The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide Read online

  The

  Greatest Escape

  For the people of the Plateau, yesterday and today, whose quiet courage and unfailing decency prove that yes, we can. With special thanks to my wife, Roslyn, whose fluent French helped me from the beginning to conduct interviews with French eyewitnesses from the Plateau. Further thanks to my old school friend Winton Higgins, who first gave me the idea for this book.

  Other books by Peter Grose

  An Awkward Truth

  A Very Rude Awakening

  The

  Greatest

  Escape

  HOW ONE FRENCH COMMUNITY SAVED THOUSANDS OF LIVES FROM THE NAZIS

  PETER GROSE

  First published by

  Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2014

  3–5 Spafield Street

  20 Park Plaza

  Clerkenwell, London

  Boston

  EC1R 4QB, UK

  MA 02116, USA

  Tel: +44 (0)20 7239 0360

  Tel: (888) BREALEY

  Fax: +44 (0)20 7239 0370

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  www.nicholasbrealey.com

  © Peter Grose 2014

  The right of Peter Grose to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN: 978-1-85788-626-9

  eISBN: 978-1-85788-927-7

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the

  British Library.

  Internal design by Lisa White

  Maps by Janet Hunt

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Printed in Finland by WS Bookwell.

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Introduction

  Prologue

  PART I PREPARATION

  1 Pastors

  2 War

  3 Camps

  PART II REFUGE

  4 Jews

  5 Fun

  6 Rebellion

  PART III OCCUPATION

  7 Fresh blood

  8 Forgers

  9 Arrest

  10 Switzerland

  11 Smugglers

  12 Germans

  PART IV RESISTANCE

  13 Violence

  14 Invasion

  PART V LIBERATION

  15 Guns

  16 Victory

  Conclusion

  Whatever happened to … ?

  Appendix 1: Huguenots

  Appendix 2: The weapons of the spirit

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  The drive to the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the hilly Auvergne region of central-eastern France, brings back childhood memories of those never-ending car trips peppered with the question Are we there yet? The 80-kilometre journey from Saint-Étienne, the nearest city of any consequence, starts on a broad national highway. The route soon narrows down to a local departmental road, the twisting and almost deserted D103, which scrambles up through hills, following the course of the River Lignon. Towards the end of this road, the trees give way to vast panoramas across green fields. These are the pastures of the plateau of Vivarais-Lignon. The joy of the drive is the scenery, which is stunningly beautiful, with towering dark forests lining the first part of the route, followed, in spring, by wild forget-me-nots along the verges, while vivid yellow Scotch broom flowers light up the fields and hillsides beyond. In winter it is a different story: the road disappears under treacherous snow, with only some slim poles to mark where the road ends and the ditch begins.

  The villages of the Plateau are few, and usually far between. This is Huguenot country, and the Protestants fully live up to their French stereotype. The houses are built of grey granite supporting thick slate roofs, with none of the flashes of colour that distinguish the sunny houses of Provence or the cheerful chalets of the French skiing resorts in the mountains across the River Rhône. In the villages of the Plateau, few windows have the traditional flowerboxes with bright geraniums. These are solid, grey houses, and nothing flamboyant disturbs their serenity. They give the impression of being occupied by equally solid people, honest and hard-working, a world away from the bright lights of Paris, or the hedonistic bedlam of the Côte d’Azur. This is not wine country, or even food country. (None of the modest handful of restaurants, bars and cafés in Le Chambon is ever likely to trouble the Michelin inspectors.)

  At the small village of La Fayolle, about three kilometres outside Le Chambon, there is a graceful old farmhouse close to the road. At the time of writing, it was being lovingly restored by a young couple, Philippe and Aziza Mariotte, who run part of it as a bed and breakfast (chambre d’hôte in French) known as L’Aulne. In the years between 1940 and 1944, the farmhouse offered a different kind of hospitality—not quite as comfortable, and a great deal more dangerous.

  The buildings of L’Aulne form a U-shape. The Mariottes live in one wing and the bedrooms of the B&B occupy another. Across the courtyard from the Mariottes’ home, and still part of the same U-shape, is a large stone barn. At one end there is a tiny doorway, leading to a couple of equally tiny, linked storerooms, not much bigger than two large cupboards.

  Today the storerooms are piled with junk: ancient bicycles, discarded furniture, a couple of window-frames, an old metal jug. The wooden panelling on the walls has come away in places. Cobwebs festoon the beams and the ceiling. The second room looks impossibly small for someone to sleep in, let alone live in. The entry room looks even more cramped, surely too small a workspace for a pair of forgers.

  Yet in these two storerooms, and in scattered barns, farmhouses, spare rooms, hostels, guesthouses, hotels and school dormitories, literally thousands of human beings survived who might otherwise have been murdered. In the years between 1940 and 1944, something extraordinary happened here and in hundreds of farmhouses like it. In those dark days of World War II, human decency was in short supply. But on the Plateau, it triumphed.

