Machinegun Nests

In the days following the massacre, life had to continue for the Etobonais. Jules Perret worked in the forge (where he sabotaged German materials and equipment) and in the fields. The Germans were digging in around the Villages du Bois, preparing for an Allied attack. There were still a few secrets hidden in the woods, though: Jarko, the Serb, had returned and needed food and shelter. German patrols had discovered some of the Indian soldiers camped in the forest. When would Etobon be free? Would anyone survive?

Saturday, October 7

When you go to bed without undressing, it’s easy to be ready in the morning.  Everything is calm.  We take care of the cows, and Totor.  I hear an airplane, then the raspy voice of a boche who’s sleeping at our house:  “Philippe, terrible Philippe!”  He takes the child in his arms and tickles him with his beard.  Here’s one who’s had enough.  He asks us for civilian clothes so he can desert.  “Not gut, the var!”

Near evening, with the terrible Philippe, we pick apples.  The cannons, all around, thunder near and far.  In front of us, under the apple trees of the Champs du Chêne, one gun fires constantly.  The shells fly overhead, not very high.  The child follows their path with his finger.  “Fiouuuuu – that one went quick, I couldn’t even see it.  Why?”  Then airplanes, fired on furiously, without result.

The postman Georges Bouteiller, brought the mail.  As he went through Chagey, Captain Blum of the Cossacks forbid him to go further.  He complained to the commandant that he’d been told a postman could move about without papers.

We’ve decided to feed Jarko and build him a shelter. 

This morning, Julie Blondin, wife of Frédéric Isaac, died.

Sunday, October 8

It’s the usual time to go to church.  But now – our pastor was deported to Germany – we have no one.  I’m going to write to the Inspector {bishop}, M. Philippe Poincenot.  After what’s happened to us, we need God now more than ever.

Five blacks just passed by, surrounded by Germans, the Hindus of the Chateau who’ve given themselves up, passing themselves off as Moroccan deserters.  In passing, they asked mama, “And Jacques?  Dead also?”

Everywhere, in the orchards, the boches are digging machine gun nests.

An ambulance departs quickly to pick up the bodies of three officers who were blown up by their own mines, near Frédéric-Fontaine, where the front is.  The Americans have occupied the quarries.

What a beautiful autumn day, one hundred times more beautiful than the most beautiful spring day!  I was able to take food, a hook, a pick, some blankets, an overcoat and some clothing to Jarko.  He has to be well hidden, because the boches are all around him, and the telephone line passes nearby.

Still no news from Jean.  Does he know of our loss?

Coming back from seeing Jarko, I ran into the youngest of the little boches – seventeen years old – who is hiding out with two buddies at Moulinlou.  These three heroes have quit the war.  They sneak around with their rifles on their backs, living by stealing.  To understand, you have to know that, of the two or three hundred boches who are here, there are men from maybe ten different regiments, infantrymen, sailors, aviators, artillerymen, all mixed together, not knowing each other, including kids of fifteen years old.  So, sneaking around is easy.

As soon as I got to the house, a boche asks for the “schmid”, that is to say the blacksmith.  He holds up a piece of metal and explains, “Machine broke!  Broke!  Kaput … Repair!”  Yeah, buddy, I’ll fix it for you.  Come on!  I put it in the vice and stretched it to the point where it was ready to crack.  “How much money?”  “None.”  He left thrilled, leaving a fifty-franc note on the workbench.  “Nix return money.” 

Finally, a little walk to the shelter at the bottom of la Goutte Benay.  Everything was intact, even M.P.’s typewriter, hidden under some roots, but it was damp.

Swarms of Shells

Monday, October 9

Anniversary of two marriages:  ours and Jean’s. 

For a long time, I’ve been hiding all the horseshoe nails.  But the boches have been stealing them from other places and bringing their horses to me.  But because I don’t clinch the nails, the shoes fall off right away.

Suzette has received a picture of her and René, taken two weeks ago, that they’d sent to Audincourt to be developed, which made her cry.  It’s the final farewell.  Poor children!

Did Jean hear London radio when it recounted the massacre of Etobon?  We’ve told him nothing.  It’s soon enough for him to find out when he comes back.  When I see the two boches who have been forced on us, who eat at our table, revolt cries out within me.  And for all that, despite the cruelties they have inflicted on us, I don’t want to kill them, these two:  Karl, whose eyes fill with tears when I tell him our sorrows; the other, Willy, is just a kid.

Tuesday, October 10

I climbed up into the church attic, where the tiles are stored, so that I can fix the roof of the parsonage, which was pierced by a shell.  They had stored munitions and explosives there.  Along with Jacques, I had come to take them and hide them somewhere else, but we had found nothing.  Today, sticking my arms down into spaces under the arches, I find enough to blow up the whole village.  What should I do?  Nothing, evidently, with these boches everywhere.  And, if we blow up something, they’ll blow up something.

