The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (7 page)

Miraculously for a small and isolated rural community, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon also enjoyed the leadership of some remarkable
men and women. Charles Guillon, the mayor, had at his disposal an international network of political, religious and youth organisations. André Trocmé brought with him a separate group of international contacts, as well as an unshakeable vision, huge charisma and a powerful intellect. Trocmé’s efforts were rendered all the more effective by the tirelessly unsentimental, practical, sceptical Magda, who made sure her husband’s feet made regular contact with the ground, and who attended to many of the details. Édouard Theis provided enormous intellectual and practical support, as well as doing his own independent work both as headmaster of the New Cévenole School and as a protector of refugees. He also turned out to be a dab hand at forgery.

The pastors of the surrounding villages would also play a vital role: encouraging, organising, sheltering, planning, conspiring. It is all too easy to write the Plateau’s story as though it all happened in Le Chambon, and that André Trocmé alone carried the burden. That is far from the truth. Pastors like Daniel Curtet in Fay-sur-Lignon, Roland Leenhardt in Tence, André Bettex in Le Riou, and Marc Donadille, who worked for the Cimade refugee organisation, were all important, and all showed great courage during the testing times ahead. Dr Roger Le Forestier, who had worked with Albert Schweitzer in Africa, arrived in Le Chambon in 1936 and became a hard-working and much-loved presence. Roger Darcissac, the headmaster of the primary school, turned out to be a talented forger (which is beginning to shape up as a previously unremarked skill that goes with teaching), as well as a resourceful prevaricator when it came to telling the police who was and who wasn’t on the school roll. Other outstanding figures—like Oscar Rosowsky, the Resistance leader Pierre Fayol, the extraordinary American agent Virginia Hall, or the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Albert Camus—were still to arrive.

• • •

Despite all this promise and potential, the Plateau’s career in international rescue got off to a pretty shaky start.

Just as World War II can be seen as a continuation of World War I, so the Spanish Civil War can be seen as the full dress rehearsal for World War II. In brief, on 17 July 1936 war broke out between the elected Spanish government of (left-wing, often communist) Republicans and the rebel (right-wing, often fascist) Nationalists, who were led by the Spanish military. Civil wars are generally noted for their viciousness and cruelty, and the Spanish Civil War set new standards in horror. The upshot was a defeat for the Republicans, by 1 April 1939, and the imposition of the military dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, which lasted in Spain until the old brute died on 20 November 1975.

The war produced a flood of refugees, mostly Republicans, who headed for what they believed would be a sympathetic reception in neighbouring France. The bulk of the refugees congregated on the French side of the Spanish border, just across the Pyrenees, or in the French Basque Country around Biarritz, or along the Mediterranean coast near Perpignan. The numbers were enormous: perhaps as many as 500,000 Spanish Republicans fled to France. The French didn’t want them, and certainly couldn’t cope with them.

The department of the Haute-Loire was instructed by the French government to do its bit to help out. Three waves of refugees were allocated to them: 200 in October 1936, 500 in the summer of 1937, and a massive 1115 in the spring of 1939, when the Republicans had lost the war. The prefecture had the task of finding refuge for them.

The Spanish were not exactly greeted with open arms. The gendarmes spoke up early. They didn’t want any more ‘anarchists’ and ‘dangerous men’ on their patch. In the largely Catholic and conservative town of Tence, the local council simply barred the Spanish from entry. On 25 October 1936 the eighteen Tence councillors voted unanimously to keep
them out, prompted no doubt by the thought that the Republicans were both left-wing and anti-clerical. There was the usual hand-wringing explanation of the ‘we’d like to help, but …’ variety. ‘The householders and hoteliers are refusing the refugees,’ the council informed the prefecture, going on to say what amounted to: ‘The council itself can’t help either, because we don’t have enough pots and pans, and bed linen. What’s more, there’s no work for the refugees. And in any case, the council’s first duty is to its own people’ (and not, by implication, to a lot of godless anarchists and troublemakers). The headline in the local Plateau newspaper,
Yssingeaux Gazette,
on 1 November 1936 gives some measure of the hostility. ‘Does the Spanish invasion threaten our region?’ the paper demanded. The answer seemed to be yes. So no refugees, thank you very much.

