Storming the Eagle's Nest by Jim Ring

Nice in the Rhône-Alpes, on the southern side of Lake Geneva. Megève, a 3,369-foot resort ten miles east of Mont Blanc, in a sense selected itself. It was a medieval farming village developedas a skiing resort by the Rothschild family. The Jewish banking dynasty had tired of St Moritz in the years immediately before and after the First World War. Megève showed some promise as a substitute. It commanded a large, sunny bowl below the flanks of Mont Blanc that flattered the skiing of beginners, and it was easily accessible from Geneva. As skiing snowballed in the 1920s, the resort flourished. It attracted just the sort of set to whom St Moritz itself appealed: aristocrats, financiers and film stars:
haute volée
– high society. Now, in a turn of events not anticipated by the Rothschilds, the bankers were going to be supplanted by refugees.
    The next challenge for Lospinoso was to move the 400 Jews from Nice to the Haute-Savoie. Rail was the obvious option to transport the thousands the Inspector General needed to resettle. However, to avoid the gradients of the Alpine terrain, the line from Nice ran west along the coast through the honeypots of Antibes, Cannes and St Raphael to Marseilles, before turning north to Grenoble and thence north-east to Savoie. All three sides of this rough oblong would take the Jews through territory held by German forces. Neither the Italians nor the refugees themselves would run this risk. Nobody knew how the Germans would react. Morale in the Wehrmacht had been badly hit by the final destruction of Paulus’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad at the end of January 1943.
    Fortunately, a committee had been established in Nice to look after the refugees’ affairs and represent the community to the local authorities – now including the Italians. The Comité d’Assistance aux Refugés had provided the Jews with the papers necessary for survival in wartime Europe: identity cards, ration books and housing permits. Now it was able to secure the funding from the community itself to pay for lorries to take the refugees north by road to the Haute-Savoie. These were lumbering gazogènes, developed to run on charcoal in the absence of very heavily rationed petrol. Going uphill, passengers had to get out and push. The first convoys arrived in Megève on 8 April 1943. Just four days previously, a new crematorium – the fifth – had opened at Auschwitz.
    As the days lengthened and the snows melted in the mountains, as the spring flowers blossomed, Lospinoso established similar communities in other Alpine resorts as far from the Germans and as close to the Italian border as possible. These were roughly on the north–south line between Megève and Nice: at Barcelonnette, Vence, Venanson, Castellane and Saint- Martin-Vésubie .
    The last of these was only half a day’s drive north of Nice, a remote 2,346-foot settlement where the village and its stone houses seemed to cling to the edge of a precipice. Between the wars Saint-Martin had been fashionable among the English escaping from the heat of the summer Riviera; in nearby Roquebillière in 1939, Arthur Koestler wrote his masterly critique of totalitarianism,
Darkness at Noon.
Now, courtesy of Lospinoso, the 1,650 locals were joined by more than 1,200 Jews. In the words of a Polish refugee:
    Saint Martin, a small settlement in the mountains some sixty kilometres from Nice, was before the war a holiday and convalescence resort. There the Italian occupation authorities have set up one of the places of résidence forcée for the Jewish refugees who have reached France during the war from countries occupied by the Germans. Here the refugees were accommodated in houses and villas. Twice daily they have to report to the police officers; they are also not allowed to go outside the village or to leave it … They are well organized: a Jewish committee elected by the refugees is responsible to the Italian