Voices from the Dark Years (37 page)

Gitla Szapiro was 10 years old when arrested with her parents, despite her and her younger sister having French nationality. In the stadium, she noticed some Red Cross helpers trying to alleviate suffering and, transported to Pithiviers concentration camp between Paris and Orléans, she watched her father and brother having their heads shaved. The father’s beard was also shaved off before the two males, an older sister and the children’s mother vanished forever. Taken to Drancy, Gitla was left to look after her 5-year-old sister, both of them constantly ill from the atrocious food and sleeping on soiled, lice-infested mattresses. Hearing their names called for transportation, they were terrified, the younger girl crying that they were going to be shot. On an impulse, Gitla took her hand and got off the bus to walk back into the camp. Miraculously, no one called them back and thanks to the intervention of an uncle, who had managed to obtain an
Ausweis
stating that he was a
wirtschaftswertvoller Jude
(an economically valuable Jew), they were released into the care of an organisation for Jewish orphans. The uncle had been trying to get all the family released, but was too late to save the older children and parents.

Those left behind in Drancy were accommodated in unfinished and unfurnished council flats. Children were lodged in vast ‘dormitories’ with no toilets on the same floor, but buckets for their use at night. The food was mainly cabbage soup, tolerable for an adult stomach, but not for children. The smaller ones with diarrhoea had either to wait in agony until an older child or adult came to help them, or foul themselves. What clothes could be washed could not be dried, so they had to stay naked or put them on still wet. Approximately 5,500 children passed through this nightmare between 21 July and 9 September, one in five needing medical treatment.

On 28 July Charles Wajsfelner wrote from the camp to his family’s former neighbour Madame Salvage, the local baker. Charles wrote asking her to take care of his little brother Maurice, his message showing that he at least had no idea what lay ahead:

Thank you very much for what you gave us the day we had to leave. Tomorrow morning Daddy, Mummy and I leave for an unknown destination. I shall write you our news as soon as I can. I ask you a favour – to help my aunt, her daughter and Maurice. We shall pay you back one day. Please say hello for us to all the people in our street.

On 18 July SS-Obersturmführer Heinz Röthke proudly informed Berlin that 12,884 people, including 4,051 children and 5,802 women, had been taken either to Drancy or other camps. The irony of
le grand rafle du Vel d’Hiv
is that France had been the first European country to treat Jews as full citizens. After the Revolution atheist Maximilien Robespierre supported Henri Grégoire, a Catholic priest whose parish lay in eastern France where many Jews lived in poverty, in claiming before the National Assembly equal rights for Jews in accordance with the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
⁶

It is sometimes alleged in defence of those who participated in the round-ups and transportation that nobody knew the truth about the deportations, and that they all believed the victims were being sent to work camps in the east. That this is false is shown by a letter from Bouli Simon to the other leaders of the EIF written shortly after Vichy had agreed to hand over to the Germans 10,000 foreign Jews living in the Free Zone:

Postcard sent by Charles Wajsfelner from Drancy, stamped by the censor.

The official version is that they are supposedly being sent to construct a ‘Jewish state’ in central Europe. Yet you know that recently in Minsk 35,000 Jews were machine-gunned to death and during the German occupation of Poland 700,000 Jews have been killed – men and women, the old and the young – whether in massacres or the gas chambers.
⁷

Certainly Shatta was under no illusions when she ran all over Moissac to track down some Rovers included on the arrest lists. Mika X crossed the Napoleon Bridge to hide in the broken country on the other side of the river for three days with two or three others. Then they were taken to a campsite 15km from Moissac, where some Protestant Scouts looked after them.
⁸

Despite the brotherly solidarity of other Scouts, Mika’s troubles were far from over. On 15 September he was led across the Swiss frontier just after the federal government had passed a law requiring the repatriation of all refugees over 15. Aged 20, Mika was arrested by the Swiss police, dumped back on the border, re-arrested and taken by train in handcuffs to Rivesaltes concentration camp, where he refused to work. On 8 November – the day the Allies landed in North Africa – Mika was summoned to the camp commandant’s office, handed a train ticket and shown a four-word telegram purporting to come direct from the office of Interior Minister Pucheu: ‘Liberate immediately Itzhak Michalowicz
.
’ The telegram, Mika learned long afterwards, was a fake sent by an optician in Metz with the complicity of the prefect of police. At the time, all he could think of was to get as far away from Rivesaltes as possible.

Hesitating whether to head back to Moissac, in case he was the bait in some Kafkaesque trap, he was walking round the streets of Toulouse, hungry, inadequately dressed and very cold, but with no money to buy food or a room in a hotel, when a stranger tapped him on the back and thrust 400 francs into his hands before vanishing among passers-by. In one of life’s coincidences, thirty years later Mika was Israeli ambassador in an African country and received an invitation from his French colleague to come and meet an inspecting officer from the Quai d’Orsay who had just arrived. The inspector turned out to be the man who had given him the money on that dark night in Toulouse.