Things weren’t much better in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Unlike the councillors of Tence, mayor Charles Guillon did not try to block the refugees. However, he made it clear that the council would do nothing official to help them. If they wanted to use their eight-francs-a-day allowance from the prefecture to pay for vacant holiday accommodation in and around Le Chambon, that was their business. Even this tepid response proved locally unpopular. Although the community could certainly use the money the refugees brought in, particularly in winter, they did not want them filling up the holiday accommodation in summer. They preferred their regular customers.

All was not lost. As early as 1936, the first glimmer appeared of the Plateau’s role as a refugee shelter. Marguerite de Félice, a Swiss resident of Le Chambon, joined forces with Juliette Usach, a Spanish refugee, to set up La Pouponnière (The Creche). She followed this up with ‘a call to the people of Le Chambon’ to create an orphanage. The local population responded well, and the orphanage opened its doors in 1939. Meanwhile, the Salvation Army opened one refuge, Les Genêts d’Or (The Golden Brooms),
⁸
then a second, Les Barandons,
⁹
in the
hills to the northeast of Le Chambon. There was also a youth hostel opened at La Bruyère, and another hostel, named rather mysteriously Fraternité d’Hommes (Men’s Brotherhood).

The Spanish did themselves no favours. Some 90 per cent of the refugees were women and children, and little was expected of them. But the men were not exactly dynamic in their search for work. They preferred to live on their allowance, and were generally regarded as useless layabouts. Nor did the children endear themselves to the local population. On 18 February 1939 three young Spanish boys aged between nine and eleven, all of them residents of The Golden Broom, went to the small village of Le Crouzet, less than two kilometres from Le Chambon, and set about trying to derail the train. Happily, they failed, but they all finished up in court anyway, and there was no shortage of volunteers to keep a close eye on them afterwards. A local newspaper reported, more in sorrow than in anger: ‘This attempt has produced a strong response in Le Chambon, where the refugees had all recently been given a warm welcome.’

By September 1939, most of the Spanish had left the Plateau, either returning to Spain or moving elsewhere. The few that remained now played a memorable if unexpected role. First, the prefecture in Le Puy-en-Velay, the capital of the Haute-Loire, decided that about twenty ‘undesirables’ should be moved to their own camp, about two kilometres from Tence. The prefect commandeered an old paper mill known as La Papeterie,
¹⁰
and the Spanish were rounded up, housed there, and told to stop idling and do some work. Some moved on, but a few of them organised work permits and moved to Le Chambon. As we have seen, Charles Guillon had long wanted to build a UCJG camp on the Plateau. He now gave free rein to his old ambition to become an architect, and designed it himself. Called Camp de Joubert, it was built about two kilometres outside Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, with Spanish refugee labour. Now at last the Spanish had some useful work,
and the Plateau had a purpose-built UCJG camp (which could also come in handy if unexpected visitors arrived). The camp had nine wooden chalets, seven of them identified only by number, and two of them given names: Williams, after Sir George Williams, the founder of the YMCA; and Espérance (Hope), the name of the newspaper of the French UCJG.

At the end of 1939, the Papeterie camp, which had briefly housed Spanish ‘undesirables’, stood empty. Not for long: it would shortly have a vastly more sinister job to do.

• • •

While the refugees from the Spanish Civil War were on the hunt for somewhere to stay, ever more menacing storm clouds were gathering over the rest of Europe. The sense of impending calamity was strong, and there was justified fear that a rerun of the horrors of World War I was both unstoppable and imminent. On 29 September 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the French prime minister Édouard Daladier met Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini in Munich to see if they could reach a deal and avert war. The result was the Munich Agreement, signed on 30 September 1938, which cynically abandoned Czechoslovakia and gave Hitler what he wanted, all in the hope that he was a man of his word and would make no further territorial demands. Neville Chamberlain flew back to Britain and, on his arrival at Heston aerodrome, brandished aloft the piece of paper signed by himself and Hitler setting out ‘the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again’. The crowd there to greet him roared its approval. Later that day, from 10  Downing Street, he went further, saying the Munich Agreement had delivered ‘peace for our time’.