  Peter Grose

  March 2014

  PROLOGUE

  Oscar Rosowsky’s childhood was nothing if not exotic. He came from a family of White Russian Jews, originally from the town of Bobruysk, 600 kilometres southwest of Moscow, in Byelorussia. Oscar’s grandfather had made the family fortune, building a substantial business exporting oak wood.

  There was enough money to pay for graduate studies for Oscar’s father, so he moved to Riga, the capital of nearby Latvia. Graduate studies were a serious privilege: higher education was not for Jews in Tsarist Russia. After the Russian revolution, Oscar’s father settled in Latvia and took Latvian citizenship. In 1921 he married Oscar’s mother in the Latvian beach resort town of Libau.

  Oscar’s grandfather had planned carefully for his three sons. The oldest son was placed in charge of one branch of the family timber business, in the port town of Danzig, then part of Germany; the youngest son managed another branch in Edinburgh, Scotland; Ruben Rosowsky, the middle son and Oscar’s fat
her, took charge in Berlin. Oscar was born in Berlin in 1923.

  Oscar’s family kept their Latvian citizenship, but in Berlin they led a very Russian life. They spoke nothing but Russian at home, though Oscar never learned to read or write Russian. At school, he learned to write as well as speak German. The Nazi Party was on the rise, and anti-Semitism was widespread in Germany; however, the family made no attempt to conceal their Jewish identity. It was barely visible anyway: they were liberal rather than strict or Orthodox Jews. Oscar Rosowsky remembers a visit from his grandfather to Berlin when the family observed the Passover ceremony and ate the Passover meal, but in general Oscar’s father stayed away from the synagogue, doing no more than popping in occasionally for Yom Kippur.

  These were golden days for the Rosowskys. Germany’s Weimar Republic was breaking all records for financial catastrophe, and the German currency famously collapsed in 1923. Anyone with foreign currency was king, and the Rosowskys, whose business was exporting timber, had access to hard currency. They lived in a furnished six-room apartment in Berlin’s fashionable Charlottenburg district, rented from a Prussian Army officer down on his luck (he and his wife slept behind the kitchen). Young Oscar spent his primary school years surrounded by gilt antique furniture. His parents’ social life included throwing a succession of extravagant parties.

  Although this was the period of Hitler’s rise to power, the Rosowskys’ Jewishness caused no problems. As far as their German friends and neighbours were concerned, they were Latvians, and Latvians were like brothers to Germans. The family’s wealth even spared Oscar some pain at school. At the strict boys primary school he attended, one of the teachers kept two canes, which he soaked in a humidifier to inflict maximum pain on boys who irritated him. But the public beatings were reserved for poor children. Oscar’s family was rich, and he emerged from primary school unscathed.

  The lavish lifestyle could not last. Ruben Rosowsky had always been wayward. He was seen as the enfant terrible of the family, a prankster who had scandalised his parents as a child by turning up for meals wearing peasant boots with a wooden spoon tucked into the side. He was the practical joker of the family, the clown. He was also no businessman, and not even a successful business could support his extravagance. In 1933, he went bust. Hitler had already become chancellor, but it was not the threat of Nazism that chased Oscar’s father out of Berlin. Instead Ruben skipped town a step ahead of his creditors and headed for the French Riviera, where there were casinos with plenty of rich players. The three Rosowskys, father, mother and Oscar, moved to a much more modest two-room apartment in Nice.

  Oscar’s mother, Mira, was, according to her son, vivid, attractive, resourceful and indomitable. She quickly realised that, if the family was going to eat, she would need to be the breadwinner. She trained as a milliner, and worked from home, copying designs from Vogue magazine and selling her hats to the Russian Jewish community on the Côte d’Azur. It was not exactly lucrative, but it paid the rent and bought the groceries. Ruben did the shopping and cooked some memorably good meals. When he could muster up the stake money from the tiny allowance his family sent him, he gambled. If he won, he bought Oscar a peach Melba. If he lost … well, there was always next month’s allowance. One room of the apartment housed the parents’ bed, a small kitchen and Mira’s worktable. Oscar slept on a sofa in the other room, which doubled as a showroom for the hats.

  Oscar arrived in Nice with barely two words of French. But thanks to a superb teacher, Demoiselle Soubie—‘the sort of person one should fall on one’s knees before,’ he says—he quickly fitted in. The school building even gave him a brief aftertaste of the luxurious life he had led in Berlin: called the Imperial Park College, it was an old palace with huge rooms and a giant marble hall. Each room had two balconies, and the students could peer out and watch the King of Sweden playing tennis below them. The Côte d’Azur in the 1930s was a cosmopolitan place, packed with White Russians and other refugees, rich and poor. One of the other students, Paul Franck, taught Oscar French by sitting him down on the slope alongside the college and getting him to recite the irreverent plays and novels of Courteline. Paul Franck’s Jewish father, also Paul Franck, had managed the Olympia music hall in Paris, where performers like Mistinguett basked in the spotlight. In Nice, Oscar Rosowsky was surrounded by colourful and sophisticated people, living in a pleasantly sunny and largely tolerant city.

