Village of Secrets by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

An unknown and unknowable oblivion

It was not only on the plateau, but across the whole of France, that the mood was changing. The early spring of 1943 was relatively mild. Even so, people were cold and hungry. The number of cases of TB was rising all the time, along with diabetes, typhus and scurvy. Lack of vitamin B and sugar was resulting in sudden deaths from malnutrition. Hospitals and chemists were running out of codeine, quinine, insulin, gauze, iodine and disinfectants of every kind. The welfare organisations, unable to meet the ever-greater demands on their resources, reported feeling ‘menaced by starvation’. There were now, said the Quakers, at least two million ‘seriously malnourished’ people in the cities, not so much because of a shortage of food, but because so much of it was going to the Germans and to the black market. Across the country, the French, angry with Vichy about the privations, were angry too about the pervasive repressions, the all-too-visible ill treatment of the Jews, the round-ups of their own young men, and the predatory militia recruits, swaggering around with newly acquired weapons. It gave strength to those bent on saving people.

Despite the savage reprisals, the attacks on the occupying forces by the Resistance were becoming bolder and better organised. In January 1943, the three principal resistance movements in the south – Combat, Franc-Tireur and Libération-Sud – had merged into Les Mouvements Unis de la Résistance. Henri Frenay, head of Combat, was often to be seen in le Chambon, staying at Les Ombrages with his sister, Mme Eyraud, just across the street from the convalescent Germans, all part of the curious inviolability of the plateau.

Since the execution of hostages seemed only to alienate the population, Eichmann ordered that the trains carrying people to the concentration and extermination camps, a more effective measure of control, be resumed. After a lapse of five months, during which the trains had been needed to carry men and supplies to the eastern front, the deportation of the Jews from France began once more.

February was a murderous month. A first round-up of Jews in Paris took away children – whose names had been found through lists held by the Jewish umbrella organisation the UGIF – the sick and the very elderly. Four 90-year-olds and 54 men and women in their eighties, taken from the Rothschild Hospital in Paris, as well as seven three-year-olds, were on the 49th convoi of the war to leave Drancy for Auschwitz. On arrival, a little girl called Sylvia Menkes was gassed; it was her first birthday. All but a very few of these new deportees were foreign Jews, but the net around the French Jews was drawing tighter all the time. By mid March, 49,000 people had been sent to the death camps; almost none were still alive. Plans were afoot to increase the number of new deportees to between 8,000 and 10,000 every week. Deportation, it was announced over the radio, was a question of ‘public hygiene’.

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