From May 1940, about 100 children rescued by Kindertransports from the Général Bernheim and Herbert Speyer homes in Brussels were cared for by their directors in a run-down farm near Seyre. The winter of 1940/41 made it clear to those in charge that new accommodation was desperately needed.
Since October 1940, the children who had fled to southern France were under the care of the Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für kriegsgeschädigte Kinder (Swiss Association for War-Damaged Children, SAKK). The SAKK had a head office in Toulouse, with Maurice Dubois as its director. At the beginning of 1942, the SAKK merged with the Swiss Red Cross to form the Abteilung Kinderhilfe (Children’s Aid Department).
At the beginning of 1941, Maurice Dubois who was searching for better accommodation, found it: an empty castle, the Chateau de la Hille, seemed suitable to him. In May 1941, the Swiss children’s nurse Rösli Naef arrived in Seyre to be the director of La Hille. The children moved to La Hille one month later. As in Seyre, the daily routine there was strictly regulated. The children were given school lessons and did homework and handicrafts. In addition to this, they worked in the fields on the surrounding farms, as they produced some of their food themselves. By July 1942, 20 children from La Hille were able to leave for the United States with the help of the Quakers.
In the early morning of 26 August 1942, the catastrophe happened: gendarmes appeared in the castle and presented Rösli Naef with a list of the names of some 40 young people older than 16 and three Jewish employees. The Vichy government had approved the deportation of 10,000 Jews from the unoccupied “southern zone” of France. The policemen took all the people into custody and brought them to the internment camp Le Vernet. However, after laborious negotiations between Maurice Dubois and the Vichy government, the young people were able to leave Le Vernet and returned to La Hille.
After this incident, Rösli Naef and other employees of the Swiss Red Cross working in La Hille started their own rescue operations. Many children and young people managed to escape to Switzerland or Spain with their help. Yet some escape attempts failed. In 1943, several young people were arrested at the Swiss border and were sent back to La Hille. Gendarmes arrested them and took them to the Drancy transit camp. From there they were deported to Auschwitz and Majdanek.
The surviving Children of La Hille stayed in contact with each other after the war and met on a regular basis. In 2000, many of them were present when a memorial plaque was inaugurated close to the Chateau de la Hille. AP