Chapter Thirty
With filming shut down on Heart Restoration Project for one more day because of the mold issue, Elliott and I decided it was the perfect opportunity to visit Aix-en-Provence and the Camp des Milles Memorial. I was relieved when he knocked on my door late last night suggesting the trip, not even the slightest trace of awkwardness still lingering from our kiss and his subsequent quick exodus from the carousel.
The camp was about an hour south of Maubec, so we set out early, wanting to take full advantage of our day off. Unfortunately, Jack and Claudine didn’t seem any keener on our pursuit of the true story behind Chateau Mirabelle as a facet for the show, but it no longer mattered to either one of us. Elliott and I were on a mission to unveil the reasons behind the town’s collective silence about what had truly transpired there.
Gervais parked the van in front of a dark-red, run-down brick building resembling an old factory, and we stepped out onto an empty dirt road. Elliott lifted his backpack and camera onto his shoulder and said, “I called ahead and arranged for a tour guide to meet us at the entrance at eight thirty.”
It was probably around eighty-five degrees, yet goose bumps trailed up and down my arms. There was something wholly unsettling about this place. If Provence was impressionist art with its color and light, this landscape was the complete opposite—dull, monochrome, and lifeless. I didn’t need a tour guide to tell me this was somewhere you didn’t want to stay for very long.
A few minutes later, an older woman with a nameplate that read Hélène approached us. “Bonjour, you must be Elliott?” she said, glancing down at her clipboard and then back up at us.
“I’m Elliott Schaffer, and this is Plum Everly,” he answered.
“Pleased to meet you both. I have your tickets right here,” she said, patting her right breast pocket. “But they know me so well, they won’t be necessary. Come, we can go inside this way.” She motioned for us to follow her around the side of the building to a small gatehouse. The security guard glanced at Hélène’s credentials and waved her inside while we followed closely behind.
“So,” Hélène asked us over her shoulder as she led the way, “what is your interest in Camp des Milles? Perhaps that will help to better structure our day?”
“We are working on the restoration of a chateau in Maubec for a television show, and we understand the former owners played a role in the French Resistance. We’re trying to learn a bit more about what may have happened to them,” I answered. “I was wondering if it would be okay if we film a bit of our tour and conversations here for the project?”
“Actually, that would be wonderful. Very few people know France even had internment camps during World War II. What a great platform to be able to educate them. Please, film away, but perhaps we should start at the beginning then, non?”
Over the next several hours, Hélène walked us through Camp des Milles, from the main building, once a fully operational tile factory before it was converted to a prison, to the guards’ dining room, now known as the Room of Murals.
Hélène motioned to the wall. “This mural is called ‘The Last Supper,’ one prisoner’s very dark take on the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece,” she explained. “Camp des Milles imprisoned many artists believed to be political dissidents. You will see that they left their mark all over the grounds.”
“That’s just incredible. Elliott, can you bring the camera up close to it, get tight shots of each and every painted face? Be sure to give special attention to the detail work when you zoom in. If we can show the actual brushstrokes on the wall, it would be a way to subtly acknowledge the people who made them,” I directed.
Elliott, not missing a beat, took my cue and moved about the space filming the sequence as I requested. “This looks great. Nice touch, Plum.” He stroked my arm affirmingly and moved to follow after Hélène, who continued her guided tour of the room.
“Camp des Milles was used to house various ‘undesirables’—emigrants awaiting exit visas, political enemies, escapees from Germany and Austria, and, as I said, an exceptionally high proportion of artists. The painters, sculptors, writers, actors, and musicians had to be endlessly inventive in devising ways to ward off boredom and lift their spirits,” Hélène explained. “Over three hundred paintings and drawings are thought to have originated here.”
I thought back to the exhibit at the French Resistance Museum in Paris and the black-and-white photographs of the cattle cars standing outside Camp des Milles’s front gates. “When did things change? When did it become more of a deportation camp?”
“Between 1941 and 1942, Camp des Milles became one of the centres de rassemblement before deportation. About two thousand of the inmates were shipped off to the Drancy internment camp, and then, for many, eventually they were brought to Auschwitz,” Hélène answered solemnly, not needing to fill in the rest.