They’ve brought back some soldiers from the front, muddy, dead on their feet, drained.  One of them, who could hardly hold himself up, leaned against one of our doors.  He was rubbing the four hairs on his chin.  I said, “Here’s one with a goatee.”  He understood.  “Yes.  A little beard.”  “Where did you learn French?”  “Me, traveled a lot, Italy, Spain, France.”  “What’s your job?”  “To play the accordion at dances.”  “Well, it’s time to play.”  “Ah!  Soon be finished dancing.  It’s the Americans who are making the music.”  “What do you say about the war?”  “Not good.  For you, soon finished.  For us, all the way to the end, everything.”  “Everything, to the bitter end?  OK, my friend, you’ve said something that makes me happy.  Come in, and we’ll give you something warm to drink …”  Did I react wrongly?  This Willy Imbet told us that he had come out of a true hell and that during his fifteen months in Russia he hadn’t suffered so much.  You understand when he tells about the sound of hundreds of “screamers” that come down on the front.

A battery of four guns passes through the village, a walking forest.  The soldiers have branches on them all the way to their helmets.  Will they at least put them back?  Shells are arriving in swarms, tearing up fields and orchards.  One on the reservoir.  One a direct hit on Fritz’s house.

More echoes of the massacre.  No one saw Jacques at Chenebier.  Two people say they saw him getting into a car.  But he wasn’t seen at Belfort.  Could he have escaped on the way?  But we would have seen him by now.  And then his pants that were found in that awful room …

Willy Imbet just heard that a bomb fell on the trench that he left this morning.  Of the five that were found, three were dead, two wounded.  Between Sunday and yesterday, they’ve had 110 dead in this area.

Banvillars

Banvillars is a village not far from Belfort. About 2 weeks after the massacre at Chenebier, the horror continued for the men who had survived. What happened at Banvillars did not become known as quickly as the horror of September 27 in Chenebier. After taking away those captives they did not murder at Etobon, the Germans chose to execute them in a field instead of in the middle of town. There was only one survivor, a priest from Giromagny, left to bring the story back home. Banvillars is located between Etobon and Belfort, in a series of villages that become closer to each other as they get nearer to the big city of Belfort. These days, Banvillars is a true suburb of the city, but in 1944 it was still an agricultural village, surrounded by fields and woods.

Emile Pierre, the curé or parish priest from Giromagny was the sole survivor of the massacre at Banvillars on October 10, 1944. He reported[1] that he was one of thirteen men from the region who had been imprisoned in the Friedrich barracks at Belfort.  The men were called out of their cells at eight o’clock that morning. They were pushed up against the walls of the hallway by German soldiers armed with machine guns, then forced into a large room. An officer had a list of their names, which he checked one by one as they answered the roll call. The men were forced to strip, all the while guarded by the machine gunners. Everything that could later be used to identify them, including dentures, wedding rings or religious medals, was removed from their bodies. Pierre reports that they used wire cutters to remove some of the items from the men. They were then given simple clothes to wear, which Pierre calls the uniform of the condemned:  open shirts, pants and shoes, nothing by which they could be identified. The soldiers opened the exterior doors of the room and the men were loaded into the back of a truck outfitted with benches along its sides. When they were seated, the Germans loaded a stretcher with a wounded member of the maquis in the center aisle.

The truck set off across Belfort. The men were silent, knowing what was ahead. Pierre led the men in prayer as they were driven toward certain death. He asked each of them their name, the name of their village and their occupation. He pronounced the absolution upon all of them.

It was not long before the truck left the main highway towards Héricourt. It went down a lane, through open fields, over a bridge, then along the edge of a wood. Finally, far from any houses or barns, the truck was stopped. A car that had been following pulled up beside the truck. A German officer, the commander of the prison where the men had been held, got out. The four soldiers who had guarded the men took up their stations and prepared their machine guns.

The first to get out of the truck were a Senegalese and a North African soldier. They climbed out of the back, walked a few paces into the field and were shot. Next, the man on the stretcher was brought down. Two of the machine-gunners walked over to his stretcher and shot him. Then, two more men walked out to their death. The next two to die were one of the Nardins and Pierre Goux from Etobon. Then two gendarmes, most likely among those who had hidden at Etobon. Each pair fell on top of the bodies of their compatriots.

Then, it was Emile Pierre’s turn. The officer, who was again checking names off the list, called him out, but then led him aside. Pierre knew they were saving him for last, letting him watch the others die. After a few moments, the curé too approached the machine guns, but the officer ordered his men to stop and turned with a few words to a fellow officer. After a moment’s discussion, Pierre was ordered to return to the truck. He was the only one to return alive to Belfort that day. 

Emile Pierre did not stay at the barracks at Belfort long. He was transported to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he remained until the end of the war. He survived and returned home in 1945. But Albert Nardin, Marcel Nardin and Pierre Goux, along with four of the gendarmes, were buried in the field at Banvillars thirteen days after they were taken from Etobon.

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[1] Statement of Emile Pierre, October 10, 1945, as recorded in Ceux d’Etobon, Benjamin Vallotton, Librairie F. Rouge et cie., Lausanne, translated by K. Douglass.

