The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (34 page)

Rudi Appel, who had lit Hanukkah candles with such pleasure, was reunited with his mother, who had hidden in Grenoble. They moved to the United States in 1946, where they joined Rudi’s father and brother.

Alexander Grothendieck, a young German friend of Rudi’s at The Wasps’ Nest, appears to have been one of the first to leave Le Chambon. He had passed his baccalauréat at the New Cévenole School, and is generally thought to have moved to Montpelier in late 1944, with his mother. He went on to become one of the world’s great mathematicians.

Nathalie Stern was thirteen years old when she moved into The Shelter, in July 1942. She waited three years for a letter from her parents, and thought they had abandoned her. But her parents had
hidden themselves successfully in Agen, and called for her in May 1945, when they were certain the war was over.

Louis Claude Milgram was only three years old when his Jewish Parisian parents agreed to place him with the Ollivier family at La Bâtie de Cheyne, just outside Le Chambon. Knowing that circumcision was a sure giveaway, the Olliviers stopped using the name Louis and switched to Claude, or Claudie, and brought Louis up as a girl, treating him as their own child. He was reunited with his family in 1946, and had real difficulty adjusting to his new situation.

And so it went. For many of the Jews who had sheltered on the Plateau, their strongest wish was to obliterate the memory of years of fear and misery. They set about making a clean break with the past by changing countries. For many, the habit of keeping their Jewishness to themselves was hard to break. When the war ended, the Sauvage family—Léo, Barbara and Pierre—moved to New York, where Léo worked as a foreign correspondent for the French newspaper
Le Figaro
. Pierre, who had been born in Saint-Agrève hospital in March 1944, attended the French Lycée (high school) in New York, and lived a contented bilingual life in his family’s adopted country. At the age of eighteen, in that very Jewish city of New York, he found out for the very first time that he was a Jew.

So how many were saved? As with everything to do with this story, accurate figures are hard to come by. Estimates range from a high mark of 8000 down to a modest ‘more than 1000’, but the most commonly quoted figure is 5000. The numbers game began with a plaque erected in Le Chambon in 1979, which saluted the courage of the people of Le Chambon and surrounding country who ‘hid and protected thousands of the persecuted’ against the Nazis. The plaque was signed by ‘the Jewish refugees in Le Chambon and in the neighbouring communities’, so it was generally taken that the ‘thousands’ who were sheltered were Jews.

Oscar Rosowsky was a member of the committee which organised the plaque. Two years later, in 1981, he was more specific about the numbers. In a paper published by the Historial Society of the Mountain, he wrote: ‘I estimate at more than 5000 the number of refugees, more than two-thirds of them Jews, who passed through the region and were saved.’ So we can take ‘more than two-thirds of more than 5000’ as Oscar Rosowsky’s first detailed estimate of the number of Jews saved. Let’s call that number 3500.

He has stuck consistently to the overall number 5000 ever since. He based this estimate on the number of false papers he and Sammy
Charles produced in their twenty-month forgery careers. However, in an interview given in 1982 for the 1989 documentary
Weapons of the Spirit
he said without qualification that 5000
Jews
were sheltered on the Plateau. As we shall shortly see, this increase from 3500 to 5000 led to one of the more enduring myths of the Plateau story. Then in 1990 in his contribution to the symposium held in Le Chambon to examine the history of the rescue operation, he reverted to the old number, telling the audience the figure of 5000 should be broken down into 3500 Jews with the remaining 1500 coming from a mixture of
réfractaires
—young men dodging the STO—and members of the Resistance.

There are other numbers to take into account. Rosowsky and his team were not the only forgers on the Plateau: Roger Darcissac, Édouard Theis and Mireille Philip were all busy running up fake documents for Jews and others. To complicate things still further, not all the Jews sheltering on the Plateau had false papers. Some of them kept their own identity, despite the risks. And not all of Rosowsky’s papers necessarily went to the Plateau. So estimates based on numbers of the Rosowsky bureau’s forged papers are not the whole story.

