IHT : Spotlighting one of France's darkest days

Spotlighting one of France's darkest days

By David E. Gumpert | August 22, 2007

Sunday will mark the 65th anniversary of one of France's darkest days: On Aug. 26, 1942, French gendarmes fanned out across the unoccupied southern half of the country, on orders of German occupiers in the north, and began the roundup of 7,000 Jews, including children. By the end of that year more than 42,000 Jews had been sent from France to Auschwitz for extermination.

It's an anniversary that won't get much attention in France. Many French citizens either actively or passively collaborated with their German conquerors, and the nation has yet to fully confront this past.

But in the tiny southern village of Montegut, in the shadow of the Pyrenees, the events of that day are being recalled in a way that can provide lessons to the entire country on how to finally come to grips with this traumatic period. Montegut has recently opened a museum that examines the events in the village leading up to and following Aug. 26, 1942.

In a series of eight carefully designed placards, Montegut tells the story in words and photos of how 100 Jewish children from Germany and Austria, ages 3 to 17, hid in a château two kilometers outside the village. The exhibit doesn't lay blame. In merely telling the story in a non-judgmental way, it reflects the schizophrenic nature of France's experience with its German overseers.

The children arrived at the château in early 1941 under the auspices of the Swiss Red Cross. Montegut allowed several dozen of its new residents under age 12 to attend its school. When the children turned 18, making them subject to arrest by Vichy authorities, a few local farmers took them in as laborers.

All semblance of normalcy ended on Aug. 26, 1942. At about 4 a.m., about 50 French gendarmes forced themselves in to the château over the objections of a 30-year-old Swiss Red Cross nurse, Rosli Näf, who oversaw the children. The gendarmes called out the names of 39 children ages 15 and older and marched them onto buses. Several dozen Montegut residents stood watching the children walk in pairs the few hundred yards from the château to the buses, many with tears in their eyes. The police commander refused to say where the children were being taken.

With help from a sympathetic government bureaucrat, Näf eventually located the children at Le Vernet, a French transit camp 30 kilometers away - one of about a dozen the French constructed to hold arrested Jews. She arrived at the camp in a taxi and so surprised camp officials by marching in and demanding that the children be released (not many strangers pushed their way into these camps), that they let her remain in a small hut.

After five days of cajoling by Näf and a Swiss Red Cross colleague in Vichy, the French relented, and the children were left standing at a rail siding as hundreds of other Jewish inmates of Le Vernet were loaded onto box cars destined for Auschwitz.

The children returned to the château and would eventually go into more serious hiding before making efforts to escape to Switzerland and Spain, which Näf aided. Amazingly, 90 of the 100 children survived, and Näf and her colleague were later honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum.

For Montegut and its few hundred citizens, though, there were only years of silence, much as there was in the rest of France.

Then, in September 2000, about 40 of the children who had lived at Château de la Hille gathered there for a reunion, and invited Montegut officials and residents to participate in commemorative ceremonies at the château. These citizens admitted they knew little or nothing about the events that took place in their midst. They were so moved by meeting the survivors that the town's leaders resolved to devote half their small library to the museum.

At ceremonies on June 23, some 250 local residents, along with about a dozen survivors and their families, gathered to dedicate the new "Musée for the Children of Château de la Hille."

But the stars of the dedication ceremony were some 25 children, ages 8 to 10, who took turns reading the story of those terrible events. It had the feeling of the Passover reading of the Haggadah, in which the youngest children usually recite key parts of the story of the Jews' exodus from ancient Egypt.

In its unique approach to commemorating the terrible years of the occupation, Montegut has taken a path to healing that all of France can learn from.

David E. Gumpert is co-author, with his aunt, Inge Joseph Bleier, who was one of the children of the château, of the book, "Inge: A Girl's Journey Through Nazi Europe."