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

Author:Peter Grose
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Published: 2014-07-31T07:00:00+00:00

11

Smugglers

The money that was smuggled to the Plateau from Switzerland appears to have been delivered by a relay team rather than a single courier. As already mentioned, one of the most important rules in any clandestine operation is to keep all the parts separate and make sure each member of the team knows as little as possible about the rest. So Catherine Cambessédès has no idea to this day how money travelled between Geneva and Lyon. She would simply receive a message consisting of not much more than an address to go to, and a password. That was all she needed. The people at the first address would brief her on the next step, and so on. That kept to a minimum the amount of information that could be dragged out of her by the Gestapo if she was caught.

This trip was less dangerous than the trip to the maquis, because there were no guns involved. I was given an address in Lyon and I went there. You got to wherever you were sent and said a password so they would know you were genuine … They gave me a suitcase that had money in it. I have no idea how much. It could have been ten francs or a million. I sat on it all the way home. The train was full so there were no seats. I saw a friend of mine on the train, and he sat on the other end of the suitcase. I’m pretty sure the money came from Charles Guillon in Geneva. I delivered it to Camp de Joubert in Le Chambon, and Joubert was Charles Guillon’s baby. I handed the money over to somebody there, probably Charly Durand. He belonged to one of the families living at Joubert. Getting back to Le Chambon always meant safety. In Lyon, or Saint-Étienne, I didn’t know anybody. But in Le Chambon, if anything happened, I knew plenty of places to hide. I was always anxious to get back there. I remember being scared. If a German walked by I’d think: Oh, dear!

Catherine never kept a record of any of these missions, so it is impossible to know how many courier trips she made, but she thinks it was at least ten and maybe as many as twenty—to Lyon, to Valence, to Nîmes, wherever the Resistance asked her to go. Everything she brought back was incriminating, and could be easily linked to the Resistance. If she had been caught she would certainly have been arrested, and the penalties for aiding the Resistance were dire, including death or deportation.

Things didn’t always go smoothly.

I was in the Lyon train station one night and it was hot as hell. Fresh from Le Chambon where there was no hanky-panky, I said: ‘I’m going outside to get some fresh air.’ A man followed me out, not a lot of people as I expected. I got into a train because I thought I could sleep on a seat. He followed me in there. It was obvious what he was going to do.

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