“Are there records on-site? Lists of prisoners? The former owners of Chateau Mirabelle, the Adéla?ses, we believe that they may have been brought here. They were arrested sometime in 1942, so the timelines sync up,” I said.
“Yes, there is an archive in the main building we can check. I think they should be amenable to letting you both visit given the nature of your project.” Hélène glanced down at her watch and tsked. “Oof, but we should go now. The archive is only open a few hours every day, and that’s assuming Madame Razat even came in at all.” Hélène turned to me. “She watches her grandson every other Tuesday, and I cannot remember if she worked last week?”
We hurried across the sparse yard back to the main factory building. Hélène flashed her credentials for a second time at the guard standing outside the entrance, and he ushered us inside. We scurried down two flights of stairs to a dank basement, white fluorescent lights flickering overhead.
Hélène knocked gently on a door that was slightly ajar, and a heavyset woman with high cheekbones and snow-white hair shuffled over to answer it.
“Bonjour, Hélène, tellement content de vous voir,” Madame Razat said, pushing the door completely open to greet us. They spoke in conversational French, clearly not meant for us. Though I picked up a bit, I wasn’t confident enough to join in, and so instead, we just waited politely beside Hélène for further instruction.
“Bonjour, Marjorie, vous ne gardez pas Mathieu aujourd’hui?” Hélène asked.
Madame Razat nodded. “Mathieu est malade. Sa maman l’emmène chez le médecin. Allez, viens-ici.”
Hélène waved the three of us inside the room and lowered her voice to translate. “We are in luck, Madame Razat was supposed to babysit Mathieu today, but he has a cold so his maman is going to take him to the doctor.”
“Please, come inside,” Madame Razat said, coaxing us farther into the room. “What can I help you with?”
“This is Elliott Schaffer and Plum Everly. They are working on a film project,” Hélène answered.
Madame Razat eyed me up and down. “Plum Everly? From EVERLYday?” She peeked around us, expecting to see a large film crew trailing behind.
“Yes, I’m that Plum, but this isn’t for EVERLYday.”
Elliott chimed in. “We’re working on a new television show documenting the restoration of a chateau in Maubec that we’ve come to understand may have played a role in the Resistance. We were hoping to learn a bit more about the couple who owned the chateau. We know they were arrested by the Third Reich in 1942, but we don’t know what happened to them after that.”
Madame Razat strummed her stubby fingers against her chin. “If they were arrested in the Provence region in 1942, it is more than likely they were sent here. Do you know the couple’s name?”
“Luc and Imène Adéla?se,” I replied.
Madame Razat nodded and sat down at a small wooden desk in the corner of the room. She popped open a laptop and began furiously typing away on the keyboard. After a few clicks of the mouse, she pushed the computer closed and sprang up from the seat. She motioned for the three of us to follow her down another hallway to a room crammed full of filing cabinets and shelving units full of plain-looking storage containers.
Madame Razat inched up on her toes to reach for the highest shelf of one of the cabinets. “The Nazis were nothing if not meticulous. They kept records of absolutely everything. Every arrest. Every prisoner. Every single transport in and out of the camp.” She eyed Elliott up and down. “You, you’re very tall, aren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am,” he replied.
“I could go retrieve the stepladder, but why bother with you here? Can you reach far into the back and pull out the files labeled ANNECY?”
Elliott stretched his arms up, not even needing to stand on his tiptoes, hefted a box marked ANNECY from its spot, and effortlessly placed it down on the counter in front of Madame Razat.
“I’m sorry, but ... what is Annecy? Is it another camp?” I asked.
“It is a French town about forty kilometers south of Geneva, Switzerland,” Madame Razat answered. “So actually I need you to grab the folders behind this,” she instructed with a rigid finger pointing back up to the top shelf.
Elliott, now on his toes to see what he was missing, reached far back into the cabinet and pried out two large files, which he handed to Madame Razat, their weight practically knocking her over. She left the box on the counter but carried the folders into a room adjacent to the one we were in and set them down with a thud. Loose papers, photographs, and maps spilled out onto the table, covering more than half of the top of it.