The Cossacks Return

The fighting grew closer, but Etobon was still occupied. German soldiers and Cossack mercenaries were everywhere: sleeping in homes and barns, stealing food and clothing. One showed up wearing murdered Jacques Perret's leather coat. Jules Perret burned with anger.

Wednesday, October 11

The Cossacks have come back.  One of them was wearing my son’s leather overcoat.  Thugs of Kouban!  Traitors to their country!  My blood boils.  Why have a revolver and nine cartridges, René’s shotgun and fifty cartridges and not kill as many as possible?  Am I a man to hesitate or am I better off resisting my anger?  Ah, if I only had myself to consider … Bad luck!

Gustave Colley, from Chenebier, has come to the forge.  He was a close friend of our mayor, with whom he had served in the same battery during the other war.  He told me of his grief in burying his friend himself in the common grave.  There was so much blood that the sabots of the men of the burial detail were full.  He didn’t see or recognize Jacques.

Suzette has gone to feed our hermit in the pines, Jarko.

Mama came back from the Champ Bozar furious.  A band of boches had pulled up our potatoes and carried them away by the basketful in a truck.

I brought in some wood and put it above the kitchen ceiling to protect us from explosions.

Thursday, October 12

Sinister noises of shells.  You get used to everything, even living with a storm of iron that could destroy you any minute – you, your house, the whole village.

The Cossacks are everywhere.  They steal our leeks.  Jeanne had an officer chase them off, but they were back a moment later.  How do these jerks dare to walk by homes they’ve pillaged, in this village where they took all the men to the slaughter?  Thugs!  (I think I’ve noted elsewhere that my nephew Pochard, coming back from imprisonment, told me that the Russians, when the Germans were routed, killed every last one of them.  In the area where he was, they killed hundreds.)

Some boches have returned from the front.  “Much grenades.  Much kaput.”

By the fireside, Philippe on my knee, I talk to him about his poor papa.  And I relive that frightful day.  Jeanne says, “I still see him leaving, so confident, with his pink cheeks.  And the mayor!  He was crying.  His wife said to him, ‘Look at the others, they aren’t worried like you are.’” He wept because he had received a warning.  He sacrificed his life.  But he said, “They are young, they believe anything.”  We try to console ourselves, saying that their suffering, however terrible, was short, that they weren’t tortured like so many others, perhaps like those twenty-seven who were taken to Belfort.

And we went to bed while the bombardment went on over the woods.

We Have to Go on Living

Jules Perret and the other Etobonais had to house and feed their German and Cossack occupiers, even as their orchards and gardens were being decimated by shells. Leeks, cabbages, apples, pears - winter's produce was either being eaten or destroyed by the enemy.

Saturday, October 14

A young boche is sleeping in the stable with his horse.  This Walter Hutter, with his little horse cart with two car tires, is going to resupply the soldiers on the front line.  He is still inflated with arrogance.  To hear him, they’ll be back in Paris in two months, and will never let it go again.  He boasts of a new army that will freeze the Americans.  “Allies kaput … real cold.”  And just so that I understand, he shivers with cold.

I remarked that, when the shells are falling, the Germans are more chicken than the villagers of Etobon.

Five o’clock.  Philippe comes up to me:  “Grandpa, write in your notebook that I picked the apples from the tree behind our hives all by myself.”  There, it’s done.

As for me, as I was harvesting, I almost got myself killed by a Cossack.  Since he refused to give me back my ladder, I pulled it out of his hands.  So he pulled his rifle, jumped on me, pointed it at my head and said, “Bang!”  Seeing me calmly climbing my ladder, he left, grumbling.

A big boche bought the best pears for the officers.  The ones they covet, at my place, are the winter pears. “I’ll keep them till Christmas.  But pick them by hand!”  Yes, sir!  Climbing into the tallest trees, I shake down as many as I can.  The pears are drowning in the soggy ground.  We wash them and put the least damaged on the top of the sack.  In two weeks, they’ll all be rotten.  Merry Christmas!

Now that the rain has stopped, what much, everywhere!  But there’s worse.  The boches are camped all around, in courtyards, gardens, orchards.  They are disgusting.  And they think they’re bringing us “kultur.”

Up until now, the shells have limited themselves to tearing up our fields, without touching the village.  Elsewhere, they say there have been many civilian casualties, in particular, three families who suffered twelve dead, including all three mothers.

Tuesday, October 17

Early, before the shooting starts, we go to pull leeks.  What a scene!  The ground is turned upside-down.  And broken apple trees everywhere.  As for the cabbage, it’s just sauerkraut.  Since the rain has started again, we have sticky mud up to our ankles.  More of the Germanic horrors!  How disgusting!

Denise Nardin recognized her father’s knapsack being worn by a Cossack.  The community will miss him so much, that poor Charles, both as a man and as a craftsman who was always willing to work.  These thugs have taken three woodworkers, two blacksmiths, two teachers, from us. But we still have to go on living …