Caroline Moorehead | Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France / 2014

an exceptional moment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Caroline Moorehead Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (New York: HarperCollins, 2014)

 

In what I might describe as a case of “intentional coincidence,” I received a review copy, while writing of Gertrude Stein’s biographical descriptions of living in Vichy France, a book, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France, by Caroline Moorehead. As soon as I finished rereading Stein’s Wars I Have Seen, I immediately dived into the Moorehead book with great eagerness.

      Although the short Foreword makes apparent that this work will be covering new material, the narrative itself begins rather slowly, with a focus in its first chapter, “Mea culpa,” centering a few specific French-Jewish families, most of whom, having lived for years in France and holding French citizenship simply could not imagine the growing virulent pre-war Anti-Semitism, stoked by the likes of Charles Maurras, Xavier Vallet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and others would have a significant effect. They felt safe in their homeland. As the elderly Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré had declared: “After the Dreyfus affair, anti-Semitism will no longer ever be possible in France.”

    But with the defeat of the French by the Nazis, and the sudden split of the country on June 22, 1940 into Nazi-controlled and Vichy-ruled territories, everything was turned on end: new edicts against the Jews were almost weekly posted. And what once seemed impossible appeared every day to become a shocking reality which these families suddenly had to face, some of them breaking up, sending the children and one parent into relative safety in the Vichy territory, while the other remained behind—often facing arrest and imprisonment—to close up affairs or to follow when a safe haven had been reached.

     If Moorehead’s work begins as what might seem a slow-rolling narrative of some of individuals directly affected by these radical changes, it quickly moves, with ever great urgency, into an almost breathtaking adventure tale as these individuals and the society as a whole quickly discover that, if at first the Pétain led government seemed to me more tolerant with regard to its citizen Jews, they were equally in jeopardy.

     As we learned after the war, Jews were hidden in various places throughout France, particularly with the Vichy region; and others were helped to escape through Switzerland and Spain. Yet large numbers of French Jews, particularly as Eichmann and others in Germany demanded more and more roundups—to which Pétain and others readily capitulated—were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz, Belsen, and other camps; if at first these included primarily “outside” European Jews who had escaped to France from various countries, by the end of the war the steady trainloads of children, middle-aged, and older Jews included nearly anyone the Gestapo and the French Vichy government could ferret out. And the people who hid them were equally arrested and sent off to prisons with few proper accommodations (no plumbing, little food, in many cases not even beds) and with high death-rates. Particularly after the Allied attacks in November 1942 on northern Africa, which led the Germans to retaliate by marching into Vichy territory, the attacks on Jews, immigrants and French citizens both increased, as Jews were arrested and sent away at greater and greater rates.

    Most of this has been well-documented in the hundreds of books of World War II and Vichy France. But what Village of Secrets reveals is quite startlingly different from the history of the country in general: representing such astounding exceptions that, after reading this book, one feels a bit as he or she has actually participated in history itself, particularly since this is clearly the most extensive recounting of the events ever before published.

     In one small region of Vichy France, in the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in the mountains of the Eastern Massif Central, something remarkable happened. There a protestant pastor, André Trocmé, with his wife Magda and their three young children began a revolution that was to change everything we know about French history. A strong supporter of non-violence, living among generations of Calvinist, Huguenot-inspired sects, and Darbyists protestants, Trocmé preached to his worshipers the ideas not only of pacifism, but a concept that came to be described as a “conspiracy of good.” Already aligned through religious readings to the Old Testament teachings, these quiet, almost silent families, who themselves had through the centuries suffered their own forms of persecution, determined to take in Jewish, Spanish-Republican, and other endangered children and adults.

     The small Trocmé hometown of Chambon-sur-Lignon had already become known for its healthy summer air, and had built large hotels to cater to children and their parents who suffered from chronic asthma and lung diseases. In winter the snow cover made the community, approachable primarily through a single small rail line, almost impassable.

 

    For all these reasons the location was quickly perceived by the numerous brave individuals and organizations that had already banded together to help save children and adults from Vichy prisons as a possible destination. But even they might not have imagined what soon would transpire.

     Not only were Trocmé, local innkeepers, teachers, and authorities willing to help, but numerous local farmers, shop-keepers, and clergymen in small towns such as Maze-Samt-Voy, La Tavas, Tence, Les Vastres, and elsewhere in the region joined in. Farmers, both Protestant and Catholic, willingly housed numerous children, mingling them, in some cases, with their own families. Priests such as Daniel Curtet in Fay-Sur-Lignon, Roland Leenhardt in Tence, and Marcel Jeannet in Mazet, along with a few Catholic leaders actively supported—in some cases even more radically committed than Trocmé—the underground activities. Rescuers within this region and from elsewhere, such as Mirelle Philip, Madeleine Dreyfus, Georges and Lily Garel, Liliane Klein-Leibert, Georges Loinger, and André Salomon (most of these working with the Organisation de Secours aux Enfants, OSE), set up connections, links, and codes to bring children to the region and, when fear grew near the end of the war that the Gestapo was moving in on the Plateau operations, creating methods of escape and plans to sneak the children over the Swiss border. Forgers like Oscar Rosowsky created new passports and other papers; doctors such as Dr. Le Forestier offered medical services; boy scout leaders led the children on hiking and camping trips to keep them fit; and the mayors of the small towns not only “looked the other way,” but actively participated in the cover ups. In some cases, it appears, even Vichy and German authorities collaborated with the underground figures by warning them and failing to carry out Nazi demands.

      A remarkable school, the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole, was set up in Chambon, teaching several languages, philosophy, religion, literature, and numerous other subjects, some of its professors being illegal Jews and outlawed figures themselves. Even a rabbi taught at the school; and in another community a Jewish educational group was established.

      Trocmé’s bravery and sometimes fool-hardy outspokenness, as well as his village’s exceptional activities, have been well known for several years; what Moorehead reveals are the intricacies, for better and worse, of that commitment and, more importantly, the fact that the entire region was filled with equally brave, and sometimes even more daring individuals—all of whom together saved thousands from capture and possible extermination.

      Detailing the vast network of these underground activities, Village of Secrets valiantly succeeds in separating myth from fact. Although at one time was estimated that 5,000 people may have been saved in the Haute Loire, Moorehead suggests it was more likely from 800 to 1,000, with perhaps 3,000 more passing through, and taken away to safety. The truth is just as astounding! That these small, isolated communities should have contained a population so like-minded in their humanistic values and equally tight-lipped about their activities in a time of so little food and so many personal threats to their lives is almost beyond imagination. Yet few of the natives, at War’s end, felt like they had done anything out of the ordinary.

     Everyone who went through the experience was changed, some children finding it difficult after the war to reintegrate into the Jewish community, others becoming notable figures in Israel, the United States, and other nations to which they scattered after the Holocaust. But all felt blessed just to be among the saved few of the 8,000-10,000 Jewish children who survived the German occupation of France! Pierre Bloch, one of the children central to the book’s narrative, now living in a kibbutz in Lebanon, expresses his wonderment of this experience: “We lived a very big adventure, an exceptional moment in time and place. It was something extraordinary to be young, engaged at a moment when France was so dark. There was something in the air, in the spirit of the people, that none of us ever forgot. All my life I have tried to live up to that moment.”

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2014

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2014-15) [on-line].