The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (32 page)

Another of those who gave significant help was Fanny Arnskov, a leading figure in the Danish Women’s League for Peace and Freedom. She not only helped Jews during the October days, but later took charge of sending parcels to those who had been seized and sent to Theresienstadt. The Danish government insisted on the Danish Jews in Theresienstadt being given special protection, and food parcels. Almost all the other inmates of the camp, mostly German, Austrian and Czech Jews, tens of thousands in all, were starved to death or deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
¹⁷

Starting on the eve of the planned deportation from Denmark and continuing for three weeks, Danish sea captains and fishermen—some members of the resistance, others simply public-spirited—ferried a total of 5,919 Jews, 1,301 part-Jews (designated Jews by the Nazis) and 686 Christians married to Jews to neutral Sweden. Among those saved in this way was Niels Bohr, the atomic scientist, who was to put his expertise at the disposal of the Americans. Two of those who helped organize the crossings were Ole Helweg and Bent Karlby, architects who left their jobs in order to form the Danish-Swedish Refugee Service, also known as the Ferrying Service. They were helped by a Danish naval lieutenant, Eric Staermose.
¹⁸

The Danes’ support for the Jews was remarkable. On one occasion, when a Jew was discovered by a Danish Nazi in the street in Copenhagen, an angry crowd forced him to hand the Jew over to the Danish police, who later helped him to escape.
¹⁹
One would-be safe haven failed, however. The eighty Jews hidden in the attic of the church at Gilleleje, awaiting transfer to a boat, were found by the Gestapo and deported to Theresienstadt.
²⁰

On 1 October 1943, the second day of the Jewish New Year, the Germans found only five hundred Jews remaining in Denmark. All were sent to Theresienstadt; of them, 423 survived the war. On 14 April 1945 the Swedish Red Cross negotiated their release.
²¹

The Danish Jews who had been ferried to Sweden survived the war unmolested, as did a further three thousand Jewish refugees who had reached Sweden before the outbreak of war, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Reflecting on the rescue of so many Jews in such a short time by a whole nation acting in unison, the historian Leni Yahil concludes: ‘The Danish people’s resolute refusal to discriminate against their Jewish fellow citizens and to surrender them, or the refugees among them, to the Germans; the rescue launched to transfer the Jews to a safe haven in Sweden; and the unwavering support and protection they gave to the Theresienstadt deportees—all represent an exercise of high moral and political responsibility, outstanding and exceptional for the time in which it took place.’
²²

F
OLLOWING THE FRENCH
capitulation in June 1940, France was divided into two zones: the Occupied Zone, which included the Channel and Atlantic coastal areas, and the Free Zone (‘Zone Libre’), also known as the Unoccupied Zone, ruled from Vichy by a French collaborationist government headed by Marshal Pétain. His ‘Vichy France’ was eager to accede to German demands with regard to the isolation, and eventual deportation, of Jews, both foreign-born and French-born.

The first deportation of Jews from Paris to Auschwitz took place on 27 March 1942. Most of those taken were Polish-born Jews living in Paris, within the Occupied Zone. The deportations continued throughout April, May and June. On July 16 and 17 a mass round-up led to the incarceration and eventual deportation of Jews from Paris, elsewhere in the Occupied Zone, and even from the ‘Free Zone’, under sole control of the Vichy regime. Helping Jews required the combined effort of many people, each individually at risk, but seeking—and finding—strength in joint action. A high point came in late August 1942, as the deportations of foreign-born Jews—and in particular children—intensified. Senior church figures took a leading role: just south of Lyons, Protestant and Catholic clerics, including Cardinal Gerlier, the Archbishop of Lyons, joined forces with Jewish resistance groups to find hiding places for five hundred adults and more than a hundred children from a camp in Vénissieux, from which the local Prefect had ordered their deportation. Not only Cardinal Gerlier, but also his Secretary, Monseigneur Jean-Baptiste Maury (later Bishop of Reims), were honoured for their acts of rescue.
¹

The Night of Vénissieux, as it became known, also saw the birth of the ‘Circuit Garel’, the first clandestine network in the south of France set up to protect Jewish children. Jews and Christians participated equally in the work of rescue. Elisabeth Maxwell, a French Protestant who has studied this period, writes that it was ‘the first episode in France when ecumenism truly worked, and when all forces of goodwill and decency combined’—to thwart a Vichy order to deport six hundred Jews to the transit camp at Drancy, in a suburb of Paris, for deportation to ‘the East’.
²

Georges Garel was a French Jew who owned a small electrical appliance shop in Lyons. ‘His name was impeccably French,’ noted the historian Yehuda Bauer; ‘he had never been connected with any Jewish causes; he was completely unknown; and he had all the human qualities essential for such an undertaking.’
³
Among Christians who helped in this particular effort to deny the Germans their prey during the Night of Vénissieux, and for two years after that, was Abbé André Payot.

