I’ve been spending the last few days in and around the village of Montegut, a place that doesn’t show up on many maps, about 50 miles south of Toulouse.
Montegut is about two miles from a large 15th century chateau, Chateau de la Hille, where 100 Jewish children, including my aunt, Inge Joseph, hid out from the Germans and collaborating French from 1941 to 1943. This past week, Montegut dedicated a small museum, in a room of its quite modest town library, to the children who lived at the chateau. The museum is comprised mainly of a series of large placards with photos that chronicle the events of that era. Two of the eight placards in particular stand out because they capture the most dramatic events: the story of how French police in August 1942 shamefully rounded up thousands of French Jews for deportation, including 39 teenagers at Chateau de la Hille…and of how two Swiss Red Cross officials teamed up to rescue the children moments before they were due to be shipped off to Auschwitz.
The simple fact that the museum recounts the events in straightforward language is noteworthy in the Frech scheme of things, since France has long chosen to ignore or play down its role during that era. Montegut signaled its commitment to historical truth by having a group of 25 younsters, ages 7 to 10, read segments of the story before about 250 attendees at the dedication…in a scene akin to Jewish children reading from the Hagadah at Passover.
After the ceremony, I got to speak with several elderly townspeople who were themselves children at the time my aunt and the other children were at the chateau, and learned some things I hadn’t understood from my many years of research of the story in connection with the book I co-authored with my aunt.
For example, I’ve never understood how the youngest children at the chateau were able to attend school in Montegut, given the Nazi control of France. I learned that the town fathers just labeled these children "refugees," rather than Jewish refugees.
One other question that has persisted is how the 100 children managed to avoid any serious outbreaks of disease while in France. (Potential disease was a big fear of the adults supervising the children, since having to consult doctors might alert authorities to the children’s presence.) They were certainly exposed to disease–such as when several teens joined them from French concentration camps, where typhoid and cholera were rampant. One such teen was known to have tuberculosis.
One of the French women who attended school with the children from the chateau, 76-year-old Ginnette Dagarde, told me her father, a dairy farmer, had supplied milk to the children at the chateau. Was the milk pasteurized? I asked.
"Of couse not," Ginette answered. No milk in that region was pasteurized then.
And I suddenly realized that that might explain the children’s good health in a truly dangerous environment, and may be one of the reasons 90 of the 100 children were able to survive the war years.
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