History's Secret Heroes: Series 2: Raymond Gurême: Escape Artist

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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

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The 5th of October 1941.

An internment camp about 30 kilometers outside Paris.

Locked inside a windowless wooden hut.

A 16-year-old boy held his breath.

He listened.

for any sound of human movement.

He was handcuffed with his hands behind his back.

Hearing nothing, the boy slowly began to contort his body.

He could put his hands by the legs, by the bottom, and pass them in front of him.

His arms now in front of him, the boy gritted his teeth and ripped his hands out of the handcuffs.

His skin tore.

Joints cracked.

Trembling with the pain, refusing to scream, he felt around in the pitch dark.

He took one nail from the cell which was in wood, and with it he could open the cell.

Using his handcuffs as a wedge the boy forced a small gap between the two planks.

He wedged it wider and wider then began to squeeze himself through it.

As he landed on the cold hard ground outside the noise sent rats on the roof scattering

the boy looked around

Now it was time for the hard part Escaping from a heavily fortified camp.

Moving quickly between the huts, he made for the woods on the edge of the camp.

He climbed on a tree and he was looking at the policeman with dogs looking for him down in

the forest.

Motionless, the boy perched on a branch in the freezing cold.

And he remained there for the whole night?

Hours later, the dogs were called off.

The boy climbed down and hurried over to the fence around the camp.

With superhuman ease, he launched himself up and over.

As he sprinted off to freedom, he grinned.

He had spent an agonizing month in solitary confinement, and now he was out.

He repeated his motto to himself, Toujour résiste.

Always resist.

This boy's name was Raymond Gouréme.

He had been brought up in a traveling community and had been trained as an acrobat and circus performer.

These unique skills would allow him to escape not just from this internment camp, but from many others across France and Germany during the Second World War.

It seemed there were no bonds that could hold him, no level of security that could keep this professional escape artist captive for long.

And whenever he slipped out of their clutches, Raymond Gouréme would dedicate himself to bringing the Nazis down.

I'm Helena Bonnencarter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

Raymond Gouréme, escape artist.

Raymond was born into a family of French travelers.

Lise Foineau is an anthropologist who documents the resistance work of French travelers during the Second World World War.

Raymond liked to say he was a Malouche, so that meant that he felt very strongly and related very strongly to the Romani and French travelers communities.

Raymond's father came from a family of circus performers and on his mother's side, itinerant merchants, basket weavers and musicians for generations.

The traveling circus and the travelling cinema were central to the Gourmes family life.

As was usual in their community, Raymond and his eight siblings joined the family business from the start.

He started as a circus child when he was only two years old.

He could barely walk.

Simon Millé is a founder of the French Romany association, La Voie des Rome.

Gourme often told him stories of his early performances in the circus, toddling out into the ring as a tiny clown and acrobat.

Gourhéme played up to the audience's applause.

He enjoyed life, I think, as a clown who internally can suffer a lot, but who is there to spread joy to other people.

The audience may have loved circus people.

The rest of France did not always show them the same appreciation.

Gourhéme had been born in 1925 at a time of state sanctions against travelling people.

At the beginning of the 20th century in France, the governments really wanted to control those people who were wandering and walking and selling goods and all over the French territory.

Under the laws of the Republic, the French government could not classify travelers as a racial group.

The word was nomad, so they came up with the nomad category.

In 1912, a law was passed defining so-called nomads as generally generally gypsy travellers with no home, residence or homeland, most of them vagrants, with the particular ethnic character of gypsies, bohemian, Zigan and Ghitanos, who under the appearance of a problematic profession wander along the roads with no concern of hygiene or legal regulations.

After this law had passed, whenever travellers like Gourm's parents entered or left a town or village, they were obliged to show identity papers to the police.

As the Gourème circus traveled across France, Belgium and Switzerland, young Raymond sometimes felt that every day brought a new battle with the authorities.

Despite the restrictions, circus lives and circus shows went on, yet the world around them was changing fast.

Gourrème was 15 in the spring of 1940 when Nazi troops were preparing to invade France.

As the French army readied itself for the coming German assault, the President of France, Albert Lebran, signed a decree to restrict the movements of the nomadic population.

If you were a so-called nomad, you had to stay

in one place and were not allowed to go outside the village or the city perimeter.

The government claimed that enemy agents could pose as nomads and move around spying on the French armed forces.

But what really happened is is that the war was a perfect excuse to finally round up travelers and Romani person and make sure they would not travel anymore.

When the German invasion began, Gourm and his family were in the village of Petit Couronne near Rouen in northern France.

Once the Germans crossed the border into France, the speed of their advance was shocking.

French defenses collapsed.

Within a month, France had surrendered.

Nazi Nazi forces took over the administration of the state.