But back in 1942 the hunt was well and truly on. The Rovers and Rangers now had to both save themselves and help to get all the children of an age to be arrested into safer homes. They called this
le planquing
– or ‘stashing’. Alone or in small groups, they travelled the country, knocking on doors of priests, ministers and others who might be able to help. Sometimes this came in the nick of time, and from unexpected quarters. Hearing that some Jewish children without papers were camping in the commune of Monboucher near Limoges, the mayor’s secretary left her office with all the official stamps and blank identity cards on her desk long enough for them all to have new papers.

In Moissac on the fateful morning of 26 August, Shatta had been forewarned to expect the knock on the door that came at 8 a.m. She opened it to find herself facing the chief of police from neighbouring Castelsarrasin bearing a list of the ‘illegal’ children to be arrested. Behind him was a row of dark vehicles in which they were to be taken away.

‘I’m afraid they’ve all gone,’ Shatta said.

A search revealed the house to be empty, which led to the question, ‘Where’s their travel permit?’

Shatta apologised for having mislaid the paper on which their present whereabouts should have been noted. Her excuse was accepted and the
agents
departed empty-handed. Not so lucky were four adult refugees picked up by the police elsewhere in Moissac, none of whom returned from deportation. One search team was stopped by a cyclist who remarked, ‘Feeling proud of yourselves today, are you?’ A father of nine children, his sarcasm earned him a summons to the sub-prefecture in Montauban, where he diplomatically apologised for his spontaneous outburst and was allowed to go.

No sooner had the police from Castelsarrasin departed from the Maison de Moissac, than Shatta headed for the local police and gendarmerie HQs, to be reassured in both places that there was no more danger for the moment. Some of the children returned to the house by the bridge, to be reclaimed by their parents in the Occupied Zone on the strength of a clever disinformation rumour to the effect that families with children were not, after all, going to be deported. Bouli and Shatta did not believe a word of it and ignored more than eighty desperate telegrams from parents. Instead, they summoned enough Rovers and Rangers to accompany an emergency convoy of forty children across 500km of ‘enemy territory’ to the Swiss border and across it.

When 15-year-old Kurt Niedermaier was ordered to present himself at the concentration camp of Septfonds, less than 50km distant, Shatta hurried on her bicycle from Moissac to Castelsarrasin and confronted Lieutenant Tanvier in the gendarmerie there with the news that his son’s closest school-chum was to be deported. Tanvier quietly ‘lost’ the boy’s paperwork and Kurt was safe for the time being. When it came to saving lives, Shatta had no scruples, using bribery and threats of what would happen ‘after the end of the war’ – a prospect that seemed infinitely remote in 1942
.
She even managed to ‘corrupt’ the anti-Semitic assistant police commissioner into putting himself in such a compromising position that after the Liberation he came to her for an attestation that he had done his bit for the Resistance.

In Chambon-sur-Lignon, pastors Theis and Trocmé did everything possible to prevent an official visit on 10 August by Minister for Youth Lamirand. Considering it inevitable, Unionist Chief Scout Jean Beigbeider tried to smooth things over. The scant official meal over, the cortége drove through the village with no people in the streets and no flags waving or hanging on the houses. At the football ground, the prefect frigidly quoted Romans XIII verses 1–7 on the respect due to those in authority. After a religious service, all the pupils read an open letter from Trocmé that was on every notice board:

Monsieur le Ministre,

We have learned of the scenes of horror three weeks ago in Paris when the French police obeyed the occupying power and arrested in their homes all the Jewish families in Paris to dump them in the Vel d’Hiv. Fathers were torn from their families and deported to Germany and children torn from their mothers, who suffered the same fate. Since we know that the decrees of the occupier will soon be applied to the Free Zone, where they are presented as the spontaneous decisions of the Head of the French state, we fear that deportations of Jews will soon be occurring in the Free Zone.

We hereby inform you that a number of Jews live among us. We do not differentiate between Jews and non-Jews for that would be contrary to our evangelical teaching. If our comrades, whose sole fault is to have been born in another religion, are ordered to be deported or even registered, they will disobey and we shall hide them as best we can.

Hearing the text read out aloud, Lamirand blenched and replied, ‘This has nothing to do with me. Take it up with Monsieur le Préfet.’ The following exchange then took place in public:

Prefect: ‘Monsieur Trocmé, you are sowing dissension on what should be a day of national harmony.’

Trocmé: ‘There can be no national harmony while our brothers are threatened with deportation.’

Prefect: ‘In a few days, my staff will come to Chambon to register all the Jews.’

Trocmé: ‘We do not know who is a Jew. We only know people.’

When the police arrived two weeks later, the head teacher refused to supply a list of Jewish children. Asked how many there were, he replied, ‘None.’ Trocmé was summoned to the town hall, where he told the police, ‘If I had a list of these people, I should refuse to hand it over to you. They have come in search of aid and protection from the Protestants here, whose pastor I am. A pastor is a shepherd and it is not the job of the shepherd to denounce the lambs entrusted to him.’

N
OTES

  
1.
  S. Klarsfeld, ‘La page la plus noire’ in
Le Monde
, 14 March 1979.

  
2.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne
, Vol. 3, p. 187.

  
3.
  Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 140.

  
4.
  Article in
Le Monde
, 22 July 1997.