Madame Razat passed around latex gloves, and I picked up one of the photographs of a small, unremarkable-looking farm sitting on a remote hilltop. I flipped it over, and scribbled on the back were the words Beliveau, Bauernhof. I held the picture up. “Beliveau, Bauernhof? What does that mean?”
“Bauernhof means farm in German. So that is the Beliveau farm,” Hélène answered confidently.
“May we film in here? Is it alright?” I asked.
“Oui, go right ahead.” Madame Razat gestured, and Elliott stood up to capture our exchange. Though I knew he would shoot most of the footage with his professional camera, I couldn’t help but take out my iPhone, adjust some of my settings, and film close-ups of the splayed pictures and documents, the inky scrawls of signatures of those long forgotten and photographs in black and white. The cinematography practically took its own shape, telling its own story, as Madame Razat shuffled through the images and narrated along the way.
I took another look at the tattered photograph of the Beliveau farm. “I’m still trying to piece this all together. What’s the connection between this farm and the Adéla?ses?”
“Have you ever heard of the Dutch-Paris network?” Madame Razat asked.
I looked up at Elliott, who was shaking his head. “No, no I don’t think so.”
“It was a small but quite successful Resistance network instrumental in saving many, many lives. Their main mission was to rescue people from the Nazis by hiding them or taking them to neutral countries using falsified documents. Annecy was the town where the Dutch-Paris network brought the refugees to cross the border from France into Switzerland.” Madame Razat lifted the photograph off the table. “Beliveau, Bauernhof was one of the safe houses used to shelter people on their way to Switzerland.” She shuffled through a handful of papers until she finally landed on the one she was in search of. “Ah, here it is. A list of all those who were captured at Beliveau, Bauernhof on November 16, 1942.”
She slid the paper across the table over to me, and there in block type were the names Luc and Imène Adéla?se, Marthe and Grégoire Archambeau, and Ginette and Alain Grenouille listed among half a dozen others. I almost fell off my chair. I handed the sheet to Elliott, whose mouth dropped wide open. “All of them, every name on this list, were arrested and brought to Camp des Milles?” I asked.
“Oui.” Madame Razat shuffled to another paper and pushed her reading glasses farther down the bridge of her nose. “They were processed into Camp des Milles on November 28, 1942, and remained here until December 23, when they were transported to Drancy internment camp.”
“And from there?” I asked.
“Transported to another camp, most likely Auschwitz, but unfortunately, this is where our paper trail ends. It is possible that there could be more records in Geneva or Poland.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket, snapped a shot of the list of names and the photograph of the farm, and tucked my phone back into my pocket.
“It is well past my lunch hour,” Madame Razat said, pushing up from the table. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Elliott switched off the camera. “Thank you, you’ve been more than generous with your time.”
“Yes, merci,” I echoed.
Hélène escorted us out of the dark basement and back into the light, back to the front gate where Gervais was waiting with the van.
“It was lovely spending the morning with you both,” she said.
“Thank you again. This was incredibly eye opening,” Elliott answered.
“Is that ...?” I asked and motioned into the distance.
Elliott and Hélène turned to look where I was pointing.
“Ah oui, it is one of the cattle cars that was used for transport, now a permanent fixture at our memorial,” Hélène confirmed.
My chest tightened as hot tears flooded my eyes. I wiped them with the back of my hand and cleared my throat. “Elliott, we should grab a few exterior and interior shots of the car before we go.” Before I’d even finished my sentence, he was already moving toward the train car with his camera mounted on his shoulder.
“Thank you again,” he called over to Hélène with a wave.
After shooting the footage and expressing one more round of gratitude to our lovely guide, we climbed back into the van, dripping with sweat and emotionally drained.
“Gervais, would you be able to turn up the air-conditioning? Plum gets motion sickness,” Elliott mentioned, without one hint of sarcasm or irony.
Gervais nodded into the rearview mirror and blasted cold air from all the vents. It was the coolest I’d felt in France since we arrived.
“Gervais, La Cigale Chantante, s’il vous pla?t,” Elliott directed with an exhausted sigh.
I leaned forward, between the two front seats. “Actually, if neither of you are in a hurry, I have a small detour I’d like to make.”