For the first few months of occupation, the Gourèmes continued to perform their circus shows.

On the 4th of October, at 6 a.m., two French police officers roared up on motorbikes and stormed into the caravan.

They ordered the family to come with them.

And his father said, but wait, wait a bit.

We haven't done anything wrong.

What is happening?

The police offered no explanation.

Instead, they began to threaten Gourème's father, a veteran who still bore scars from his service for France in the First World War.

He felt shocked because they had no criminal activities, they were not spies, they were not fighting with anyone, they were just living,

like other French people, nothing which could justify their internment.

The reason was sinister.

The French police now reported to the Nazis, and as part of their racial theories, the Nazis considered Roma and other traveling people to be untermenschen, racially inferior.

When the Nazis occupied France, they asked that all tzigoiners, so all so-called gypsies, would be put in camps.

But in France, the word gypsy was not in use.

by the French administration, which used the nomad category.

Whatever the travelling communities were called, the Nazis intended to build on existing persecutions.

But of course, I mean, the first step of genocide is to create a category and to make sure people you want to be out of society fit in this category.

So that's why

before the Nazis came to power, several European countries already built different categories.

So in France it was the nomad category, but you had similar categories in in different

European countries.

The Nazis ideology built on a pre-existing anti-gypsism that was in the European society and it was not new.

Across France around 30 new camps were constructed to imprison travelers.

The strict controls that had already been imposed by French authorities made it easy to round up nomadic people.

The Gouren family were first forced to move their caravan, circus, and cinema to a camp at Darnetal, just east of Rouen, along with around 200 other traveling people.

From Darnetal, though, worse was to come.

They were to be transferred to another internment camp on the grounds of a famous motor racing track at Linas Montléry,

outside Paris.

They couldn't even take their belongings.

Their properties were taken by the state and never given given back.

This new camp was a series of shacks without heating, chairs or blankets.

It was dirty and dangerous.

Many inmates fell sick and even died.

One day, Raymond Gourm was queuing for soup when he looked out at the barbed wire fence, punctuated with guard buildings.

At the front of the queue, Gourrème held out his bowl.

There were also worms in the soup, so in the beginning he took them out and then we said, well, we can eat this.

It is meat.

As Gourm ate, he watched a young Romani boy who was standing in the soup queue.

The boy was hungry and had gone back for more.

When a guard noticed that the boy had already eaten, he beat the child.

Boiling with rage, Gourm ran over.

Barely thinking, he hit the guard as hard as he could.

Other guards quickly jumped into the fray.

They pummeled Gourm and broke his nose.

He was hauled off to a solitary confinement in a tiny hut.

This was when Raymond Gourme was able to draw from his circus experience to make his acrobatic escape from the camp.

Once outside, Gourrème moved fast and lightly.

Sleeping outdoors and avoiding patrols, he hiked 140 kilometers back to the outskirts of Rouen.

At last, he arrived back at the camp at Darnetal.

The family caravan was still there, abandoned.

Gourme gathered a few belongings, covered his injured wrists with long sleeves, and set off again.

Romanies and travellers in France knew the French territory very well.

They knew where to go, where to hide, and so on.

Gourm kept moving around, working casually on farms.

If people found out he was a traveller, he could be in grave danger.

So he made up stories and gave himself a new identity.

Once he felt back at full strength, he embarked on his next feat, to break back into the internment camp at Lina-Moléry.

He used to come from time to time in the camp by night to have some time with his family during the night, bringing food, food for his family, for friends.

And in the morning, he left the camp without being seen by the police.

Kourème scaled the fence to break into the camp again to visit his family several times.

Through the coldest winter of the 20th century, he carried on working in fields and traveling mile after mile on foot.

Of course it was dangerous, but danger was his friend.

Helping people was in his blood.

After his fourth journey back into the camp, Gourm was spotted.

and seized by police guards.

He was taken to Anger and interned in La Ville Ville des Rose, a reform school for orphans, members of the Resistance and delinquents.

Within the camp, Gourme took a job in the hospital.

One morning, a man approached him.

Checking to see if they were alone, he asked if Gourm was interested in a different kind of work.

He needed someone quick and determined, with nerves of steel.

Later that week, Gourm stood waiting in a corner of the hospital yard.

He was about to begin his first secret mission for the French resistance.

His task was simple but dangerous.

The idea was that he would steal one of the supply lorries arriving in the hospital courtyard and drive it to a crossroad where resistant fighters would pick it up.

As Gouréme watched the vehicle approach, he thought about how dangerous this mission was.

He was being asked to hijack a German army truck fully laden with supplies.

So it was really to make sure the Machisars, so the underground fighters, would have some food.

The driver climbed down from the truck.

