Hilde Hoefert, the language teacher from Vienna who has some claim to being the Plateau’s first Jewish refugee, also returned home, where she continued working as a teacher.

The Austrian Jews may have returned home but it was notable that, as far as anyone can recall, not a single German Jew returned to Germany from the Plateau. For them, the United States, Israel and South America were the popular destinations. They had enough of Germany, and they also had enough of Europe.

Dr Jean Meyer, who had fled with his wife and daughters from Paris in June 1942, had joined the maquisards and headed Pierre Fayol’s team of doctors in the Ardèche. His two daughters, Ariane and Lise-Hélène, stayed in the Tante-Soly guesthouse in Le Chambon. Two of Dr Meyer’s sons, Bernard and Francis, had also joined the Resistance. Francis was killed fighting the Germans in the Alsace. The rest of the family returned to Paris, to their old apartment. Dr Meyer resumed practice as a doctor.