Read Voices from the Dark Years Online
Authors: Douglas Boyd
By chance, on a bus, Renée discovered herself sitting next to the man who had brought back from Montauban the 150 blank ID cards. Shatta Simon’s brother Dr Djigo Hirsch had been an eminent Parisian radiologist until debarred from practising medicine. With the help of mayors and local gendarmes, he and his wife had managed to find homes for eighty boys and girls aged 18 to 20, mostly with false papers – although once in the country, where the local gendarmes gave warning of any search and there was time to hide in the woods, many had no need of identity papers, providing they kept out of sight of strangers. However, all of them needed regular deliveries of ration cards. To help him out, Renée took the risk of persuading her uncle’s estate steward to employ three of the older boys on the estate – with no idea that she was placing them in grave danger.
On the morning of 18 October Djigo and his wife were arrested in the village of St-Michel near Auvillar. Their small son was safely in Moissac when the Germans arrived, but Madame Hirsch, who had few illusions of their eventual fate, took advantage of the diversion caused by Djigo running away and getting seriously shot in the arm to thrust her baby into the arms of a neighbour’s daughter, so that the infant should not be taken away with them. Also rounded up was a girl with false papers living in their house and Djigo’s assistant.
Hurrying down to the village with Françoise, Renée arrived in time to watch from a distance as Djigo was thrown into a truck, bleeding heavily from his wound and his face unrecognisable from blows of rifle buts. Seeing the house full of Germans in uniform and plain clothes making a thorough search that lasted until 5 p.m., they ran back to Château St-Roch and telephoned Shatta in Moissac to sound the alarm. She immediately called EIF’s founder, Robert Gamzon, with the message, ‘Djigo is very ill. He has been taken by ambulance to hospital in Toulouse.’ In the simple code they used, because the Milice monitored phone calls,
ill
meant ‘arrested’ and
ambulance
meant ‘taken away’.
Hospital
meant ‘by the Germans’; had it been by French police, she would have said
clinic.
20
Gamzon cycled to Moissac, arriving at dusk. Nothing could be done to help those arrested, but he and Shatta agreed that the urgent priority was to check whether the Germans had found Djigo’s filing system. If so, the eighty children were as good as dead, for it contained their true names and whereabouts, together with their ration cards. Gamzon set off on his second long bicycle ride of the day with a helper named Roger, who, once they were on the road to St-Michel, told him that he had not wanted to alarm Shatta further by telling her about Djigo’s wound. His other, more vital, piece of information was that neighbours had heard Djigo mutter ‘Tidy the
cagibi
’, as he was hauled bleeding onto the truck. It had to be a clue.
Cagibi
could mean a box room or storage place. But where? Surely not in his house, since the Germans had spent eight hours searching it.
At St-Michel the mayor was terrified Djigo would betray him under torture, and refused to let them break the seals the Germans had placed on the Hirsch home after threatening to shoot the neighbour entrusted with the key if there was any sign of entry when they returned. The only good omen was that none of the children accommodated nearby had so far been picked up. After dusk, Gamzon pretended to set off back to Moissac, but rendezvoused with Roger and two other boys outside Djigo’s house by imitating owl calls to identify each other. Breaking in without leaving any sign was not easy. Once inside, careful to show no lights and make no noise, they found clothes and food for the eighty children thrown all over the floor, the contents of every drawer emptied on top. After two hours of fruitless searching, one of the boys lifted a heavy old door in the attic and found the box of files Djigo had hidden on hearing the Germans arrive. Gamzon and Robert cycled back to Moissac through the curfew to give Shatta the news that the children were safe – for the moment.
On 21 October Klaus Barbie was cheated of several victims. Arrested with Jean Moulin was Raymond Aubrac, whose wife Lucie had been so angered by the anti-Semitic exhibition in Lyon. With extraordinary courage and initiative, she devised a plan to rescue him, based on a huge gamble: that his false identity as ‘Claude Ermulin’ had not been broken under torture.
Two days after the arrests, a smartly dressed young woman calling herself Ghislaine de Barbantine asked to see Barbie at the École de Santé. He was smartly dressed, she afterwards recalled, in a light summer suit and pink shirt, and had a woman with him, as usual. Lucie’s first attempt to see her husband failed, but she returned on 21 October and succeeded in meeting Barbie again by dint of bribes to French staff working for the Gestapo. When he asked what she wanted, Lucie cried hysterically that she was ashamed to be carrying a child by ‘Ermulin’ and wanted to tell him what she thought of him. As she had astutely deduced, the idea of a wronged woman tongue-lashing a detainee so appealed to Barbie’s perverted sense of humour that he sent for prisoner ‘Ermulin’. Apparently unaffected by his pitiful state after four months in Montluc prison, Lucie raved at him that whatever was happening served him right as far as she was concerned, but she needed a name for her child and expected him ‘to do the decent thing’.