Once he was out of the way, Gourm took his chance.

He leapt into the cab and drove the truck out of the camp.

He continued to drive down the streets of Anger,

adrenaline pumping through his veins.

Near the crossroads, Gourm parked the truck.

As he climbed out, he saw German soldiers approaching.

For a moment he panicked, but then he saw saw they were resistance fighters, disguised in Nazi uniforms.

So it was at this precise moment that Raymond's resistance stopped being just about what happened to the Romanis and travellers and turned into resistance against the Germans.

Later, in Anger Prison, Gourm waited in his cell.

Anger was a very harsh prison.

Each cell was guarded by a German soldier.

Gourème's career in the French Resistance had been brief.

The hospital director had quickly noticed the truck had been stolen and had reported Gourème for the crime.

Gourem had escaped from the youth detention camp easily enough when he had a German truck.

Now, though, he was locked in a prison and the Nazis would decide his fate.

As a traveller and now a member of the Resistance, Gourem was in a doubly precarious position.

In German-occupied areas like France, the Nazi authorities usually interned travellers or sent them to Germany for forced labor and re-education.

Some 23,000 Roma and Sinti people were deported to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Around 3,500 more were sent to other concentration camps.

Many travellers were subjected to forced sterilization by the Nazis, and some were used by Joseph Mengele in his grotesque experiments.

Few survived Auschwitz.

Across Europe though, thousands more travelers were never taken to the camps.

The Nazis and their allies simply rounded them up and shot them.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that at least 250,000 travelers were murdered by the Nazis Nazis and their allies.

The true total may be as high as half a million.

The Nazis put a huge machinery in service of

genocide.

At the origin, the gypsy as an image has been created as the negative of what a

citizen should be.

Guchm was sent by train to a labor camp outside Frankfurt.

Inside the camp, he was guarded by a Nazi intelligence agency.

Raymond said that it was probably one of the hardest moments in his life.

He suffered with cold, hunger, mistreatment, and bombing raids were never far away.

The skies above Germany were filled with Allied planes bombing targets.

The air raids were terrifying, yet they gave Gourm an opportunity.

Using the chaos and noise of the bombing as cover, he managed to pull off another escape, this time taking two other inmates with with him.

For days, they hid in the vast darkness of the Black Forest.

Gourem went without food, eating damp leaves to quell his hunger and thirst.

It wasn't long, though, till the guards noticed prisoner 3619 was missing.

The Hitler youth were dispatched to find and seize Gourem.

Now that he had forged a reputation for repeated escapes, Gourem was considered a serious risk.

When he was recaptured, he was transferred to a high-security discipline camp, alongside captured Russian and Ukrainian soldiers who were being held as prisoners of war.

His work included the grim job of pulling bodies from the rubble of buildings after Allied bombing attacks.

During his time in camps, Gurem saw three Russians hanged at the entrance for stealing bread.

He saw guards watch and laugh as an inmate was killed and eaten by dogs.

Amid the horrors of the camps, Kurem worked hard to maintain his promise to himself, always to resist.

When they were ordering prisoners who were working to go faster, they were yelling Schnell, Schnell,

and he was always answering taguel, which in French means shut up your mouth.

Eventually, a soldier demanded that another prisoner translate what Gourm had said.

Reluctantly, that prisoner obliged.

And the soldier hit Raymond with the back of his gun on the head, so he had a hole on his head.

Guraim was out cold.

Two friends carried him back to his hut, where he only regained consciousness the following morning.

He was sure he would soon be sent to a death camp.

After ten months in Germany, though, on the 15th of June 1944, his fortunes took another dramatic turn.

So by chance he ended up working in a train station, unloading the vagans.

And it was there that he met a French train driver who offered him a way back to France, hidden in a pile of coal in the locomotive.

The driver hollowed out a small space in the coal, surrounded it with wood and stashed Gouréme inside.

Again, Gouréme's small wiry frame and contortionist skills came into play.

Once he was covered with coal, he was completely hidden.

The train pulled away and finally he was on his way back to France.

Folded up in the dark, Gouréme felt a sense of French patriotism he had never experienced before.

Liberté, egalité, fraternité.

After what he'd seen of Germany, he longed for an Allied victory in the war.

June 1944.

As Gouréme crossed the city of Paris, he heard the extraordinary news that Allied forces had landed in great numbers on the beaches of Normandy.

If they were able to break through German lines, Paris would soon be in their sights.

Raymond had only one thing on his mind, to fight the Nazis.

Through a contact, he arranged a meeting with a resistance brigade.

The French Forces of the Interior, or FFI,

were a renowned secret army working under the orders of the French French government in exile.

Their instructions came via London and were carried out by a large network inside Paris.

As he approached the meeting point, Gouréme wondered whether they would accept a traveller into their ranks.

