Days before we left my mother received an e-mail from Docteur Gérard Cardin, a member of the Corps Village Council, who had been the mayor of Corps from 1972 to 1999. He asked about the dates of our visit and told us he would be arranging a small reception at the Mairie (village hall). My mother e-mailed my cousin and me and told us to bring suits and ties for the reception.
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We drove down to Corps and arrived in the late afternoon. Trying to find the Hotel de Tilleul, we stopped first at the Restaurant de Tilleul where the proprietor told us that Docteur Cardin wished to be informed immediately of our arrival. Cardin rushed to the hotel and warmly welcomed us to Corps. So far, so good…
The next day, 25 residents of Corps arrived at the Mairie bearing food and drink. The elders, accompanied by their children and grandchildren, sat around a large table listening to my mother’s recollections of her time in town and how she and her family lived in the Nouveau Hotel on the third floor while the first floor was occupied by German soldiers billeted in town.
This story had always been greeted with skepticism by her children: “How could a Jewish family hide out on the third floor of a hotel when the Germans were on the first floor?”
A voice at the table piped up. “I was born after the war and my parents – who owned the Nouveau Hotel – told us of French families, new to the town, living there for a period of time on the third floor. I had no idea they were Jewish,” said Monsieur Gérard Plissier.
So it came to pass that facts began to replace “stories” about the past. We came to understand that the fragment of the story of living above the Germans in a hotel was indeed true.
So was the story about a German soldier who, missing his newborn daughter, took a liking to my infant aunt and came up the stairs every day with his extra rations of sugar and bread for my mother’s family. According to family lore, one day he swallowed a whole bottle of wood alcohol in the family’s kitchen and died from some kind of toxic reaction. Fearing the soldier’s death might be blamed on them or, worse yet, prompt the Germans to discover a Jewish family lived on the third floor of their headquarters at the hotel, my mother’s family fled the next morning to a small farm in a hamlet several kilometers from Corps.
“Not so,” said Mme. Simone Pellissier-Asie. “That soldier often drank wood alcohol but actually died from being stabbed in a bar fight/mutiny later that night.”
During the course of the reception others shared that they, too, had hidden refugees, including Jewish families, during the war. Initially a discussion about how one Jewish family was hidden in Corps, the story expanded to a discussion of multiple Jewish families hidden by the townspeople. No one had ever spoken about hiding the Jewish families – mostly in the interest of protecting the families and themselves. Even the Jewish families were unaware that there were other Jewish families hiding in the same village.
What was most interesting was that in the 70 years since liberation, none of the inhabitants of Corps had ever shared with one another any stories of hiding Jewish families during the war. My mother’s letter to the mayor, the reception, and my mother’s recollections unleashed a torrent of memories and a dialogue among the townspeople in attendance about the war years, Corps’s hidden Jewish population, and the bravery of the town’s inhabitants.