The next tally comes from André Trocmé, who chose the middle ground. The author Philip Hallie quotes him as estimating the number of Jews saved at 2500. Hallie thought this estimate was too low: he was inclined to agree with the estimate of 5000. When the new Lieu de Mémoire (literally ‘Place of Memory’, but ‘Memorial Museum’ might be a better English description) opened in Le Chambon in June 2013, the catalogue was extremely conservative. It said simply: ‘Around 800 Jews were officially registered on the Plateau, to which must be added the numerous
clandestines
. So it is impossible to know exactly how many were saved, but we know the names of more than 1000, and new witnesses are coming forward all the time.’ In other words, the official estimate is a hesitant ‘more than 1000 Jews, and rising’. So there we
have the choice: Oscar Rosowsky, about 3500 Jews rescued (twice); then Oscar Rosowsky, 5000; Philip Hallie, 5000; André Trocmé, 2500; and the Lieu de Mémoire, ‘more than 1000’.

There is a statistic commonly bandied about which is nonsense and should be disposed of straight away. It was given its most prominent recent airing by Barack Obama in a speech in Washington on 23 April 2009, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Obama said: ‘We also remember the number 5000—the number of Jews rescued by the villagers of Le Chambon, France—one life saved for each of its 5000 residents.’ Obama’s version is more inaccurate than most. The usual formula requires that ‘5000 Jews were sheltered by 5000 Protestants, one for every man, woman and child in the community.’

These numbers are simply wrong on one count, and open to challenge on another. We can dispose of the 5000 Protestants straight away. There were not 5000 Protestant ‘villagers of Le Chambon’. There were 2378. And there were not 5000 Protestants on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. There were 9000. The ‘5000 Jews’ is more problematic, and still the subject of heated argument. Oscar Rosowsky now says that when he spoke about 5000 Jews in
Weapons of the Spirit,
he was merely repeating a joke doing the rounds towards the end of the war, that there were more Jews than Protestants on the Plateau. The numbers behind that particular joke are even more baseless. Not even the wildest optimists have suggested that more than 9000 Jews owe their lives to the generosity of 9000 Protestants.

The second error is to suggest that
at any one time
there were 3000, or 5000, or 7000 (the highest estimate I have come across) refugees on the Plateau. There were those who came to the Plateau simply because it was the starting point for the ‘pipeline’ to Switzerland. These refugees may have stayed there for a mere few days, just long enough to collect their false papers and Boy Scout hat before setting off for the Swiss or Spanish border. Others came to the Plateau to escape
immediate danger; these people were usually from a large city like Paris or Lyon, where raids and round-ups were frequent and vicious. Having acquired a new identity, and new papers to go with it, they moved on to another part of France, usually in the countryside, where the dangers were less acute. The Italian-occupied zone was popular, as was the Cévennes area.

The numbers who stayed long term on the Plateau are hard to establish. The various children’s homes supported by organisations like the Cimade and the OSE had a capacity of not much more than 200 at any one time. However, that does not take into account those in guesthouses like Tante-Soly and Beau-Soleil, and there were plenty; nor does it take into account those like Hanne Hirsch, who moved on to Switzerland after a comparatively long time on the Plateau. André Trocmé estimated that in the summer of 1942 there were 150 Jews spread around the various outlying farms and villages. That number would have soared after the German occupation of the whole of France, but again there is no way of knowing by how many.

So where does all that leave the question of numbers? Reduce Oscar Rosowsky’s numbers to allow for some of his papers leaving the Plateau. Add some back in to allow for all the extra forgeries carried out by Roger Darcissac, Édouard Theis, Mireille Phliip and others. Keep in mind the comparatively small capacity of the various children’s homes. Now allow for those who didn’t bother with fake papers and false identities. Where does all that leave us? Taking all the possibilities and all the variations into account, I will stick my neck out and say Oscar Rosowsky’s repeated figure of 3500 Jews rescued is probably about right. But the reader’s guess is as good as mine.

• • •

What of the other Jews in France? The best figures available include some suspiciously precise numbers, but the consensus is that there
were something like 350,120 Jews living there, of whom about 150,000 had French citizenship. That leaves about 200,000 ‘foreign’ Jews in France, more than half the total, who were liable to deportation to the camps. Even among those with French citizenship, some 30,000 had been naturalised in the 1930s, and under Vichy law were vulnerable to having their recent citizenship taken away at any time.

