Voices from the Dark Years (30 page)

Laure Schindler-Levine, who was 13 at the time, recorded her journey from the mud and malnutrition of Gurs concentration camp, where she had lived for months as an orphan after her mother was deported to be gassed in Auschwitz and her father disappeared into the men’s part of the camp. When Laure and three other released children were taken into a café by their guards on the way to the train station:

it seemed extraordinary to us to be able to sit down at a table on real chairs and simply ask for food. We devoured the coffee and rolls, with the inevitable result that we had to run for the toilets. Then we took the train for Moissac with our chaperone. This was on 8 May 1941. We arrived at Moissac in the evening. Shatta gave us her wonderful smile and really became my ‘living mother’ at that moment. There were no embraces [because the children from the camps were verminous and probably carrying disease].

Shatta called resident nurse Violette, to shave the heads of Eric and me because we were infested with lice and fleas, after which we were doused with insect powder. For a girl it was doubly humiliating. Because I had scabies too, Violette scrubbed me so hard that it hurt and then rubbed me all over with an evil-smelling sulphur ointment. From sheer exhaustion and fear and grief and pain and humiliation, I cried the whole time.
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In view of the many diseases they might have brought with them, two weeks’ strict quarantine then ensued before newcomers from camps could join the other children. They emerged with memories of deprivation and horror fresh in their minds, to find themselves in a world of Scouts and Guides, where everyone used the familiar form
tu
for ‘you’ – even to Shatta and her husband Bouli. The food was pretty basic, with lots of beans and vegetables that would have been fed to the animals in peacetime, but it seemed to malnourished newcomers like feasting every day. As did many others, Laure saved some of her rations to send to her father, now transferred to the concentration camp at Noé.

Food shortages and missing ration books made catering at the Maison de Moissac a constant headache. In addition, many children came from Orthodox families and refused to eat non-kosher food. Many could not speak French and used German or Yiddish. Some were traumatised by having to leave one or both parents behind in the camps, knowing they could be deported at any time; others had no living relatives left. Many of the youngest did not know their own names. A helper trying to identify one 4-year-old asked who he was, to receive the reply, ‘I’m Alex’s brother.’ Alex was dead. The helper tried another angle: ‘What did the concierge call your father?’ ‘She called him Monsieur,’ the boy replied.

Once her hair began to grow again, Laure entered more easily into communal life with the other girls in her patrol, all detesting the obligatory daily dose of cod liver oil and adoring the family atmosphere fostered by after-dinner singsongs, the Friday night dinners and festivals. Daytime at No. 18 was as happy as Shatta could make it, while Bouli was the stern but caring housefather. After months of incarceration, children were amazed to discover that the front doors of No. 18 and the overflow houses were never locked. They were free to come and go, but where could they go? At night, memories returned in dreams. The problems the more disturbed children presented for their adult carers surpass imagination. The following extracts from personal files preserved after the war in the archives of the château de Laversine give some idea:

Roger – Father deported in August 1942. No known relatives.

Isaac – Very sweet and affectionate little boy. Arrived in Moissac aged seven after being in Gurs and Rivesaltes concentration camps May 1940 – April 1942. Both parents deported in August 1942. No news since.

Bella – Mother depressed since father and son both shot. Mother refuses to take care of her daughter. The child has several times run away.

Alfred – Unidentified orphan sent to us by WIZO.
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Has no idea who he is.

Hannah – Father caught in a
rafle
in Paris 1941, but escaped from Pithiviers concentration camp, managed to cross into Free Zone and reach Moissac, where he worked as a tailor. Five months later, wife and children managed to join him here. In 1943 both parents caught in a
rafle
. Mother deported. Father escaped again and returned to Moissac, but was denounced. Escaped again, but was caught and sent to the mines. Caught by the Milice, taken to Drancy. During all this time, Hannah has been in Moissac.

Léon – A good lad who wants to go into farming. To be sent to a rural group. Has one sister, who became insane after parents’ arrests.
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Given the political situation, it sounds unreal today that the Moissac ‘children’s house’, or
colonie
as the locals called it, was run on the lines laid down in Robert Baden-Powell’s blueprint for the Scout movement, as adapted by EIF. Organised in patrols, children slept in dormitories with their patrol leaders. Each day began with fifteen minutes’ gymnastics, after which all but the youngest children had to make their beds and tidy the dormitories before washing in communal washrooms. Bouli’s morning room inspections were legendary: each mattress had to be turned every day. To prevent cheating, there was a mark on one side which had to be on top on even dates and underneath on uneven ones. The child who cheated by just pulling up and smoothing the blankets found all the bedding thrown onto the floor and had to start all over again.

After breakfast, the day followed a strict timetable, with children of school age setting off with their coevals for a day in the classroom. The younger ones marched along the main street in a crocodile to the junior school, holding hands and singing Hebrew songs. If they adapted easily to the French curriculum, many older ones had academic difficulties. Freddy X recalled starting school in Düsseldorf with lessons in German, before his parents fled in 1938 to Belgium. There, he attended school for two years, speaking Yiddish in the playground and Flemish in the classroom. For the next two years he had no lessons while in concentration camps. At Moissac, he began French schooling. His answer to how he and those with similar backgrounds coped was, ‘We copied everything the others did or said, without understanding anything at first.’
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Older children who could not cope with school attended workshops where they received practical instruction, which might for the girls be making clothes for themselves and the little ones under the supervision of a professional
couturière
, while boys were taught a useful trade. Both also had lessons from French and refugee volunteer teachers. Below is a sample of their weekday routine from November 1941, which was no soft alternative to school:

