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

Luxembourg, some Dutchrefugees and, naturally, French refugees. I  have an entire refugee camp of Protestant Belgians. In spite of the bad times, there is not too much disease among the crowd of refugees.
    Not to put too fine a point on it, Guillon seems to be exaggerating the refugee numbers, though not the overall problem. There is no evidence that ‘many thousands’ of refugees had arrived in Le Chambon by July 1940. Among other things, it is hard to see how they could have got there in the first place, or where they could be accommodated after they arrived. However, given that Guillon’s role, agreed between the international YMCA and the French government, included looking after refugees, it is highly likely that he began steering some of them towards the Plateau as early as the summer of 1940. So sometime before July the Plateau’s role as a World War II refuge had begun. At the time, the village of Le Chambon had a population of about 900. With the arrival of the tourists in summer, this number usually swelled to around 4500. If, as we have heard, the ‘majority of the tourist population’ stayed on, that would add perhaps 2000 extra people. They were now being joined by a trickle of refugees, which would soon become a flood. In July 1940 the combination of overstaying tourists and new refugees could indeed have run to ‘thousands’. So although Guillon’s claim might have benefited from rewording, it was probably grounded in reality. At various times, Guillon named seven national groups in this first wave: French, Spanish, Dutch, Belgian, Austrian, Luxembourgeois and German. He made no mention of Jews.

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Camps
    The word ‘camp’ has an appalling resonance in any story of the Holocaust. Yet without the internment camps set up by the Vichy government, events on the Plateau might never have taken the direction they did.
    As we have seen, well before the outbreak of World War II, the French had set up camps to accommodate Spanish refugees from the civil war. The Papeterie camp near Tence on the Plateau was one example. By the end of 1939 it was empty again, and sometime around May 1940 the French government decided to use it as an internment camp for enemy aliens. On 22 June some 70 German civilians were locked up there. This was the day Pétain signed the Armistice, and in the general confusion the commandant of the camp decided to look the other way while all 70 escaped. The local gendarmes from Freycenet, Tence and Yssingeaux quickly nabbed 43 of them, but the remaining 27 were still on the loose eight days later.
    A representative of the German embassy inspected the camp on 29 July 1940 and asked the non-Jewish Germans if they would like to be repatriated; a few said yes and were packed off on trains home. On 25 August another 132 German civilians arrived at the Papeterie. They were mostly anti-Nazis who had fled from Germany to France,and they were predominantly Jews. So the non-Jewish numbers shrank while the Jewish numbers swelled, until the camp was almost entirely filled with German Jews.
    Conditions in the Papeterie camp were generally benign, but the same could not be said of the camps elsewhere in France. In 1939 the French had built one of their largest camps at Gurs, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, about 40 kilometres from the Spanish border. It was created to hold refugees from the Spanish Civil War. The Gurs camp may have begun its life as a well-intentioned rudimentary shelter for desperate refugees, but it quickly became little better than a concentration camp. It was already filled to bursting with Spanish refugees when, in early 1940, well before the German invasion, the French government rounded up 7000 ‘enemy aliens’, many of whom were German Jews who had fled from Nazi persecution, and locked them up in Gurs along with the Spanish.
    After the German invasion of France, the German Schutzstaffel (popularly known as the SS) added to the problem with one of their nuttier schemes.