‘We did what we had to do,’ was his comment when one of those he had helped across the border suggested some special honour.
⁴

Eighty-three deportations took place by rail from France to Auschwitz and other death camps in the East. When an engine driver, Léon Bronchart, was ordered to drive a train of deportees from the town of Montauban, he refused—the only engine driver known to have done so—and wrote to Marshal Pétain to protest against the order he had been given. No one followed his example. A month later he smuggled a Jew in his locomotive from Brive to Limoges, and then on to the safety of the Italian Zone in south-eastern France. Denounced to the Gestapo, he was deported to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, and later to the slave labour camp at Dora. There, until liberation, he was a source of moral strength to his fellow prisoners.
⁵

On 28 August 1942, as the deportations from France continued, the Germans ordered all Catholic priests who sheltered Jews to be arrested.
⁶
Those taken included a Jesuit who had hidden eighty Jewish children destined for deportation.
⁷

In the British House of Commons, on September 8, Winston Churchill referred to the deportations from France during the course of a comprehensive survey of the war situation. The ‘brutal persecutions’ in which the Germans had indulged, he said, ‘in every land into which their armies have broken’, had recently been augmented by ‘the most bestial, the most squalid and the most senseless of all their offences, namely the mass deportation of Jews from France, with the pitiful horrors attendant upon the calculated and final scattering of families’. Churchill added: ‘This tragedy fills me with astonishment as well as with indignation, and it illustrates as nothing else can the utter degradation of the Nazi nature and theme, and the degradation of all who lend themselves to its unnatural and perverted passions.’
⁸

In the days following Churchill’s speech,
The Times
continued to report the deportation of Jews from France, and to stress the opposition of the French people to the collaboration of the Vichy government in these measures. On September 9, it published news of the dismissal by the Vichy authorities of General de St-Vincent, the Military Governor of Lyons, who had ‘refused to obey Vichy’s order’ on August 28 ‘to cooperate in the mass arrests of Jews in the unoccupied zone’. General de St-Vincent had, it appeared, refused to place his troops at the disposal of the authorities in order to round up Jews.

The news item of September 9 also reported the Vichy order of August 28 for the arrest of all Roman Catholic priests who were sheltering Jews in the Unoccupied Zone. ‘Some arrests’, it added, had already been made. In reply to these arrests, Cardinal Gerlier issued a ‘defiant refusal’ to surrender those Jewish children whose parents had already been deported, and who were being ‘fed and sheltered’ in Roman Catholic homes.
⁹
Two days later, a news item in
The Times
on September 11 reported ‘popular indignation’ in Lyons following the arrest and imprisonment of eight Jesuit priests who had refused to surrender ‘several hundred’ children for deportation; children whom they had kept hidden ‘in buildings belonging to the religious order’.
The Times
also reported that the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, had informed the French Ambassador to the Vatican ‘that the conduct of the Vichy government towards Jews and Foreign refugees was a gross infraction’ of the Vichy government’s own principles, and was ‘irreconcilable with the religious feelings which Marshal Pétain had so often invoked in his speeches’.
¹⁰

THE RESCUE EFFORTS
made by individuals in France were remarkable. Near Paris, Germaine Le Henaff hid a number of Jewish children in the Château de la Guette children’s home, of which she was the director, giving them false, non-Jewish-sounding names, and enabling them to blend in with the 120 Christian children already in the home. She was the only person in the home who knew that the newcomers were Jewish.
¹¹

A French farmer, Albert Masse, held out the hand of rescue to nine-year-old Karl Haussmann, who later recalled: ‘The French family who took me into their home in the Ardèche region of France were poor farmers who lived on a parcel of rocky land. They had at that time one cow that was used for ploughing and to pull the wagon. Also some goats and chickens and rabbits that were raised for food. These were the people who hid me from the German occupiers and saved me from the fate that befell my family.’

Karl Haussmann was born in a small German town near Mannheim, and deported with his family to Gurs in October 1940. His parents and older brother had been deported from France to Auschwitz on 11 September 1942, and gassed. He had been fortunate to be taken out of Gurs and sent to a children’s home, then to the farmer. ‘I am the lone survivor of my family and probably the only survivor from the Jewish community from the town where I was born.’
¹²

When a Jewish family came to the farm of Pierre and Louise Hebras, at Romanet, near Limoges, and sought shelter, mother, son and two young daughters were found a hiding place on the farm itself, while the father, to reduce the risk of detection, was taken to the village and hidden in the attic under the farmhouse roof. The villagers kept the secret.
¹³

In the tiny village of La Caillaudière, in the Indre region, Juliette and Gaston Patoux saved a Jewish girl, Felice Zimmern, from deportation. ‘I was in a terrible condition when I arrived. I was very small, thin, and had sores all over my body, which, no doubt, was a result of malnutrition.’ Born in Germany on 18 October 1939, she too was taken with her parents and sister Beate to Gurs in October 1940. Her parents were then deported to Auschwitz and killed. Juliette and Gaston Patoux were farmers—a typical French peasant couple, and yet not typical. ‘They took care and protected me as if I was their own child. I lived with them for approximately three-and-a-half years, until I was five and a half. Through their loving care, I learned to think of them as my mother and father.’
¹⁴

Felice recalled: ‘When I asked Madame Patoux years later how I came to be placed in their home she answered: “Oh, I don’t know, someone came out of the forest and asked me if I wanted to take in a little Jewish girl; and I answered yes.” From the beginning, they treated me wonderfully. They made me feel as if I was their child. I slept in the same room with them as they diligently nursed me back to health.’

