The Quiet Franche-Comté

During the “quiet years” of the occupation of France by Germany, village life was much like it had been in the previous century. Rationing of petroleum and food meant that rural families provided much of what they needed themselves. Horses and oxen provided most of the transportation and pulled plows and farm wagons. Blacksmiths were a necessary part of rural life. Only a few 20^th century inventions touched the villages, most notably the radio and the telephone.  In keeping with four hundred years of tradition, the villages of the northern Franche-Comté were Protestant, specifically Lutheran. Most had only one church building, at the center of the village, and the pastor was a public figure of equal stature with the mayor. As the mayor was the political leader, the pastor was the moral and spiritual leader of the community.

Pastor Marlier had been serving the Etobon-Chenebier parish for several years, and he and his wife were beginning a family: son Michel was born in February 1944. The youth and the older Etobonais all admired their Pastor. He was well-educated, a natural leader, and could even speak and write a little English. He baptized the infants, confirmed the young, visited the sick and buried the dead. He made sure the parish kept functioning even during the occupation. Mme. Marlier worked with the women to organize parish dinners and festivals. Her neighbors Jeanne Perret and Lucie Goux, who lived up the road, could always be counted on to bring a tarte aux fruits or a gateau de fête to any parish gathering. Most of the adults in Etobon had grown up in the shadow of the church steeple. The village looked to Pastor and Mme. Marlier to help them through those difficult years.

The Gathering Storm

By the early summer of 1944, dozens of escaped Indian POWs had passed through Etobon. Each had been fed and sheltered. When the villagers had surplus clothes, they shared them with their guests. The men had escorted the Indians to Chagey and from there they traveled in stages to the Swiss border. But as the summer wore on, groups began to return, telling how they had been stopped, or fought skirmishes with German patrols. The Germans had learned of the unprecedented numbers of escapees crossing the frontier and had closed it. The former POWs had to go back, deeper into the Franche-Comté to find sanctuary.

At Etobon, Pastor Marlier and the leaders of the maquis decided to set up a series of camps in the woods for the men. They would provide tools to build shelters and lean-tos and the village families would deliver food each day to an agreed-upon site. The men would at least be kept alive and away from the occupiers.

The idea of these exotic-looking men wandering the woods of eastern France always made me shake my head. How did they escape without being spotted? And what tales did they tell when they returned home to India? As I got to know my parishioners, I found how much the events of 1944 lived in them and their homes. One afternoon, drinking tea in Claudine’s salon in Chenebier, she told me she remembered these funny Indian men in the woods when she was a child. She said, “One got sick and died – right there where you’re sitting.” Then she pulled out an old magazine with pictures of soldiers dressed in rags, turbans in place, straggling out of the woods between Etobon and Chenebier at the end of the war. I understood then why the Indian government had placed two bronze plaques at the cemetery in Etobon, grieving with the villages of Etobon and Chenebier.  The plaque in French provided by the government of India. An identical plaque in Hindi is on the opposite wall of the cemetery at Etobon