He need not have worried.

When he joined the French Resistance, he met quite a lot of travellers and other

Romanies.

The resistance fighters were looking for people used used to resist.

And so, French resistance members would go where

so-called nomads were under compulsory residence and they would try to recruit men and women to help them.

Dourém was not just fighting for the resistance.

Alongside other travelers, he was officially fighting under French orders.

Rémond was used to fighting against the French state, and he ended up working for the French state.

By the middle of August 1944, Paris was in chaos.

Trenches had been dug in the streets, barricades went up.

The FFI attacked vehicles, commandeered them, and repainted them with their livery.

There, in the middle of it all, was Raymond Gouréme.

Fighting with his bare hands and with guns and doing sabotage and fighting

directly

Nazi soldiers.

As Gouréme and his fellow French soldiers fought hand to hand on the city streets, American Sherman tanks rumbled through the countryside.

The Allies were coming.

When the 2nd Armoured Division entered Paris, Adolf Hitler gave the order to destroy the city.

But it was too late.

By the 25th of August, Paris was liberated.

Gourm's war was over.

As he made his way back towards Rouen, the victory speech of President Charles de Gaulle echoed in his ears.

Paris utragé,

paris, brise,

paris, martyrise,

mais paris liber.

For travelers though, liberation would take much longer.

The last nomads were liberated only in June 46,

which is more than one year after the total liberation of France.

When Gouréme reached the Darnettel camp near Rouen again, there was nothing there.

His family's circus tent, the cinema equipment, the caravan, all were gone.

The Gourmes had nothing left, and Raymond had no way of finding his parents or siblings, or even of confirming they were still alive.

Yet he kept looking.

In 1950, five years after the end of the war, Gourm was in Paris when he met a Belgian fairground worker.

The Belgian told him his family were living near Wielsam in Belgium.

Gouréme got on his bicycle and rode 400 kilometers to Belgium.

When the cycle's inner tube failed, he abandoned it and continued on foot.

A couple of kilometers outside Wielsam, he spotted a girl carrying a basket by the side of the road.

Immediately, he cried out, Doll!

His nickname for his sister, Mary Rose.

She dropped the basket and gasped, Rémont!

The reunion with his family was joyous.

The Gourmes celebrated for days.

In peacetime, Gourm worked as a scrap metal dealer and market trader.

He rented out horses and made baskets.

He married and had 15 children.

Yet he preferred not to talk about his wartime experiences.

As the decades passed though, Gourm saw prejudice against travellers worsen.

Even in his 80s, Gouréme was at one point assaulted by French police.

Remembering one of his old wartime mottos, always resist, he decided it was time to share his story.

His memoir, entitled Forbidden to Nomads, was published in 2011.

It was the first time that the persecution of nomads during the war was put out there in front of French society.

He was just giving this testimony saying, well, now you have to take in account what we as Roma and travellers have to say.

As a result, in his final years, a new generation of Romani activists across Europe hailed Gourm as a hero.

He was invited to speak after a screening of a film about the Roma genocide.

He came came on stage performing a flip, even though he was already 86 years old.

In 2012, he received a medal from the French Minister of Culture for his book.

But it would be another four years before French President François Londe apologised for the internment of Romani people and acknowledged France's national responsibility.

Gouraim bought a plot of land in Saint-Germain-les-Arpagon and at last settled down in one place.

He chose the site because it was close to the Lina-Mont Le Rais autodrome, where he and his family had been imprisoned nearly eight decades before.

It was one of his final acts of resistance before he died at the age of ninety-four.

He established his family there

with his numerous children, ten children, and hundreds of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on.

And it was like he was punching the persecutors, saying, You wanted to exterminate us, look at us.

Now, I was alone, and now there are hundreds.

Next time, on history's secret heroes, Charles Drew, an American doctor, led the creation and use of blood banks, saving countless lives both in war and in peacetime.

But while he worked around the clock to save lives, he would be dragged into a battle on a different front, the battle for civil rights and racial equality in the United States.

He was doing pioneering work to figure out how to save lives.

He was not doing pioneering work to save only the lives of people who could be distinguished by race.

Charles Drew and the Blood Bank.

I'm John Ronson and I'm back with season two of Things Fell Apart, my show for BBC Radio 4 that unearths the origin stories of the culture wars.

This time around, the stories are all about the battlefronts that engulfed us during lockdown.

The stories twist and turn until each one ends with the explosion of a new, far-reaching culture war.

If you tell me that my nephew had superhuman strength, If you tell me that he didn't feel any pain, well, he's dead now.

That's Things Fell Apart, Season 2.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the renaissance era to the kellogg brothers listen to you're dead to me now wherever you get your podcasts

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