Felice Zimmern added: ‘M. Patoux put together a doll’s carriage, which was customized for me; it had very small wheels to match the carriage to my height. My charming little carriage had a bonnet on top to protect it against the weather and a little skirt around the sides. They also provided me with a lovely little doll, which I cherished and called my “ya-ya”. On my fifth birthday they made me feel very special. They stood me up on a chair in front of them and gave me a present of a bouquet of flowers as the family clapped and cheered.’
¹⁵

Rescue had constant dangers: ‘Because of me, the Patoux were always afraid of being caught by the Nazis and were always ready to run. To prepare for that eventuality, Madame Patoux always slept in her slip.’ But the villagers connived in the life-saving deception: ‘The people of the village treated me as the Patoux child. I went to church with the Patoux. No one gave me away, and I did not know I was Jewish.’

At the end of the war, Felice Zimmern, then just five and a half years old, was reunited with her sister, who had been in hiding elsewhere. A Jewish organization placed them in Jewish orphanages in France, to get them back into Jewish surroundings. ‘The separation from the Patoux was very painful for me as they were my “Mémé” and “Pépé”.’
¹⁶

In Poitiers, an employee in the town hall gave the Hoffnung family—refugees from Metz, near the German border—false identity cards, deliberately leaving out the Jewish stamp. Later, a non-Jewish classmate of the young Martha Hoffnung warned the family of an imminent round-up, and insisted that the Hoffnungs go to her parents’ home for safety. Then the family was taken to the border between German-occupied and Vichy France. ‘Other townsfolk watched Martha and her mother push Martha’s grandmother across the border on a bicycle without denouncing them.’
¹⁷

In Solignac, a French Jewish girl, Inès Dreyfus (later Vromen), and her mother were helped by several non-Jews in turn. Inès later recalled the days after her father’s arrest on 1 September 1943, when, at the railway station in Roanne, ‘my mother, in desperation, bought train tickets for Limoges. We spent a terrible night on the train, switched train in Limoges, arrived at Solignac early morning. Mme Schenherr was going to early Mass. I met her on the road, and she simply said: “Your parents have been arrested, haven’t they? You were right to come to me.”’ (My mother and grandmother, exhausted, were trudging behind with the suitcases.) The Schenherrs were living in two rooms—the husband always in bed—on the second floor, no running water, you had to get it from the pump. After a couple of days we found a room to sleep, in the village of Solignac, but spent the day at their place, cooking and washing together, and trying to get enough food for eight people, running to remote farms, gathering wood, apples, chestnuts.’

Inès Vromen recalled that a priest from Alsace, Robert Bengel, ‘had our papers forged so that our name would be Diener instead of Dreyfus’. He then registered Inès with a Catholic correspondence course so that she could continue with her studies: ‘I was fourteen at the time. He always kept in touch with us, even when we had left Solignac, which we did between Christmas 1943 and New Year: we had to leave, we were endangering the Schenherrs.’

Inès Vromen and her mother moved to the village of Panazol in the Haute-Vienne. A farmer, Monsieur Faye, who was also the mayor of the village, rented them an abandoned farm on his estate, ‘and issued for us new “clean” identity papers (much safer than ours)’.
¹⁸

In Montauban, near Toulouse, as the mass deportation of Jews from throughout France was being carried out, a French Catholic woman, Marie-Rose Gineste, rode her bicycle many miles, carrying with her a clandestine pastoral letter from the Bishop of Montauban, Pierre-Marie Théas, denouncing ‘the uprooting of men and women, treated as wild animals’, and calling on Catholics to protect Jews. She began her ride on Friday, 28 August 1942, and, cycling for two days from dawn to dusk, ensured that the letter could be read out in more than forty parishes during the Sunday morning service.

The French resistance ensured that the text reached London, from where it was relayed back to France over the BBC’s
Ici Londres
daily broadcasts, which were listened to on tens of thousands of hidden radios. The impact was immediate. ‘Historians now see it as marking a turning point in the Catholic Church’s earlier passive attitude towards the Vichy regime,’ Mordecai Paldiel told the journalist Philip Jacobson, who went on to recount how, as the deportation of Jews continued, Marie-Rose Gineste accepted the mission of finding safe houses for Jewish fugitives in the Montauban diocese. Dr Paldiel noted that she was also responsible for pilfering food ration cards from the authorities (sometimes aided by sympathetic officials for use by underground Jewish organizations).