The Children of la Hille by Reed Walter W.;

Author:Reed, Walter W.; [Reed, Walter W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815653387
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2016-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

28. Siblings at La Hille, 1942. From left: Addi and Lotte Nussbaum, Ruth and Betty Schütz, Cilly Stückler and cousin Gerti Lind, and Norbert Stückler. From the author’s personal collection.

Next to attempt an escape—actually for the second time—was Addi (Eddie) Nussbaum, whose sister Lotte had been the second of the colony to cross safely into Switzerland one year before. Addi, a very bright and also cautious eighteen-year-old, had been one of the two young men who mistrusted the traitorous Spanish Pyrénées guide in June and thus avoided being caught and deported. His rescuer would be Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet, herself only twenty-seven years old and at La Hille since May 1943.

Anne-Marie tended to scoff at the attitudes and regulations advanced by the management of the Secours Suisse and by the higher Swiss authorities, especially those that forbade helping her protégés to escape. The several daring rescue activities that she was about to launch with Addi’s escape violated the edict drafted by Col. Hugo Remund and Edouard de Haller in February 1943 and announced to all Swiss personnel in Vichy France. It demanded “strict adherence to French regulations and required the resignation of any Swiss staff member who was opposed to that host country’s actions and would thus compromise the prestige of the Swiss Red Cross and of our country.”42

The rescue of almost eighteen-year-old Addi Nussbaum would be only the first of several violations of this order by the courageous and somewhat insubordinate Anne-Marie (Im Hof) Piguet. The young Swiss woman had grown up near the French border in the hilly Jura region, some twenty miles north of Geneva, where her father was a forester. He knew every byway in the nearby wooded area known as the “Risoux.” Anne-Marie collaborated with an anti-German twenty-four-year-old member of the French resistance movement named Victoria Cordier who helped dozens of refugees escape across this heavily guarded border terrain near her mother’s home.43

In mid-September Anne-Marie and Addi left La Hille for the nearest train station at St. Jean-de-Verges for the ride to Toulouse. From there they continued to Lyon. Anne-Marie recalled that Addi had fake ID papers but she feared that Addi’s accent, his features, and the not-so-professional fake papers might spell disaster if they were stopped. All went smoothly and she left Addi behind at a Secours Suisse children’s colony in Montluel, not far from Lyon, where Anne-Marie had been a staff member before she came to La Hille. She would go ahead to the border by train and bus and telephone for him to follow if all was in order.44

“I telephone Addi and repeat the directions for getting to Champagnole. The bus arrives but Addi is not on it. Madeleine [Victoria Cordier’s sister] promises to watch for the next arriving busses and I leave with the others [Victoria’s family members],” Anne-Marie recalls in her book. She describes the journey to the house of Victoria’s mother, which was located in the forbidden travel zone not far from the Swiss border. After staying overnight, the group

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