Of the original 350,000 Jews in France, some 272,800 survived the war, about 78 per cent. The remaining 77,320 were murdered in the camps. The number of murders is, of course, shocking. Nevertheless, France had by far the highest Jewish survival rate of any occupied country. In Poland only nine per cent survived, while other occupied countries fared almost as badly: Greece, thirteen per cent; Holland, nineteen per cent; Yugoslavia, nineteen per cent; Slovakia, twenty per cent; and so on. So what was different in France?

There was a fascinating exhibition held at the National Archive in Paris from 28 September to 26 December 2011. Entitled simply
Fichés
(Records
⁵⁶
), it dealt with the various identity documents used in France from 1848 to the 1960s. A section of the exhibition focused on the Vichy years. In that period, the traditionally officious French bureaucrats had gone into overdrive, creating a paper and cardboard blizzard of official means of identification: identity cards for French citizens, for foreigners, for public servants; employment permits; residence permits; provisional residence permits; travel permits; exit visas; transit visas; safe conduct visas; demobilisation certificates; internment camp release papers; special passports for STO workers; and more.

The various French departments rather than the central government issued many of these documents. So the papers and cards could differ in size, colour and wording from department to department and region to region. It was a forger’s paradise. No fewer than 141 different specialist forgery teams were active all over France, supported by 124
delivery networks. Many Jews in France owed their survival to the work of these forgers.
⁵⁷

Some Jews escaped from France to Spain—the commonly accepted number is about 25,000. A total of 30,000 Jews escaped to Switzerland, mostly from Germany but also from France.
⁵⁸
A smaller number escaped from France to the United States. So a significant number of Jews living in France in 1940 survived either by assuming another identity or by escaping to another country.

But that cannot be the whole story. Clearly an enormous number of Jews didn’t leave France and didn’t live under an assumed name. They could not have made it without the goodwill and blind eye of their non-Jewish French friends and neighbours. Jews were ignored or tolerated, and sometimes actively hidden, all over France. There was no overall conspiracy to protect Jews, nor any strong popular feeling that something should be done about their plight. These were isolated acts of kindness, but there were many of them.

So where does that leave the Plateau? The answer, surely, is that while there were individual acts of courage and humanity all over France, and throughout Europe for that matter, the sheer scale of the Plateau operation dwarfs all others. That is what makes the Plateau’s story special. Much of the Plateau rescue operation was uncoordinated and spontaneous. Much of it was not. It involved a sophisticated money smuggling operation, the creation of a series of institutions to house refugee children, and a forgery bureau that was second to none. By way of comparison, Oskar Schindler saved about 1200 Jews; the Plateau saved about three times that number. The Plateau worked openly, then clandestinely, but always effectively.

• • •

Anyone looking into the story of the Plateau inevitably faces a further question. Surely, common sense dictates, someone in authority must
have been turning a blind eye to what was going on there. Otherwise, how did the people of the Plateau get away with it for so long? The two most popular candidates for secret protectors are the prefect Robert Bach, and the German commander Major Julius Schmähling.

The case for Schmähling is interesting. He had been a history teacher back in Germany, at Aschaffenburg in Bavaria, so he may have had liberal instincts. He served in the German Army in World War I and remained in the Army Reserve afterwards. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1937. When war broke out, he was called up from the Reserves. He was comparatively old for a middle-ranking German officer: when he took command of the Le Puy garrison in December 1942 with the rank of major, he was 58. So he was no young hothead. It is a matter of record that during this period the synagogue in Le Puy remained open, and Jews were able to attend school openly. We also have the testimony of a young French Jew, Serge Klarsfeld,
⁵⁹
who fled with his mother and sister from Nice to Le Puy in September 1943. They had been told that Jews were safe there because ‘the German commander isn’t interested in them’. When Serge and his mother arrived in Le Puy, they met a rabbi named Poliatchek who told them that up until then the German commander had not mounted any operations against the Jews. It is also claimed, by those who propose Major Schmähling as the protector, that only thirteen per cent of Jews in the Haute-Loire were arrested and deported, compared with 22 per cent in France as a whole.