Rebecca Erbelding - Rescue Board : the untold story of America’s efforts to save the Jews of Europe

France, August 1942

T HE BUSES THAT TOOK the children away arrived first. The sun beat down, and the loveliness of August in Provencethe olive groves green and gray, the newly harvested wheat fields still goldenstood in stark contrast to the tile factory, a looming brick structure enclosed by barbed wire. Within, more than fifteen hundred people waited for the end to begin.

Nearly seventy children, some just toddlers, were gathered in the factorys dusty courtyard as two large buses pulled up. Their parents did not know where the children would go, only that it would not be to Poland. The Jewish organizations working inside Les Millesthe name of this makeshift concentration camphad negotiated with the French government to exempt the children from deportation. With the hours growing short before the first train was to leave, the time had come to say good-bye. Grasping tiny faces and stroking hair, mothers and fathers gave frantic good-bye kisses and cried, Gut seinBe goodbefore the buses rolled away. Some of the parents screamed and collapsed.

Roswell McClelland watched off to the side, pacing and smoking. A twenty-eight-year-old Californian, Ross was one of only a few dozen Allied aid workers permitted in the concentration camps, mostly representatives of pacifist churches. He and his wife, Marjorie, both worked for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization. Because the AFSC had fed hundreds of thousands of German children after World War I, the Nazis and their French collaborators allowed them entry into the camps to distribute food and clothing while forcing other Americans out of occupied and collaborationist territory. And now, the AFSC found itself in a position none of the staff ever imagined: splitting up families, likely forever, in a heartbreaking attempt to save the lives of the children. As he watched the fathers and mothers wail, Ross tried not to get emotional. Though none of the other aid workers knew, Marjorie was pregnant with their first child. What kind of a world, he wondered, separates parents from their children?

Other prisoners in Les Milles, also watching the scene, had sent their children out of the camp sooner. Relief workersincluding Ross and Marjoriesecreted the kids to orphanages run by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, a childrens aid organization. As the war dragged on, some of those children would go into hiding with non-Jewish families; others would try to sneak over the border to Switzerland or to Spain; and others would be arrested and deported east like their parents before them. Several hundred children, whose mothers and fathers signed away all parental rights, had already left for America to be placed with new families. A group of fifty children from France had departed nearly three months earlier; their first letters from America would not arrive in time to reach their parents in Les Milles.

It was Monday, August 10, 1942, the beginning of the deportation of foreign Jews from southern France toward Drancy, a transit camp outside Paris. From Drancy, the prisoners would take a longer train ride toward an uncertain fate in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Ross had his suspicions of what awaited the prisoners of Les Milles. He had just returned to Provence after an emergency trip to Vichy, the capital of Nazi-collaborationist France, where he and a group of colleagues had managed to meet with Pierre Laval, the head of the authoritarian government. They implored Laval to cancel the deportations. McClelland impressed upon him that the Germans wanted to exterminate these people. Laval scoffed. The accusation was preposterous, a fiction. The French were assisting the Nazis in removing troublemaking foreign Jews from France, and the prisoners were going to special ethnic reservations in southern Poland where they could live and work together. Besides, Laval added, if the United States loved the Jews so much, why didnt McClellands country accept them?

In fact, many of the prisoners at Les Milles had been collecting the documentation required to get a visa to the United States. But for most, the bureaucratic obstacles erected by both the American and the Vichy governmentsnot to mention the challenge and expense of reserving space on one of the few passenger ships still crossing the Atlanticmade immigration impossible. The AFSCs Refugee Division tried to assist thousands, including a significant percentage of the Les Milles prisoners, with their applications and paperwork. McClelland knew many of themknew their families, knew how close they were to getting the all-important visas, knew them as individuals in a way bureaucracies couldnt.

In the weeks prior to the deportations, Vichy France canceled exit visas for refugees, the last official document a prisoner needed to be released from a camp prior to immigration. As a result, even those who received their U.S. visas could no longer leave. The AFSC protested and got reprieves for a few. But in October 1942, more than 270 letters alerting the recipients their U.S. visas had finally been approved were returned to the Marseille consulate, marked undeliverable. At least seventeen of the letters were for prisoners deported from Les Milles in the early morning of August 11, 1942.