Hitler may have fooled the prime ministers of Britain and France, but he did not fool the mayor of Le Chambon. Two weeks later, Charles
Guillon wrote in the Plateau newsletter: ‘Keep your spare rooms free, stock up with provisions, we are going to have a flood of refugees.’

More cynicism was in evidence on 24 August 1939, when Germany and the Soviet Union, despite their mutual animosity, signed a non-aggression pact. Hitler was now safe from attack from the east, and he lost no time pressing his advantage. World War II duly began eight days later, on 1 September, when Hitler invaded Poland. Britain and France had warned that if Poland came under attack, both countries would declare war on Germany. This they both did, on 3 September.

The two community leaders in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon reacted in very different ways to the declaration of war. As we have seen, Charles Guillon had been clear from Munich onwards that the Plateau would soon find itself playing host to refugees. The minutes of the municipal council of Le Chambon, which met four days after the declaration, on 7 September, record that the population of the Plateau had been considerably augmented ‘because the majority of the tourist population has decided to remain in Le Chambon for the duration of hostilities, some refugees have arrived, and the holiday homes and refuges for children have decided to keep their children from the city and from the department of Haute-Loire’. With the war only four days old, the Plateau was already hard at work offering people shelter, with Guillon and his council playing a part in feeding and housing them.

The French families who regularly took their summer holidays on the Plateau were due to return home by the end of September. As the minutes of the council meeting record, many of them decided to stay on. After all, it wouldn’t be forever, they thought. The war would be over in a few weeks; while it lasted, they would be safe on the Plateau.

The Cambessédès were typical, a ‘comfortable’ middle-class Protestant family from Paris who regularly spent their summer months in La Fayolle, where they rented a substantial nine-bedroom house. They would arrive in June and leave at the end of September. The
father was a successful doctor, and the mother came from an old Cévenole family. Dr Cambessédès had given money to help set up the New Cévenole School.

Madame Cambessédès quickly came to a decision: now that war had been declared, she and two sons and two daughters would stay on in the holiday house. The children could go to school in Le Chambon, not Paris. For one of the daughters, Catherine, it was a relief and a revelation. School in Paris had been an unpleasant experience; her teachers used intimidation and public humiliation to get their way. At the New Cévenole School, however, the teachers treated the students as friends. Catherine was a good pupil, but she remembers struggling with an aspect of algebra. Her maths teacher offered to walk two and a half kilometres to her house after school to help her with it. That would never have happened in Paris.

So, in 1939, teenage Catherine was well content to stay where she was. The house was cold that first winter (she remembers having to crack the ice in the water pitcher to get water to brush her teeth), but she was happily established in a pleasant school, with the war far away. Her parents could congratulate themselves on a wise decision.

If Dr and Madame Cambessédès had known then that their daughter would soon be asked to run some long and highly illegal errands carrying suitcases full of money and other supplies for the Resistance, they might have had second thoughts.

• • •

André Trocmé responded to the declaration of war in typically thoughtful fashion. It happened that 3 September 1939 was a Sunday. Traditionally, Monday was the pastor’s day off so, if they could get away, he and Magda would aim to take a picnic, go for a walk or find some other escape. That Monday, 4 September, they discussed the war. What could they do? What
should
he do? His first thought was that he
should serve as a pastor, yes, but possibly also as an ambulance man or nurse, in a city or village that had suffered bombardment.

The next day, Trocmé set about clarifying all this by putting his ideas down on paper. Happily, those thoughts were preserved, and can be read today. It is a curious document. It was not intended for eyes other than his own. In it he recalled his childhood and his memories of World War I, and considered his German and Italian connections. What if he abandoned his pacifism and joined the fight? He had six aunts in Germany, all married to pastors, whose religion led them to prefer prison or death to bowing down before Hitler. André’s wife was Italian, the daughter of an Italian engineer and army colonel, and he had a brother-in-law in Italy. If he fought, André might be asked to kill them. He couldn’t face that possibility. However, he could not simply sit tight in Le Chambon, away from danger. The final paragraph reads: