The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (2 page)

The lavish lifestyle could not last. Ruben Rosowsky had always been wayward. He was seen as the
enfant terrible
of the family, a prankster who had scandalised his parents as a child by turning up for meals wearing peasant boots with a wooden spoon tucked into the
side. He was the practical joker of the family, the clown. He was also no businessman, and not even a successful business could support his extravagance. In 1933, he went bust. Hitler had already become chancellor, but it was not the threat of Nazism that chased Oscar’s father out of Berlin. Instead Ruben skipped town a step ahead of his creditors and headed for the French Riviera, where there were casinos with plenty of rich players. The three Rosowskys, father, mother and Oscar, moved to a much more modest two-room apartment in Nice.

Oscar’s mother, Mira, was, according to her son, vivid, attractive, resourceful and indomitable. She quickly realised that, if the family was going to eat, she would need to be the breadwinner. She trained as a milliner, and worked from home, copying designs from
Vogue
magazine and selling her hats to the Russian Jewish community on the Côte d’Azur. It was not exactly lucrative, but it paid the rent and bought the groceries. Ruben did the shopping and cooked some memorably good meals. When he could muster up the stake money from the tiny allowance his family sent him, he gambled. If he won, he bought Oscar a peach Melba. If he lost … well, there was always next month’s allowance. One room of the apartment housed the parents’ bed, a small kitchen and Mira’s worktable. Oscar slept on a sofa in the other room, which doubled as a showroom for the hats.

Oscar arrived in Nice with barely two words of French. But thanks to a superb teacher, Demoiselle Soubie—‘the sort of person one should fall on one’s knees before,’ he says—he quickly fitted in. The school building even gave him a brief aftertaste of the luxurious life he had led in Berlin: called the Imperial Park College, it was an old palace with huge rooms and a giant marble hall. Each room had two balconies, and the students could peer out and watch the King of Sweden playing tennis below them. The Côte d’Azur in the 1930s was a cosmopolitan place, packed with White Russians and other refugees, rich and poor. One of the other students, Paul Franck, taught Oscar French by sitting
him down on the slope alongside the college and getting him to recite the irreverent plays and novels of Courteline. Paul Franck’s Jewish father, also Paul Franck, had managed the Olympia music hall in Paris, where performers like Mistinguett basked in the spotlight. In Nice, Oscar Rosowsky was surrounded by colourful and sophisticated people, living in a pleasantly sunny and largely tolerant city.

Politics was inescapable here, too. In a world polarised between the far-left communists and the far-right fascists, there was plenty to argue about and even demonstrate against. Some teachers at the school were Pétainists, supporting the Vichy government of ‘Unoccupied’ France led by Marshal Philippe Pétain. Others were socialists or communists, ready to defend their beliefs with their fists. Oscar’s language coach and school friend Paul Franck lost two teeth in a political brawl.

Oscar also discovered the Boy Scouts, and they became a passion. He rose to become a troop leader. The overall head of his troop was the aristocratic Jean-Claude Pluntz de Potter, a baron from his father’s side, whose petite Jewish mother was born Schalit. Jean-Claude’s family sympathy for the plight of Jews was soon to play a vital role in Oscar’s life.

So we have a picture of young Oscar—slightly built, wearing spectacles, studious rather than one of the lads, but sharp-witted and street smart. He spoke three languages fluently: French, German and Russian. He had known rich, and he now knew poor. He says he was a lazy student, but that did not stop him passing the second and higher stage of his baccalauréat, clearing a path for him to go on to university. The Boy Scouts had taught him a degree of self-reliance, and some of the secrets of survival in the wild. He was now eighteen years old, the year was 1942, and so far life had been safe and fairly uneventful. Then the noose began to tighten.

• • •

After France’s defeat in 1940, the northern half of France and the whole Atlantic coast was occupied by Germany. Under the terms of an armistice signed on 22 June 1940, the ‘Unoccupied’ or ‘Free’ southern half, including Nice, was managed from the central French town of Vichy by a government led by France’s Marshal Pétain, a World War I hero. It was, by any standards, a puppet government. As well as general collaboration, military and civil, with the Germans, the Vichy government undertook to participate wholeheartedly in Hitler’s persecution of Jews. This led to the passing of a swathe of vicious anti-Jewish laws, which often went beyond the anti-Jewish legislation in the German Occupied Zone to the north, or even in Germany itself. On 3 October 1940 the Vichy government passed a law that excluded Jews from jobs in the public service and parts of the private sector. The next day it passed a law authorising the immediate internment of all foreign Jews. As Latvians, the Rosowsky family were targets.

In this period, the Jewish population in the Unoccupied Zone lived in a state of quite extraordinary ignorance and denial. Although the French internment camps began to fill up with Jews from late 1940 onwards—all of them rounded up under the grotesque euphemism ‘gathering the families’—news was tightly controlled, travel and communication were restricted, and people simply didn’t know what was going on. This was backed up by a general sense of it-can’t-happen-here. But in 1942 that all changed.

By then, Oscar Rosowsky had already lost out to the
numerus clausus
, a Vichy law which restricted Jewish entry to the professions, most notably law but also medicine. No university course could accept more than 2 per cent Jewish students. Oscar wanted to train as a doctor. He was philosophical about the missed opportunity. ‘I couldn’t hope to study medicine because of the
numerus clausus
,’ he says. ‘But in any case, I don’t think my parents could have afforded to send me to study in Aix-en-Provence.’ So at the end of the summer of 1941, after passing
both stages of his baccalauréat, Oscar Rosowsky accepted a job with a local Nice tradesman, repairing typewriters and mimeograph machines, a form of printing press. His special beat was the local administrative district, or prefecture; he cycled there two or three times a week with his toolbox and cleaning brushes to clean the machines and sort out any problems. The various prefectures were the ultimate source of all the papers needed to function in Vichy France. Identity cards, driving licences, ration coupons, residence permits, travel permits: all originated from the prefecture. Oscar Rosowsky came to know the machines that produced these documents literally inside out.

By early 1942 the nightmare for Jews in Vichy France had well and truly begun. On 2 June 1941, the Vichy government proclaimed its oppressive
Statut des Juifs
(Jewish Statute), at the same time announcing a census requiring all Jews to declare themselves. The census created a handy list of Jews to be barred from jobs or deported, as well as a register of Jewish property to be confiscated. All French people over the age of sixteen were required to carry an identity card, including their photograph and their current address. Jews in the northern Occupied Zone had the word
Juif
(Jew) stamped on their identity card. Production of a card stamped
Juif
was a licence to officialdom to hassle the bearer in every possible way.

Food was rationed. So was tobacco. And clothing. Anyone who carried a
Juif
identity card could expect problems with all three. There were random checks. ‘Your papers,
monsieur
?’ Anyone who failed to produce the appropriate identity card could be arrested on the spot. A  Jew—especially a non-French Jew—caught in this way could expect deportation to Germany and beyond. Most who were deported never returned.

Jews were also liable to have property confiscated, without compensation. Some old scores—or simply jealousies—were settled as neighbour
denounced neighbour.
He’s Jewish. She’s Jewish. They’re foreigners.
Next would be a raid, followed by arrest and deportation.

• • •

In August 1942 Oscar set off to a Boy Scout camp at Saint-Dalmas-Valdeblore, in the mountains a little to the north of Nice. ‘It was a marvellous camp,’ he recalls. ‘I  was “totemised” [given an animal name]. I was nicknamed Cacatoès [Cockatoo], while our troop leader Jean-Claude Pluntz became Pipistrelle [Bat].’ The return to Nice, across the Gorges du Verdon, was idyllic. A beaming Oscar arrived back at his parents’ apartment bursting with stories to share. He had no chance to tell his news. The nightmare had now struck at the heart of his family.

I walked through the front door and the first thing my mother said to me was: ‘Listen to me, your father has disappeared. He’s been arrested. I  don’t know what’s happening … I  called the lawyers, but I haven’t heard anything back. And you, you’ve had a summons to hand yourself over to the foreign workers group at Mandelieu-la-Napoule [on the outskirts of Cannes, to the south-west of Nice].’ She handed me a bit of paper. I couldn’t think of what to do, so I said: ‘You’re kidding me. I’m heading straight back into the mountains.’ It was silly of me to say it. She just said: ‘No, no.’ She was a clever woman, and she already had a plan. ‘Definitely not. One of my clients has a husband who’s a Spanish Republican. He’s the under-secretary at Mandelieu-la-Napoule. We’ll see if we can work something out with him.’ So I said to her: ‘I’ll do my best.’ I put on my Boy Scout uniform with all my bits and pieces, including my four-pointed hat, and I headed off to the foreign workers group at Mandelieu-la-Napoule.

Then I had a bit of luck. When I arrived, the place seemed deserted. I found an office. There were two people behind a white
table: a commander from the Army Reserve wearing a uniform with [a captain’s] three bars, and his Spanish secretary standing beside him. The commander said to me: ‘What on earth are you doing here? Everybody was brought here yesterday, and I packed them all off to Germany.’ He was outraged. I  said: ‘I  don’t want to be worked to death like that.’ He said: ‘Well, listen carefully. It’s not complicated. I’ll post you off to Mont Faron.’ There were raids going on in the centre of Nice at the time, but Mont Faron was on the outskirts. It was full of Italian market gardeners. ‘You can work there,’ the commander said. ‘I’ll give you the papers. When I’ve done that, I never want to see you again.’

That was it. I stayed with the Italians while the raids went on in Nice. I watered their vegetables and flowers. I didn’t have a ration card, but they gave me some bread, and I fed myself with fruit, some delicious figs. And they made me some snails in tomato sauce, Italian style. So I was never hungry, and I ate with them. I spent three peaceful weeks there.

When things had calmed down a little, Oscar slipped back to the family apartment in central Nice. In the three weeks that had passed since her husband’s arrest, Mira had set about trying to trace him. She had established that he had not been singled out for arrest, he just happened to be with the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her natural first thought was that it was all a mistake. He’d be released, surely? But despite her best efforts with lawyers and contacts in the Russian and Jewish communities, she could not find out where her husband was or what had happened to him. For three weeks she had waited, living in hope.
We’ll hear soon. We’ll get some news. He’ll write.

The truth was unimaginable. A  single letter got through more than a year later, in late 1943. He had been taken to the French
internment camp at Le Vernet, south of Toulouse, then handed over to the Germans at the notorious Drancy camp on the outskirts of Paris. He was deported from Drancy on 25 September 1942 in Convoy 37, bound for Auschwitz. There were 1004 Jews in the convoy, of whom a mere fifteen survived the war.

Mira and Oscar Rosowsky learned the rest of the story after the war. Ruben Rosowsky had been luckier than some, avoiding the immediate fate of new arrivals at Auschwitz. He was one of 175 prisoners separated from the rest of Convoy 37 and set to work. He was allocated to a slave labour camp called Blechhammer, an annexe of the Auschwitz III death camp, where he survived until 1945. However he did not survive the dreadful death march of slaves and concentration camp prisoners that marked the last days of the Third Reich. Luck finally ran out for Ruben Rosowsky, the
enfant terrible
, the family joker, the failed businessman, the talented cook, the compulsive gambler, the buyer of peach Melbas. In the dying days of the war, he finally joined the six million.

• • •

When Oscar Rosowsky returned to the family apartment in Nice after his time at the Mont Faron foreign workers site, there was still no word from his father. He knew what he had to do. ‘I  said to my mother: “Listen, I’m going to Switzerland, and we’re going there together.”’

This was easier said than done. The Swiss were turning back Jewish refugees in their tens of thousands along the whole length of the French–Swiss border. So it was not simply a matter of turning up at a border post with a valid passport and walking through. Legal entry would require visas issued by the Swiss authorities, and there were none to be had. To enter through the front door was impossible. That left an illegal border crossing, on foot, across rugged mountains. In addition, the two Rosowskys would first need to travel to the border
area by train. That, too, would involve terrifying risks. In Vichy France in late 1942, a traveller faced random checks at the station and on the train from gendarmes or the
Sûreté Nationale
police, and could be asked to produce travel documents, proof of identity, and proof that the journey was authorised and legal.

There was no question of mother and son travelling under their own documents. The non-French-sounding-name Rosowsky would be enough to guarantee trouble. Oscar’s Boy Scout troop leader came to the rescue, offering to lend his papers. So Oscar Rosowsky became Jean-Claude Pluntz. He simply replaced Jean-Claude’s photo on the identity card with his own, using an old art pen to copy the missing quarter of the official stamp onto the edge of the new photograph. That left the question of papers for his mother. In particular, she would need a convincing identity card.