Grandmère

Suzanne Planchon Babut was born 121 years ago today. She was my great-grandmother.

She saw herself as an ordinary person, but few others shared that view. Her good sense, goodwill, and courage endeared her to people far beyond our family and even secured her a footnote in history.

Grandmère* was neither the first nor the last in the family to earn distinction. Her paternal grandfather, Jules-Émile Planchon, was a renowned botanist, and the Impressionist painter Frédéric Bazille was a relation. Her husband, Ernest-Charles Babut, was a noted scholar in early Christianity; his father, Charles, was a beloved and influential Protestant pastor; and a nephew, Daniel Bovet, would win a Nobel Prize in 1957. Grandmère’s endeavors, though less celebrated, were at least as consequential.

It’s hard to know what role misfortune played in forging her character, but it certainly helps explain her lifelong concern for the disadvantaged and dispossessed. Between 1909 and 1922, she lost her father, her husband, both sons, and her financial security. She also endured the privations of two major wars, and yet she somehow remained almost preternaturally warm and optimistic.

Grandmère was an early suffragette, and during World War I she trained and volunteered as a nurse. When that conflict left her a widow at 29 with a meager pension, she tapped her only real asset: the commodious house and garden that were her grandfather’s legacy. She rented rooms and served meals to paying guests, most from the nearby University of Montpellier, where her family had studied and taught for generations.

Not all of the lodgers were locals. When Franco’s takeover sent Spanish republicans scrambling in the mid-’30s, Grandmère took in several, including a family that stayed for over a decade. She did the same for refugees during the French-Algerian War and later for a few ex-convicts she’d befriended while they were in prison.

World War II put her legendary resourcefulness to its greatest test. Like many Huguenots, with their own long history of persecution, Grandmère became involved in the Resistance. Gambling that no one would hassle a sweet-looking middle-aged woman, she relayed messages, pedaling into the countryside and leaving them under a rock for pickup by the next link in the chain. (Years later, she would be greatly amused to learn that said comrade was her next-door neighbor.)

As the Germans closed in, members of Grandmère’s church helped as many Jews as possible to safety. She and her confrères, as part of an underground railroad, shepherded children to such havens as Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the Cévenol village whose heroic story was recounted in the documentary Weapons of the Spirit. But many people were inevitably left behind, and Grandmère heeded her instincts and opened her home, quietly sheltering up to 20 at a time, some for long periods.

The next several years were spent under the enemy’s nose – almost literally. A French army installation sat directly across the street, and the Gestapo had commandeered a neighboring villa as their local headquarters.

The latter provided a rare moment of comic relief during those dark days. One of Grandmère’s trees was toppled in a storm, falling onto the garden wall and projecting into the street. When she went out to have a look, she was startled to find a Nazi officer wringing his hands and bemoaning the “tragic loss” of “such a beautiful tree.” Tiens, she thought. Il torture les gens, mais il pleure pour mon arbre. (How odd. He tortures people, yet he’s crying over my tree.)

“Wasn’t she scared?” I once asked my great-aunt Antoinette, who admitted with a chuckle, “Once or twice she got a little nervous when people argued in Yiddish in the garden.”

Somehow they survived, thanks to Providence and the complicit silence of untold people. Many of those who’d found refuge chez Grandmère stayed in touch after the war, some returning to visit in happier circumstances.

In 1976, Grandmère was informed that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial authority in Israel, had named her one of the Righteous Among the Nations. (I much prefer the simple French term, les Justes.)

Her response, translated in a 1993 book on the subject, was very much in character. The designation, she wrote, “has confounded me, for I deserve no decoration. Besides, I am against decorations. However, I accept your medal not as a decoration but as a sign of the friendship which penetrates my heart…. Please, I beg of you, do not arrange an official ceremony for the awarding of this medal. One deserves no credit for doing what one’s heart and conscience dictate. One need not be thanked for this; even less to glorify in it. Hence, I say: ‘thank you’ … simply thanks, with all the admiration and friendship that I bear toward your people.”

She ultimately consented to a local ceremony, hosted in February 1977 by the mayor of Montpellier, in which the Israeli consul from Marseille presented her with the medal. She pronounced the gathering delightful: "not cold or official," but "almost a family reunion, with so many old friends."

A year later, Grandmère died at the age of 91. (Curiously, the date was February 28th - the same as her sister, in 1966, and her husband, in 1916. Their younger son almost shared the distinction, but he died after midnight, ergo on March 1st, in 1922.) And in October 1979, on a tour of the Holy Land, Antoinette dedicated her mother's tree at Yad Vashem.

I was lucky enough to know Grandmère for my first 11 years, and I never heard her mention her travails – or anything else negative, for that matter. She retained her thrifty ways, saving scraps of paper and cloth and sewing them into little notebooks. Several survive, along with sachets of lavender from her garden. When I remember Grandmère, she’s sitting outside in the sun, or the shade, or in Antoinette’s parlor – knitting, stitching, always busy. And always smiling.

* The term is actually grand-mère, but I somehow learned it without a hyphen and was never corrected - not by my grandmother, nor by the subject herself - so she remains Grandmère to me.