A large number of Jews who arrived in Saint Martin Vésubie in 1943 were sent to “forced residence”. This text presents the context of this “forced residence”. It served as the basis for a lecture given by Jean-Louis Panicacci during the Marche de la Mémoire 2023 weekend.
During the Italian occupation of southeastern France, a dozen climatic resorts with sufficient accommodation facilities were chosen by the military authorities of the Quarta Armata, starting in February 1943, to take in 4,400 foreign Jews who were illegally living on the Côte d’Azur and whom the German authorities wanted to recapture for deportation to the killing centers of Eastern Europe.
In the Alpes-Maritimes, this was the case for Vence and Saint-Martin-Vésubie, in the Basses-Alpes for Digne, Barcelonnette, Castellane, Digne, Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, Enchastrayes, in Savoie for Aix-les-Bains and in Haute-Savoie for Megève, Saint-Gervais, Sallanches, Combloux, Le Fayet. It should be noted that in June 1943, several towns in the Lower Alps were earmarked to house a further 800 foreign Jews: Annot, Barrême, Beauvezer, Colmars-les-Alpes, Entrevaux, Saint-André-les-Alpes, Thorame-Haute.
Before the appointment of Inspector General of the Racial Police Guido Lospinoso at the end of April, there were already 390 forced residents in Saint-Martin-Vésubie, 150 in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, 102 in Castellane, 87 in Vence, 60 in Barcelonnette and Enchastrayes, 51 in Digne, 30 in Combloux, Le Fayet, Sallanches and Aix-les-Bains. Lospinoso decided to develop the system of forced residences (residenze coatte) in order to give the impression to the German authorities who were becoming more and more pressing, so there were a thousand forced residents in Saint-Martin-Vésubie (including 10 to 20 in the neighboring communes of Venanson, Belvédère, La Bollène, Berthemont-les-Bains and Roquebillière), 770 in Megève, 590 in Saint-Gervais, 139 in Barcelonnette, 120 in Vence, 102 in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, 78 in Castellane, and 30 to 50 elsewhere.
In the capital of the “Switzerland of Nice”, the forced residents were just as numerous as the natives, which was bound to cause friction, particularly when it came to food and the cost of living. They were housed in seventeen hotels and boarding houses, as well as in private homes, with real estate agent Vincent Gasiglia in charge of distributing the new arrivals, who had to sign an attendance register at the Carabinieri headquarters twice a day, and then only once from June onwards. The Comité d’Aide aux Réfugiés (Refugee Aid Committee), now known as the Comité Dubouchage, was responsible for transporting the forced residents, housing them and even feeding them, so as not to overburden the municipal budget.
As in Megève and Saint-Gervais, a committee represented the forced residents to the Italian authorities (Carabinieri and Guardia alla Frontiera), the town hall and community leaders in Nice, who brought in the Belgian Jacques Blum, who quickly became the most influential member of this structure representing those under house arrest. The latter could work if they had the material means to do so (in Megève, for example, 240 residents were employed as tailors or shoemakers in Secours National shelters), and were free to move around within communal boundaries. They were also able to worship, and the Châlet Ferrix became a synagogue, where two weddings and twelve presentations to the Temple were celebrated. The young people of the village frequented the young refugees, who were more cultured and experienced than they were, taking part together in sports and leisure activities, dancing clandestinely in barns equipped with gramophones, and even forming romances. Adults, on the other hand, were more reserved, even hostile, due to the pressure of rising food prices, as attested by telephone and postal intercepts. This conflictual situation was mirrored in most of the other forced residences in the Alps, sometimes with even greater tensions, as in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie (where the mayor resigned) and Castellane, with manifestations of anti-Semitism.
Following Benito Mussolini’s dismissal from office on July 25, 1943, the Saint-Martin-Vésubie committee realized that Italy was likely to surrender, and that an exodus to Piedmont had to be prepared to avoid being rounded up by the SS then present in the Bouches-du-Rhône. He encouraged residents to buy backpacks (or even to make their own), and obtained authorization from the garrison command to reconnoiter the paths leading to the province of Cuneo via the Cerise and Fenestre passes, which was carried out in August.
The transalpine military authorities encouraged forced residents in Haute-Savoie to move to the Alpes-Maritimes from September 6, with some 50 trucks and coaches chartered by the “Comité Dubouchage”. Residents of Savoie and the Basses-Alpes followed suit the next day, and we know from gendarmerie reports that 154 people were transported to Lantosque, Belvédère and Saint-Martin-Vésubie. Proof of these in extremis migratory movements can be found in the Nice-Drancy convoy lists published by Serge Klarsfeld, since 42 forced residents of the Basses-Alpes, 10 from Haute-Savoie, 5 from Isère and 1 from Savoie were deported from Nice between September 17, 1943 and March 24, 1944, not counting those registered as having last resided in Borgo San Dalmazzo. We know that a train leaving Annecy on September 7 through the Fréjus tunnel arrived in Rome ahead of the Wehrmacht soldiers, with several hundred residents of Haute-Savoie being taken in charge in the Eternal City by Father Marie-Benoît, nicknamed “The Pope of the Jews”.
On the evening of September 8, the announcement of the surrender was greeted with joy, as it weakened Nazi Germany, but also with concern, as the risk of deportation loomed dangerously close. On the morning of September 9, the Italian authorities invited the forced residents to follow them as they retreated to Valdieri and Entracque. Food stores were stormed, and columns of fugitives, overloaded with luggage, set off along the dirt roads leading to the Boréon (1430m) and La Madone de Fenestre (1920m), then in Italian territory, from where the mule tracks became tricky to negotiate for inexperienced people, poorly shod and overloaded with luggage, hence the rapid abandonment of hundreds of suitcases. Despite the presence of dozens of Italian soldiers at their side, the fear of being caught by the Nazis haunted them, adding to their physical difficulties a profound anxiety. Around 980 people left Saint-Martin-Vésubie on September 9 and 10, as well as Berthemont-les-Bains via the Baisse de Férisson and Belvédère via the Baisse de Prals, sometimes accompanied by natives who had rented out dearly their mules, and around 50 elderly people and children who remained in the localities where they had settled, where they were almost all captured by the SS some ten days later. The fugitives reached the villages of Valdieri and Entracque between September 11 and 13, but 340 of them, either morally exhausted or unwilling to compromise their Piedmontese landlords, preferred to surrender to the SS at the Alpini barracks in Borgo San Dalmazzo from the 18th, who deported them via Savona and Nice to Drancy and Auschwitz two months later, with only 15 surviving the Holocaust.
Places of remembrance have been erected since 1995: the first stele at Saint-Martin-Vésubie, a plaque and the open-air museum station at Borgo San Dalmazzo in 2005, plaques on the Cerise and Fenestre passes in 2007, new stele at Saint-Martin-Vésubie in 2018, and the Deportation Memorial at Borgo San Dalmazzo in 2021.
Initiated by Piedmontese associations in 1999, and joined by the Côte d’Azur Jewish community, the Musée de la Résistance azuréenne and the Saint-Martin municipality from 2001 onwards, a Marche de la Mémoire (“remembrance walk”) takes place every first Sunday in September, alternating between the Cerise pass (as in 2021 and 2023) and the Fenestre pass (as in 2022).
Jean-Louis Panicacci
Jean-Louis Panicacci is a French historian, history and geography teacher at Antibes high school, then lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Nice, specializing in the Second World War in the Alpes-Maritimes.