‘Ermulin’ was hardly in a condition to marry anyone. The whole point of the dangerous pantomime was to have him brought to the medical school for the confrontation. As the closed van was returning him and Barbie’s victims of the day to Montluc prison after interrogation, two car loads of
résistants
closed in; automatic fire from silenced weapons killed the men in the driver’s cab and mowed down the guards who jumped out, save one, who escaped.
By risking her own life, Lucie Aubrac had saved that of her husband.
21
N
OTES
1.
The full story of Faytout’s group is told by survivor P. Mignon in his book
De Castillon à Sachsenhausen
(Bordeaux: Publications Résistance Unie en Gironde, 1990.
2.
The story of the Bouchou family’s involvement in Faytout’s group comes from interviews with Cathérine Bouchou conducted by the author.
3.
Mignon,
De Castillon
à
Sachsenhausen
.
4.
Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 2, p. 58.
5.
Martin manuscript.
6.
A. Morris,
Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed
(New York /Oxford: Berg 1992), p. 82.
7.
Marshall,
All the King’s Men
, p. 292.
8.
Ibid., p. 298.
9.
Ibid., p. 253.
10.
M.R.D. Foot,
SOE in France
(London: HMSO, 1966), p. 302.
11.
Facsimile in Laval,
Unpublished Diary
, Appendix V.
12.
Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 2, p. 43.
13.
Webster,
Pétain’s Crimes
, pp. 232–5.
14.
See
www.lamaisondesevres.otg/cel/cel5.html
.
15.
English edition,
I, Pierre Seel, deported homosexual
(London: Basic Books, 1995).
16.
Ibid., pp. 42–3.
17.
Documents at Natzwiller camp.
18.
Krivopissko (ed.),
La Vie à en mourir
, pp. 226–30.
19.
From interview with the author.
20.
De Monbrison,
Memoirs.
21.
Paris,
Unhealed Wounds
, pp. 98–9.
19
Foreseeing the likelihood of a permanent German presence in Moissac, Shatta and Bouli decided in October 1943 to spirit away more than 180 children living in the
colonie
and find them safer homes under false names. Brothers and sister were forbidden to tell each other their new identities, so that one could not be forced to betray the other. Where possible, initials were kept the same, to account for tags sewn into favourite clothing. Some were sent hundreds of kilometres as ‘child refugees from the bombing of northern towns and cities’, with staff at their new schools sometimes brought into the secret and sometimes not.
At a convent school in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, between Montauban and Toulouse, 12-year-old Suzette, whose name was now Marie-Suzanne Floret, found it hard not to giggle when seated at the same lunch table as her older brother Daniel, now called Denis Forestier. Yet despite the company of three other girls from Moissac, the strain of her double life was such that she fell ill and had to be smuggled back to Moissac Hospital, where Dr Moles cared for her. Terrified of giving herself away, Suzette stayed mute throughout her stay. In addition to delivering fictitious sickness certificates to young men who would otherwise have been liable for the STO, Dr Moles also used his travel
Ausweis
and permit for petrol to transport wounded
résistants
in his little car.
More resilient children met up under their new identities pretending they had never met before, and then ‘made friends’. But life was never easy for 11-year-old Édith L. and five other girls boarding at the
collège
(middle school) of Ste-Foy-la-Grande on the banks of the Dordogne. At weekends the local children went home and gorged on whatever food was available, but the Moissac girls stayed in the school
pensionnat
, scavenging dustbins for rotten vegetables they ate out of sight in the toilets. Headmistress Madame Pécastaing had begged the mayor throughout the previous winter for kindling to light the classroom stoves and a new flagpole to replace one broken in a storm, so that each Monday the children could sing
La Marseillaise
beside it, not
Maréchal, nous voila!
Also, because the school’s bicycle had been stolen when the premises were occupied by the French army in June 1940, suppliers could no longer deliver food and other necessaries, so she had been borrowing the cleaning lady’s bike to do the school shopping, but this was no longer serviceable. Since her licence to use a
gazogène
car had been withdrawn, ‘Please Mr Mayor …’
1
Such was life for most French people by this stage. It is incredible that all the documents for each new identity were forged in time at Moissac, using official stamps, ID cards and ration tickets provided by the mayor’s secretary. As the last batch of children being taken to their new homes was driven across the Pont Napoléon in the all-purpose van of the Maison de Moissac, it passed the first incoming German vehicles. For their HQ the Germans commandeered premises in the rue du Pont, only 200m from the Maison de Moissac. When part of the middle school was also requisitioned, Andrée Giraud and four boys aged 15 tore out some of the electrical fittings in a spontaneous act of sabotage that had the headmaster terrified it would land him before a firing squad.