| HOME Go to  Homepage
GENERAL |
| refuge in Switzerland
opened up for me. A Pastor Freudenberg, with an office in Geneva,
welcomed those of Toureille's parishioners who could present themselves
at the Swiss frontier in order to seek asylum. The Swiss Secret Service
had distributed a list of all the members of the Aumônerie
to the military posts at the frontier. The border guards were instructed
to let them into the country, while many other refugees from France were
led back to the place where they had attempted the crossing. Since
my association with the Aumônerie could mean danger, Toureille
arranged for me to be put on the frontier list. If anything had gone
wrong I was thus assured a visa to Switzerland, which could possibly save
my life. I did not have to use it, ever; but it was a good feeling
to have it in those times of great uncertainty.
I was now Maurice Séguy, the younger brother of Pierre, whose first name I kept, however, as a middle name. Maurice's birth date, which I repeated to myself ad nauseam, was June 24, 1924. This made me, Maurice, younger than the class of 1922, which was by now being prepared for the STO departures. The locality which was supposed to have issued my identity card was Aoste, in the Isère, a small village in the mountains above Grenoble. One of the first we ever made during the early months of 1943 in our then-amateurish outfit, this card (still in my possession) had a considerable number of flaws which did not strike me then as possibly lethal mistakes. The scripting and the stamp had been furnished by René Chave, an older student, whose call to the ministry had come at age thirty-five. Thin and lively, with a great deal of nervous energy, René had naturally become the head of our little group of forgers, which met after hours in the office of Madame Crespy, ostensibly to read poetry. His sister had married Georges Crespy, who had by then taken up a parish post in Lasalle, not far north of Montpellier, in the Cévennes mountains. My twin brother, in the meantime, had remained in Grenoble, where the Italian occupation group was in charge. He had not deserted from the army. He was, on the contrary, on the best of terms with the German Armistice Commission, who kept an eye on the Italians but did not care too much about taking the young French recruits to prison or to Germany. He was gingerly trading stamps with one of the members of the Commission (who claimed not to be a Nazi) housed only a few blocks away from our home on the Cours Berriat, in the Hotel Lesdiguières. Since Christmas, however, my brother had begged me for a new identity in case things turned out to be dangerous. It was thus in early March that I sent him the no-longer-needed card of Pierre Séguy, who was already AWOL from the army, but only in Montpellier. The birth date on the card had been obscured, intentionally, with large, smudged fingerprints. The year, "1921," was strictly illegible. There was still some usefulness left in it for him in Grenoble. No new photograph was needed, of course, our faces being practically identical. On the November night in
1943 when Italy capitulated to the Allies, the twenty-five Germans of the
Armistice Commission seized the 800-man Italian garrison at Grenoble, and
the Germans moved in as the occupying force. My brother's friend
in the German Commission warned him of the approaching danger. He
dug out his Pierre Séguy card and arranged to be transferred, under
this new |
