Report on the ceremony awarding the Righteous medal to Pastor Pierre Gagnier and his wife Hélène
January 18, 2012
Speech by Georges Isserlis (a child saved by Pierre and Hélène Gagnier)
I was born to parents who had emigrated from Tsarist Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century, and I only discovered my “Jewishness” in 1940, at the start of the German invasion of northern France.
My parents, both naturalised French citizens, feared from experience, as soon as an armistice was mentioned, the strong risk of antisemitic measures imposed by Hitler’s Germany. At the age of 14 I could not believe such a thing possible in France, but they knew it, having already suffered it in Russia (my father’s family fled the pogroms of Uralsk and Bobruisk, and my mother had sought to complete her medical studies, interrupted in Russia by an antisemitic numerus clausus).
That is why, at the beginning of June 1940, as the Germans advanced on Paris, we took to the road of the exodus in a car bought a few days earlier for the purpose.
The journey began in Buzançais, where friends put us up – my parents, my second sister and me; my eldest sister, a non-resident medical student at the Paris hospitals, had to stay at her post. The road had been marked by an attack by German Stukas, but this time we were more frightened than hurt.
We stayed a few weeks in Buzançais, where my eldest sister joined us for a few days before returning to Paris, recalled to her post by the Assistance Publique. She paid for this recall with her life: arrested in the metro in July 1942 as she left the Enfants Malades hospital, she was imprisoned at Les Tourelles, then at Drancy, and finally deported to Auschwitz where, after a few months working in the “Revier”, she died of typhus as early as November 1942.
As for us, we left Buzançais for Loches and its lycée at the end of August 1940, so that we could continue our studies.
After a “normal” school year, we left Loches to reach the free zone and settled for about a year in Antibes, at the Villa Marguerite, rue du Printemps (which says it all), where my second sister Betty and I went to the lycée for the 1941–42 school year, and where I sat the first part of my baccalauréat.
There I led an almost normal life. I joined and took part in the activities of the Éclaireurs Unionistes de France (Protestant Scouts) – meetings, camps, rural civic service and so on – and made good friends there whom I still see today, more than sixty years later.
But it was in Antibes that we learnt of the arrest of my sister Tamara, then of her deportation to Auschwitz. Was that why we left Antibes for Buis-les-Baronnies? I do not know. But we stayed there only a few months before settling in Nice after Christmas. We found a flat in Cimiez, in the Palais Chambrun residence. And from February 1943 I attended the catch-up classes of the Cours Frankel, rue Spontini, in Nice, to try to pass the second part of my baccalauréat.
There again, now a Rover Scout, I took part in the Éclaireurs Unionistes de France, led by Pastor Gagnier. That is where I got to know him. Of course, I hid nothing from him about my origins and our problems; he welcomed me with a generosity and warmth that lasted until his death in 1988. There too I made friends, took part in many activities and studied.
September 1943. We were in Nice; my mother, a doctor, helped by my father, a former head of the ORT in Paris before the war, were working for the OSE, particularly with children who needed help and had to be shielded from the abuses of the German occupier, who had occupied the southern zone after the landings in North Africa and then the scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon on November 27, 1942. The occupation of the Côte d’Azur by the Germans would then begin, with the withdrawal of the Italian troops.
As soon as they arrived in Nice, my parents (my mother, a doctor, worked for the OSE; my father was one of the former heads of the ORT in Paris) set about placing Jewish children whose parents had been arrested, or were at risk of being arrested, by the Germans – before the famous Marcel network existed, and already with the help of Odette Rosenstock.
That is how I came to cycle all the way to Monaco to hand over a large sum of money to a smuggler who was to take children to Switzerland.
That is also how, on two or three occasions, I carried to the OSE offices false documents – many false identity cards and ration tickets for families and above all for Jewish children. As the Marcel network did not yet exist, these documents could only have come from the “workshops” of the Cimade, which was already operating from a room that the organisation occupied clandestinely in Pastor Gagnier’s presbytery.
Faced with growing threats, my parents had decided to leave Nice at the end of August 1943, but as I had failed the second part of my baccalauréat in July, they left me in Nice for the September session, lodged with the family of a Protestant Rover friend and “under the protective and kindly wing” of Pastor Gagnier.
On Wednesday, September 15, 1943, the last day of the written resit exams for the second baccalauréat (I believe that is the exact date, and there were no oral exams that year), I was getting ready to join my parents, who had left for Raphèle-lès-Arles several days earlier. I was to leave Nice by train the next day, but first I had to deliver to the OSE a rucksack containing about a hundred false identity documents and ration tickets that had been left at our home, intended for children being “placed” in Switzerland or in the Cévennes, in the Chambon-sur-Lignon area, thanks to the discreet but oh so effective help of Pastor Pierre Gagnier.
I also had a second, identical rucksack containing all my books for the baccalauréat. Accompanied by a Rover Scout, Philippe, a faithful friend whom I still see today, each of us carrying one of the rucksacks, we set off by bike for the OSE.
As soon as I entered the courtyard of the building housing the OSE offices, I was seized by two German soldiers, submachine guns in hand, who took me to the OSE office, where about ten people were already being held.
After hearing a Gestapo man in the room answer the telephone and invite the callers to come round to obtain the information they were asking for, I discreetly tore out the telephone wires to put a stop to this despicable kind of trap.
