Voices from the Dark Years (38 page)

  
5.
  Webster,
Pétain’s Crime
, p. 18.

  
6.
  Ibid., p. 21.

  
7.
  Letter quoted in A. Michel,
Les Eclaireurs Israélites de France durant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale
(Paris: Éditions EIF, 1984), p. 123
.

  
8.
  Lewertovski,
Morts ou Juifs
, p. 170.

16

T
HE
P
ROTESTS
G
ATHER
S
TRENGTH

On 11 August 1942 Laval agreed to furnish 150,000 workers for the STO. The Germans would eventually bring their requirement for French workers to the astonishing figure of 1,575,000 plus the POWs out of a total population around 40 million. However, it is estimated that only 785,000 men and women actually left France under the scheme, half of them deserting on their first home leave.
¹
Even before bombs started falling regularly on industrial targets all over the Reich, it was impossible to keep secret that the conditions of work in Germany were far from those promised. The STO draftees lived in poorly heated dormitories often adjacent to the target factories; they worked alongside prisoners and forced labourers from a score of conquered territories with no common language; few German women would have anything to do with foreign men; there was little wine and meals were
Eintopf
– a single dish instead of the traditional five-course French lunch and dinner.

The summons from the STO arrived couched in elegant officialese:

I have the honour to inform you that the joint Franco-German Commission has selected you for work with the Todt Organisation / to work in Germany. I invite you to present yourself at the German Labour Office on … to learn the date and time of your departure. Failure to comply with this posting is punishable under the provisions of the law.

The Todt Organisation was the biggest enterprise in Europe, employing 2 million workers at its peak. If working for it in France was the better of two undesirable alternatives – and a worker could earn twice the normal rate elsewhere in any factory working for the Germans – one German spokesman for the organisation announced in Moissac that, though Germany had so far limited itself to taking only half of French production, it would in future it would take all. So, if one wanted to eat well, the best plan was to work in, or for, Germany. The STO caused severe rifts between the business community and Vichy because the only factories that could keep their labour force intact were those fulfilling German orders and their sub-contractors. With no political intent, thousands of young men went underground on receiving their STO call-up. Some lived rough in the forests, and would become the core of the Maquis. Others had it easier, like some neighbours of the author who had set out for the STO train in a
gazogène
car that conveniently ‘broke down’ in front of the village gendarme, who obligingly issued a
procès verbal
confirming the breakdown. They continued their journey to the railway station, arriving after the departure of their train. The
procès verbal
stamped a second time, they returned home and were not called again.

The police, gendarmerie, fire services, railways and Civil Defence all offered shelter from the STO and saw a rush of volunteers. In Moissac, Louis Fourcassié signed up with Le Service de Surveillance des Voies. The wages were low but compensated by extra ration cards. Wearing a blue-and-white armband, equipped with a torch, whistle and bilingual
Ausweis
, he and a friend patrolled the rail tracks at night, ostensibly to prevent sabotage. In the event, they told
résistants
they encountered to hit them a few times and tie them up, as their alibi for doing nothing.
²

At Vichy on 4 August an official delegate of the American YMCA protested about the
rafles
and deportations
.
A few days later Pétain received Donald Lowry, head of the co-ordinating committee for many charities. The Quakers, refusing to let a sword sleep in their hands, also protested. Slowly and quietly, Catholics and Protestants all over France began deliberately to impede the deportations by hiding Jews – especially children. Many Jews suspected their motives, and very few children followed the adolescent protected by priests at his secondary school in Orléans who converted and became Cardinal Aron Lustiger, senior churchman of France. The success of this low-key but widespread movement is that a quarter-million Jews survived the war in France despite the collaboration of police and gendarmerie.

On 12 August 1942 Vichy newspapers made much of the first convoy of prisoners released under la Relève de-training at Compiègne the previous day, but made no mention of the deportation of stateless Jews and other immigrants from the Free Zone. At Noé, Rabbi René Kapel’s belief that they were going to labour camps took a hard knock when the old and the sick who could not walk were carried in freezing rain more than a mile to the train station. Local residents were so horrified at the emaciated appearance of the prisoners that future departures took place at night. A Catholic social worker who witnessed the scene went to Archbishop Jules-Gérard Saliège in Toulouse to ask for his intervention. Saliège, a partially paralysed 72-year-old who had supported the cause of the Spanish refugees, showed more courage than his pope by issuing a pastoral letter condemning Vichy’s treatment of its Jews. The letter was read out on 23 August in most parishes of the Haute-Garonne
département
, in which Noé lay. A week later, Cardinal Pierre-Marie Théas, archbishop of Bousquet’s hometown of Montauban, issued a second pastoral letter protesting against the violations of human dignity. It was read out in every church and would also have been read out at a Mass for the SOL in front of the war memorial in the town, but for the diplomatic intervention of Prefect François Martin. He reported all this to Vichy, noting that the population had overwhelmingly approved the contents of the cardinal’s letter.

In the third week of August 1942, 5,000 more Jews were arrested in the Free Zone, police in Nice and Monaco rounding up 548 adults and twelve children, who were sent across France to Drancy en route to Auschwitz. That there were not more children was due largely to the Marcel network founded with the help of Bishop Rémond of Nice by Syrian-born Moussa Abbadi and the woman who would become his wife, Odette Rodenstock.

When shown in Lyon, the Paris winter collections, featuring wasp waists, fitted busts and exaggerated sleeves in artificial fabrics, attracted foreign buyers for the first time during the occupation, causing the fashion editor of
L’Illustration
to gush that the ingenuity of making little go far was ‘the crowning glory of our race’.

