Village of Secrets is Caroline Moorehead’s second installment in a trilogy devoted the French Resistance. The first book, A Train in Winter, describes le Convoi des 31000, a group of French female Resistance fighters who were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Bent on group survival, the women of le Convoi des 31000 pooled resources, sharing food and shelter with weaker friends, and singing “le Marseillaise” whenever possible. In Village of Secrets, Moorehead turns her novelist’s eye to the mountains of Cévannes, where the villagers of le Chambon and the scattered hamlets along the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon risked everything to hide Jewish children.
In her work, Moorehead refers to le Chambon and the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon separately; this review will follow suit. Prior to World War II, this largely inaccessible area, serviced by a single locomotive, was a popular summer destination where tourists and tuberculosis sufferers partook of the natural beauty, fine food, and clear, dry air. Needy city children lodged with farmers, who offered structured lives of strenuous farm work in ample sunshine. However, brief, temperate summers invariably gave way to France’s coldest winters. From October until April, the area lay beneath thick snow.
The area’s very remoteness meant le Chambon and the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon were hospitable to breakaway Protestant sects of Darbyists and rarer Ravenists. Likening these groups to the Amish, Moorehead describes them as “sober, austere, [and] very private people.” Neither Darbyists nor Ravenists drank, smoked, danced, or openly worshipped. Fearing further persecution from the Catholic majority, the groups withdrew from society, cultivating a deep, habitual silence. Yet silence did not equal attentisme — the attitude of quiet, watchful waiting many French adopted during the war years. Protestant communities of le Chambon and the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon understood persecution firsthand, and the Nazi agenda horrified them.
It’s unknown who first thought to hide Jewish children in le Chambon and Le Vivarais-Lignon. Madeleine Dreyfus, General Secretary for the Organisation de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), was one of the first to ferry Jewish children into the mountains. Madeleine Barot, who worked with the relief group Cimande, rushed children from French internment camps up to le Chambon and Le Vivarais-Lignon. Many worked alongside them, including Georges Garel, also of the OSE, and his assistant Lily Tager, whom he later married.
Once in the mountains, many children attended school at Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole. Reich legislation, which forbade Jews from holding employment, lent the school an impressive roster of European professors. Decades later, alumni warmly recalled the classical education received there, along with the staff’s exceptional kindness. Education was more than a source of enlightenment; for both students and staff, Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole offered momentary escape.
Few children knew where their parents were. Some received letters from family members that abruptly ceased. A boy named Peter Feigl kept a diary addressed to his parents. Quotes from this document are heartbreaking: Peter is anxious, worried, fearful for “mes chers parents” (“my dear parents”). For a time, Peter stops writing. When he resumes, in 1944, he makes no further mention of his parents.
The area’s inaccessibility made it less of a target for police raids, though tragically they did occur. Often, villagers had warning, giving them time to hide Jews in attics, cellars, and the forest. French police were often of divided loyalties. Robert Bach, Prefect of the Haute Loire, often chose to ignore activity in le Chambon and Le Vivarais-Lignon. When German soldiers sent their wounded to convalesce at le Chambon’s Hôtel du Lignon, many noted the large numbers of neighborhood children. Curiously, none took action.
On several occasions, the French border patrol assisted passeurs smuggling Jews to the Swiss border. One policeman stopped a woman struggling with four small children. Placing a little girl on his bicycle handlebars, he led the group to safety. Another policeman stopped a passeur with four Jewish women, who were so terrified they forgot instructions to remain silent and pled for their lives. The policeman quietly told them to continue.
Against the panorama of world war, Village of Secrets shines with the actions of extraordinary individuals, whose bravery, generosity, and lack of self-interest strain belief. As she did in A Train in Winter, Moorehead threads individual narratives into a larger story of war. Her use of photographs, interviews, letters, and archival material breathes life into people. In Village of Secrets, they are no longer characters, their troubles in the distant past; they are alive, immediate, and their concerns urgent. The reader loses all objectivity, throwing her lot in with the Jews and those risking all the save them. This book is truly impossible to put down. Have a box of tissues handy.
Among the many remarkable personalities is Andre Trocmé, le Chambon’s Protestant minister. Ardently pacifist, Trocmé’s open defiance of the Vichy government led to his eventual arrest. American Virginia Hall joined the United States Special Operations Unit despite an artificial foot, which she dubbed the “aluminum puppy”. Undaunted, she parachuted into wartime France, where she wryly noted “Cuthbert” — her foot — was giving her trouble. Nevertheless, she worked with the Maquisards arranging weapons drops. Upon retirement in the United States, she refused to discuss her past.
In the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon village of Fay, Pastor Daniel Curtet, aged 25, wrote lively letters to his parents detailing the many “books” he sent and received. Curtet hid people in his Presbytery; a local woman sent soup. On Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish Holidays, Curtet held special services for Jews.
Nicole Weil, a young passeur, was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Offered the chance to become a camp worker, meaning she might avoid certain death. Weil refused. She had become attached to three small orphans and preferred to stay with them. When the children were sent to the gas chambers, Nicole accompanied them.
Then there are, of course, the children: Hanne Hirsch, who was deported to Gurs, France’s worst internment camp; “The Roanne Girls”, daughters of the tailors and seamstresses of that city, hidden on the plateau; Simon Liverant, who lost his entire family save for his brother, Jacques; Jacques Stulmacher, placed with a miserably unkind family who starved him; and Max Liebmann, who met Hanne in Gurs. After the war, that couple married and emigrated to New York City. Oscar Rosowsky discovered his expert forgery skills, and put them work falsifying all manner of documents throughout the war.
Finally, there is Sylvia Menker. Sylvia did not survive. She was gassed upon her arrival in Auschwitz in 1943. It was her first birthday.
The war’s end brought mixed emotions. Reunifying families, where possible, brought multiple difficulties. The return of biological parents wasn’t always welcome. Most parents surviving the camps were emotionally and physically fragile, making them strangers to their children. Communication was often hindered by language: assigned false identities and encouraged to speak only French, many children forgot their native tongues. Others had become attached to their protectors, who indeed loved them in return.
Many children were understandably troubled and acted out. The children’s nightmares and fear of abandonment confounded caregivers. Many feared uniforms. Others were impacted by the silent, forbidding households where they were hidden. A 12-year-old girl, sent alone to a Darbyist household, wrote of teaching herself to detach. Reunited with her family after the war, she was unable to shake that detachment. She described herself as a different person, no longer a child.
Jacques Liverant, only two years old when separated from his mother, became a bedwetter who cried incessantly. His caregivers threatened to send him away unless his 14-year-old brother Simon took action. Desperate, Simon threatened to “punish him, hit him hard until he stopped wetting the bed.” He was forced to act on his threats. Jacques never trusted Simon again.
Rescuers also had difficulties returning to peacetime life. Arguments flared over who did precisely what, whether honors were deserved or exploitative of a dark past. Andre Trocmé’s role has become highly disputed, while various books, films, and article argue over the truth. Nevertheless, the area was received a Righteous Among Nations designation in 1990. The honorable actions of those living in le Chambon and the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon are indisputable.
Both Village of Secrets and A Train in Winter bear your immediate reading attention, but each book does more than relate to the past. Together they are both excellent books and also instruction manuals for many problems that plague our world today, and for the future.