A few hours later, we were taken to the Hôtel Excelsior, which served as an annexe to the overcrowded prisons. As we left I tried to hide and abandon the rucksack, but a soldier spotted me and made me take it with me.
When we arrived at the hotel, during the search, I realised with what relief that (polite and well brought up by my parents, I had taken the heavier bag) it was the books for the baccalauréat that were in the bag. Phew!
The manager of the Hôtel Excelsior asked me to find ration tickets so that he could give us bread and food. Alas, my collection, from the top floor to the bottom, was very meagre: almost all the occupants of the hotel, although most of them were Jews, thought they had been arrested by mistake and hoped, against all logic, to be released in the next few days, so they kept their precious tickets!
Philippe, for his part, who had stayed in the street with the second rucksack, saw what happened, understood immediately and left quickly but discreetly to warn our friends, including, of course, the pastor, of my arrest.
Very quickly, without hesitation – as he would on other occasions too – Pierre Gagnier went to the Gestapo headquarters to try to find out what would happen to me. They confirmed my arrest and that I would soon be sent to Drancy.
He therefore decided to leave the very next day for Raphèle-lès-Arles to warn my parents, already struck by the deportation of my sister Tamara.
The next day, I too was in a carriage of the same Nice–Paris train.
During the transfer from the hotel to Nice station, one of my Rover friends saw me in the group walking to the station and immediately warned the presbytery.
By a happy chance, I was, I believe, part of the first convoy to leave in a passenger carriage, guarded by a few soldiers travelling with us who stood on the running boards whenever the train slowed down.
Between Nice and Marseille I went to the toilet and – a sign from heaven – the head of a brass screw holding the frame that kept the window pane in place, bare of paint, caught my eye. Using my nail file, during two more “visits to the toilet”, spaced out so as not to attract attention, I managed before we reached Arles to loosen one by one all the screws around the frame. It was essential not to jump from the compartment window, so as not to put my compartment companions at risk; I nevertheless told them of my intentions and invited them to follow me, as I intended to leave the lock open just before jumping. They called me a madman risking his life for nothing. (As far as I know, I am the only survivor of that convoy to Drancy.) When the train stopped at Marseille station, I first heard over the station loudspeaker a call for Pastor Gagnier, asked to report to the ticket office. Shortly afterwards I heard, on the platform in front of the carriage, the whistle call of the Scouts. I rushed to the window and had time to exchange a few words with Élan (Pastor Gagnier), who, once again at great risk of being arrested, passed me his pullover (I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and sandals) and told me he was going to see my parents. I told him my plan and asked him to tell my parents to wait a little before believing the worst. He understood without my needing to say more and left me to get back into his carriage.
Around 9 p.m. the train approached Arles station, and I had had more than enough time to remove the toilet window completely; it was now held only by two screws that I had put back. I had to jump early enough, before the sentries stepped down onto the running boards as the train slowed and came into the station, as I had observed at previous stops. I knew the line a little, having already been to Arles, where one of my uncles had taken refuge.
At the first points, when the train began to slow down, I carefully removed the window and jumped; the running boards were still empty: no sentries. A tear in my trousers and a broken sandal were the only marks of that jump, despite the train’s still considerable speed. I was free, safe and sound, and I had compromised no one but my guards, who, to escape punishment, would report me as “shot while trying to escape”.
So I made my way towards the station, avoiding the lights, and at the first warehouse I spoke to a railwayman (praying that he was not in the Milice) to ask him for a bike and explain my situation. Panic-stricken, he told me to hide because the train was still in the station. So I waited a little, then headed for the station. In the concourse, I saw Élan talking to a man who, as I would soon learn, was none other than the pastor of Arles, who had come at his request to meet his colleague from Nice. As if it were forty years ago, I can still hear the sentence left hanging:
“One of my Rover Scouts has been arrested by the Gestapo; he’s on the train to Drancy… Oh! Well, look, here he is.”
We then went together to the home of the pastor of Arles, who lent us two bikes and told us the way and its dangers; there was no curfew yet at that hour, but we had to be careful, as my identity card, stamped by the Gestapo, now bore the word “JUDE” in German, which was highly compromising. Élan nevertheless insisted on accompanying me all the way to the house in Raphèle, where my parents were surprised to see the pastor.
This account is the only one that is 100% detailed because it concerns me personally, but I know of other deeds, all to Pastor Gagnier’s credit: sheltering and feeding many people seeking refuge in his presbytery or his church, providing identity papers, baptism certificates and false ration tickets when necessary, finding routes to Switzerland or the Cévennes to shelter children whose parents were threatened or already deported. Pastor Gagnier and his wife Hélène did not hesitate to shelter under their roof, at the same time, a Jewish family with a baby and a German army deserter. What courage and devotion that must have taken! I learnt of his work with the Marcel network from Odette Rosenstock herself, later Madame Abadi, whom I met one night, quite by chance, at the Gare de l’Est, when, still a Protestant Rover Scout, I spent nights at the station or at the Hôtel Lutetia to receive returning deportees.
For all these reasons – for his charity, his courage and his unfailing daring – I come here to testify so that Pastor Pierre Gagnier, and his wife who supported him in everything he did, may be named Righteous and that the Righteous medal may be awarded to them posthumously.
Georges Isserlis