6.45 – 8.00 a.m. – wake-up, toilet, breakfast

8.00 – 12 noon – workshops

12.00 – 1 p.m. – lunch

1 – 3 p.m. – siesta in summer / reading in winter

3 – 6.30 p.m. – physical training in the open air

7.30 – 8.30 p.m. – dinner

9.00 – 10 p.m. – studies or bed according to age

10 p.m. – lights out

After the Friday night
seder
meal, Saturday was the Sabbath:

8.30 a.m. – getting up, toilet, breakfast

9.30 a.m. – sports

1 p.m. – 3 p.m. – free time

3 p.m. – 6 p.m. – Jewish history

6.30 – 7.30 p.m. – Leisure activities
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Sundays were reserved for scouting activities, outdoors whenever weather permitted.
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Older boys and girls, who would have been Rover Scouts and Ranger Guides in peacetime, acted as the
routiers
, meaning literally ‘rovers’, travelling hundreds of kilometres by public transport, by bicycle and on foot to bring children to Moissac and take them on to safer hiding places, when these had been arranged. They also regularly visited children placed with foster parents, both for contact and to bring vital food coupons, without which town-dwelling families’ meagre rations would have been insufficient. As to where the documents came from before these extraordinary scouts and guides began manufacturing their own false papers, the answer is, from local mayors’ offices and even on one occasion from the office of Prefect François Martin in the
département
capital, Montauban. After Shatta personally explained to him her desperate need for identity papers, he promised her 150 ID cards, plus the food coupons to go with them, and despatched them to Moissac by hand, so that she ran no risk of being caught with them at a checkpoint.

Until his resignation in 1943, Prefect Martin epitomised the many public servants at all levels who were paid to obey and implement the laws of Vichy, yet chose to remain in office so that they could temper some of the worst excesses. Daily, they confronted dilemmas that no servant of the English Crown or Parliament has known for centuries. In some villages and rural areas the local gendarmerie was co-operative with the rescue operation, closing its eyes to the presence of unregistered children or those whose papers were obviously false, warning of imminent searches and sometimes sheltering fugitives from Vichy justice. When caught, the penalties for those in the uniforms of law and order were even more severe than for others: during the occupation, over 800 were deported to camps in the east; 338 were decapitated or shot by the Germans in France.

On the other side of the coin, when the new assistant commissioner in Moissac read the census list of 208 persons ‘known to be Jewish or reputed to be such’, registered as living in the town, he sent for Madame Simon and informed her coldly that he was an anti-Semite and a personal friend of Darquier de Pellepoix, an anti-Semitic journalist whose proposals in an extremist newspaper in 1937 could have served as a draft for the first Statut des Juifs. As such, he warned her, he would carry out all the orders he was given without compunction. On one occasion when two police inspectors came to arrest some of ‘her’ children, Shatta admitted that the children were present, but asked the officers to obey the dictates of their consciences, and they went away empty-handed.

With the biggest heart and greatest reserves of courage in the world, money is still what fuels such an operation. Like a number of other EIF children’s homes, the Maison de Moissac was subsidised by the Jewish Consistory, Baron Robert de Rothschild and the Comité d’Aide aux Refugiés. The Joint American Distribution Committee, known as ‘Le Joint’, also contributed 400 francs per child per month, although after the German occupation of the southern zone in 1942 this money had to be smuggled into France from Switzerland at great personal risk to those involved.
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However, the regular funding never covered more than bare necessities, so when it came to buying books for the library, tools for the workshops or any other ‘extras’, Madame Simon had to beg previous benefactors to be generous again. Alternatively, there was some ‘trading’, as when the metalworkers overhauled the forge of a local blacksmith in return for its use as their new workshop. The output of some workshops, like the book bindery, could have been sold for much-needed cash, but the Simons wisely decided against this, not wishing to antagonise local tradesmen.

The children’s house was a fragile shelter, as they were well aware. In the Free Zone, Jews did not have to wear the yellow star, but on 5 September in Paris the exhibition ‘Le Juif et la France’ opened at the Palais Berlitz on Boulevard des Italiens. After it closed to go on provincial tour four months later, the director of the Institute for Jewish Questions Captain Paul Sézille wrote to Vallat at the Commissariat Général des Questions Juives that paid attendances had totalled 500,000, which, because of free and reduced-price admissions, meant a total attendance of close to 1 million. Abetz’s figure of 250,623 visitors was closer to the truth. Sometimes propaganda achieves the reverse of what its authors hope: a 28-year-old history teacher with a Jewish husband visited the exhibition on its provincial tour in Lyon and was so horrified by all the lies that she decided to ‘do something about it’. Lucie Aubrac was to distinguish herself by exceptional courage later in the occupation.

Most Parisians were more interested in the annual Paris Fair that opened on 6 September, and the
gazogène
stand was the biggest draw for would-be motorists who had no entitlement to petrol coupons. A strange exhibition-in-reverse that ran from February to October at the Petit Palais was a German shop window exhibiting not products for sale, but products the Reich sought to buy. Tenders were received for 80 per cent of the 12,000 different items required by the German military and 75 per cent of the civilian requirements. With 26,000 tenders received, the organisers congratulated themselves on holding out exactly the right carrot to bring into line any proud laggards in French industry. For every carrot, there is a whip – in this case the alternative to working for the Reich was to see precious machinery shipped off east of the Rhine, against which accepting German orders was the best defence.