  Politics was inescapable here, too. In a world polarised between the far-left communists and the far-right fascists, there was plenty to argue about and even demonstrate against. Some teachers at the school were Pétainists, supporting the Vichy government of ‘Unoccupied’ France led by Marshal Philippe Pétain. Others were socialists or communists, ready to defend their beliefs with their fists. Oscar’s language coach and school friend Paul Franck lost two teeth in a political brawl.

  Oscar also discovered the Boy Scouts, and they became a passion. He rose to become a troop leader. The overall head of his troop was the aristocratic Jean-Claude Pluntz de Potter, a baron from his father’s side, whose petite Jewish mother was born Schalit. Jean-Claude’s family sympathy for the plight of Jews was soon to play a vital role in Oscar’s life.

  So we have a picture of young Oscar—slightly built, wearing spectacles, studious rather than one of the lads, but sharp-witted and street smart. He spoke three languages fluently: French, German and Russian. He had known rich, and he now knew poor. He says he was a lazy student, but that did not stop him passing the second and higher stage of his baccalauréat, clearing a path for him to go on to university. The Boy Scouts had taught him a degree of self-reliance, and some of the secrets of survival in the wild. He was now eighteen years old, the year was 1942, and so far life had been safe and fairly uneventful. Then the noose began to tighten.

  • • •

  After France’s defeat in 1940, the northern half of France and the whole Atlantic coast was occupied by Germany. Under the terms of an armistice signed on 22 June 1940, the ‘Unoccupied’ or ‘Free’ southern half, including Nice, was managed from the central French town of Vichy by a government led by France’s Marshal Pétain, a World War I hero. It was, by any standards, a puppet government. As well as general collaboration, military and civil, with the Germans, the Vichy government undertook to participate wholeheartedly in Hitler’s persecution of Jews. This led to the passing of a swathe of vicious anti-Jewish laws, which often went beyond the anti-Jewish legislation in the German Occupied Zone to the north, or even in Germany itself. On 3 October 1940 the Vichy government passed a law that excluded Jews from jobs in the public service and parts of the private sector. The next day it passed a law authorising the immediate internment of all foreign Jews. As Latvians, the Rosowsky family were targets.

  In this period, the Jewish population in the Unoccupied Zone lived in a state of quite extraordinary ignorance and denial. Although the French internment camps began to fill up with Jews from late 1940 onwards—all of them rounded up under the grotesque euphemism ‘gathering the families’—news was tightly controlled, travel and communication were restricted, and people simply didn’t know what was going on. This was backed up by a general sense of it-can’t-happen-here. But in 1942 that all changed.

  By then, Oscar Rosowsky had already lost out to the numerus clausus, a Vichy law which restricted Jewish entry to the professions, most notably law but also medicine. No university course could accept more than 2 per cent Jewish students. Oscar wanted to train as a doctor. He was philosophical about the missed opportunity. ‘I couldn’t hope to study medicine because of the numerus clausus,’ he says. ‘But in any case, I don’t think my parents could have afforded to send me to study in Aix-en-Provence.’ So at the end of the summer of 1941, after passing both stages of his baccalauréat, Oscar Rosowsky accepted a job with a local Nice tradesman, repairing typewriters and mimeograph machines, a form of printing press. His special beat was the local administrative district, or prefecture; he cycled there two or three times a week with
his toolbox and cleaning brushes to clean the machines and sort out any problems. The various prefectures were the ultimate source of all the papers needed to function in Vichy France. Identity cards, driving licences, ration coupons, residence permits, travel permits: all originated from the prefecture. Oscar Rosowsky came to know the machines that produced these documents literally inside out.

  By early 1942 the nightmare for Jews in Vichy France had well and truly begun. On 2 June 1941, the Vichy government proclaimed its oppressive Statut des Juifs (Jewish Statute), at the same time announcing a census requiring all Jews to declare themselves. The census created a handy list of Jews to be barred from jobs or deported, as well as a register of Jewish property to be confiscated. All French people over the age of sixteen were required to carry an identity card, including their photograph and their current address. Jews in the northern Occupied Zone had the word Juif (Jew) stamped on their identity card. Production of a card stamped Juif was a licence to officialdom to hassle the bearer in every possible way.

  Food was rationed. So was tobacco. And clothing. Anyone who carried a Juif identity card could expect problems with all three. There were random checks. ‘Your papers, monsieur?’ Anyone who failed to produce the appropriate identity card could be arrested on the spot. A Jew—especially a non-French Jew—caught in this way could expect deportation to Germany and beyond. Most who were deported never returned.

  Jews were also liable to have property confiscated, without compensation. Some old scores—or simply jealousies—were settled as neighbour denounced neighbour. He’s Jewish. She’s Jewish. They’re foreigners. Next would be a raid, followed by arrest and deportation.

  • • •