Archbishop Gerlier of Lyon had hailed Pétain’s regime as the New Jerusalem after the corruption of the Third Republic. His realisation that under Vichy’s racist legislation Jews were being deported, not to labour camps but to killing factories in Occupied Poland and elsewhere, came after ‘the Night of Vénissieux’.

Eight kilometres from the centre of Lyon, Vénissieux was the site of a concentration camp which, in some respects, was worse than Drancy. On one night alone, twenty-six detainees committed suicide. The complex of factory buildings surrounded by 5m walls was guarded by Vietnamese troops under French officers. Inside the walls, conditions were so appalling that the officials departed, leaving the job of drawing up lists for deportation to the volunteer workers of the ecumenical charity Amitié Chrétienne. They had to deal with 1,300 cases – soul-destroying work compounded by their commitment to find foster homes for children whose parents had been, or were going to be, deported and killed. In the absence of ‘proper authorities’, they ignored Bousquet’s orders to ship all the detainees to Drancy for onward routing to Auschwitz, and managed to save some 500 adults and 100 children by forging identity papers, altering them to show false ages, arranging escapes and sending 140 people to hospital with faked medical certificates. Many of the children were smuggled out of the camp, hidden in the beaten-up old Citroën car belonging to the Jesuit Abbé Alexandre Glasberg. An unlikely-looking hero, with his short, stout build and thick-lensed spectacles, Glasberg was himself a converted Ukrainian Jew, who understood anti-Semitism all too well. Working with him in the camp was the Jesuit Father Pierre Chaillet, from whom Archbishop Gerlier of Lyon learned all the gruesome details.

They could do nothing to save the rump of 545 people who were transported to Drancy, but on the night of 29 August, they packed the camp bus with children and managed to get 108 of them to the Lyon headquarters of EIF. There, twenty or so were kitted out as Scouts and Guides to be sent on a camping trip in remote countryside, the others being hidden in private homes, for the most part Catholic. Prefect Alexandre Angeli of Lyon furiously demanded the eighty-four children be handed over, but, as the patron of Amitié Chrétienne, Cardinal Gerlier backed up Chaillet’s refusal to divulge names, after first making a statement that he was still a loyal citizen. Father Chaillet was confined in a psychiatric clinic for three months, in conditions that were no better than they had been in the camp – Vichy had an appalling record for neglect and maltreatment of the mentally handicapped.

At Montauban, Prefect François Martin felt and acted very differently from his counterpart in Lyons. Receiving orders to arrest 1,700 Jews shown on the census list, he and his staff did everything possible to ensure that the people affected were warned. This was not simple, for one careless word could reveal him as the source of the warning. So many children were being moved long distances that Shatta had to attend a planning meeting with other organisers in the Hôtel des Alpes near to the main station in Grenoble. In the middle of the meeting, two policemen knocked on the door and quickly detected the false ID papers, for which the penalty was torture to uncover the source. Shatta kept her nerve and told them, ‘Yes, they are false papers. But we are meeting here to try and save the lives of 200 Jewish children under threat of deportation. You must do what your conscience bids you.’ After delivering a warning not to stay so close to the station again, the officers left, their intended victims breathed normally again and took the advice to heart.
³

Reading an article about police and gendarmerie collaboration in
L’Express
of 6 October 2005, Lucien Janvoie wrote that many gendarmes, like his own father, made a practice of warning those they were to arrest and turning a deaf ear to denunciations of refugees in hiding once they had realised the fate of those rounded up. In at least one case, at Gap in Provence, an entire company of gendarmes enlisted together in the Maquis and worked against the authorities.
⁴
Others were engaged on more mundane tasks. The hunt for metal was one: by September 1942 cities had long since lost their bronze statues, but the copper shortage led to a bizarre campaign advertising a reward of a litre of wine for every 200g handed in. The logic was that without copper sulphate solution to kill mildew on the vines, there would be no grapes next year.

On 2 September Cardinal Gerlier issued a proclamation to be read in all the churches of his diocese. It was carefully worded to avoid being construed as an attack on Pétain, but the message was clear. Through ecumenical links, Pastor Marc Boegner, as Chairman of the Protestant Federation, wrote to Pétain using the marshal’s own language to equate the inhumane treatment of the Jews as ‘moral defeat’ and ‘an attack on the honour of France’.

The action of the Catholic leaders was doubly courageous in that they were dependent on funds from Vichy for many purposes, including religious schooling. One Catholic historian, Renée Bédarida, reckons that of the eighty or so bishops and archbishops only five or six made public protests after the Vénissieux scandal.
⁵
Indeed, Cardinal Suhard of Paris, who had married Pétain in a proxy ceremony, and continued to collaborate, was shunned by de Gaulle after the Liberation, when eight bishops were obliged to resign.

Lower down the ladder, people from all walks of life played their parts, not always with the total co-operation of their charges, some of whom refused to eat non-kosher food or cut their side-locks, which were an immediate giveaway in the street and constituted a terrible risk for their protectors. Those prepared to integrate were found work on remote farms as labourers or child minders. Sometimes groups were sent to Annemasse on the Swiss border, only 4km from Geneva, where professional
passeurs
took them across for 300 francs a head. When the professionals judged it was too dangerous Georges Loinger, a sports
moniteur
working for Les Compagnons de France, devised an unusual way of getting more of these children to safety in Switzerland by refereeing a football match near the border and slipping the children across, one by one, during the game. The actor Marcel Marceau developed a mime routine as his cover for escorting ‘theatre groups’ of children eastwards – a gesture that would delight the world after the war. Others were escorted across by Jewish Scouts and Guides.