After the barbed wire, the countryside, the road, and there, eating away at the sky, the Pyrenees. We walk stamping the ground, trying to feel the soles of our feet.
—Max Aub, “Vernet, 1940”1
The history of war is not just the history of armies, campaigns, soldiers, and battles, but the history of civilians and noncombatants who have been victims of these conflicts. From the catastrophic invasions of the Suevi to the Napoleonic Wars, civilians in the Pyrenees have found themselves directly in the path of war, while their long history as a frontier zone between warring states has also given the mountains a unique place in the history of Europe, as an escape route from state violence or persecution. Some crossed the mountains alone or in small groups; others fled en masse in search of safety and refuge.
The largest episode of forced emigration in Pyrenean history took place within living memory. A few streets away from the main thoroughfare at the Spanish border town of La Jonquera, an unusual boxlike building of glass and red metal stands out glaringly against the shops, nightclubs, and hypermarkets and bears the unlikely title of Museu Memorial de l’Exili (Memorial Museum of Exile). This museum commemorates the grim events that unfolded in La Jonquera in January 1939, in the last month of the Spanish Civil War, when tens of thousands of panic-stricken Republican refugees fled toward the French border to escape the Nationalist advance on Barcelona, pursued by planes that bombed and strafed the fleeing columns.
Thousands of these refugees crossed the Pyrenees at La Jonquera. “Every side road, every field, and even the hills are swarming with unhappy thousands who are gradually finding their way to La Junquera,” observed the New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews. “It was not just an army fleeing, not only families, but entire villages, complete cities with everything they could take, and entire people, one was surprised the earth itself did not follow them.”2 In 2007, the Catalan regional government established a commemorative museum at La Jonquera to remember these events. A permanent exhibition of photographs, testimonies, and music recalls the often-forgotten story of the Catalans interned in French and Nazi concentration camps at the end of the civil war. The museum invites visitors to reflect on the universal phenomenon of forced migration that reached its peak in the twentieth century, and it also touches on a recurring theme in the history of the Pyrenees, in which the mountains constituted a boundary between freedom and persecution, life and death, and an often grueling physical obstacle that refugees, dissidents, and exiles were obliged to cross from one side to the other.
Flight and Expulsion
The Pyrenees had already begun to play this role long before the advent of the political border. As far back as the eighth century, Spanish Christians fled to the mountains of Cantabria, Asturias, and the Pyrenees to escape the Moorish invaders. The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña relates how “three hundred Christians who had escaped the hands of the Saracens” established themselves in the mountains near Jaca where the monastery was later built. The nineteenth-century Aragonese political economist Ignacio de Asso wrote of the Christian settlers who created “an almost incredible multitude of places” in the mountains around Jaca in the centuries that followed the Moorish invasion.3 In the thirteenth century, the Pyrenees became an escape route for Cathars fleeing papal persecution from southern France. Some took refuge from the war in mountain caves, while others fled southward into Catalonia and Aragon to escape the Inquisition.
In the fourteenth century it was the turn of Jews from southern France to cross the Pyrenees in search of sanctuary, when Philip IV of France expelled one hundred thousand Jews from his realms, most of whom settled in Navarre, Catalonia, and Aragon. In 1315 the Jews were invited back into Languedoc by King Louis X. Five years later thousands fled southward once again to escape the pogrom perpetrated by the Shepherds’ Crusade in their violent rampage from Paris to southern France. Even then the Pyrenees provided only temporary sanctuary, as the pastoureaux followed these refugees into Iberia, carrying out further massacres in Jaca, Montclus, Monreal, and other Pyrenean towns and villages.
From the late fourteenth century onward the tide of refugees across the Pyrenees began to move in the opposite direction. In 1391 Sephardic Jews who had lived in Catalonia for centuries fled northward into France following the wave of anti-Jewish violence that spread across Spain that year, in which Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism or killed. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered all unconverted Iberian Jews to convert to Christianity or leave the country. Most of of these Jews went by ship to North Africa, but others made their way into southern France. In 1497 King Manuel I of Portugal ordered all Portuguese Jews to convert or leave the country, and tried to prevent Jews from leaving by ordering all Jews who refused to convert to leave their children behind. Once again many Jews smuggled their children into exile in France, where they settled in places close to the Pyrenees such as Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Bayonne, Bordeaux, and Montpellier.
In the last decades of the sixteenth century, Muslim converts, or Moriscos, bore the brunt of Spanish state persecution; many found refuge in the Protestant viscounty of Béarn, where small Morisco communities were established in Pau, Oloron, and other towns and cities close to the frontier. Moriscos were not allowed to leave Spain, and many of these refugees escaped across the Pyrenees through the Somport Pass, or via more inaccessible routes, sometimes with the help of Spanish and French smugglers. When the Spanish king Philip III took the decision to expel all Moriscos from the country between 1609 and 1614, the Pyrenees acquired a new role as an instrument of one of Europe’s early episodes of “ethnic cleansing,” as thousands of Moriscos were driven across the Pyrenees into France.
In June 1610, 5,000 Aragonese Moriscos were left stranded in the Pyrenees for weeks on the border with Béarn, when French and Bearnese officials refused to allow them to enter. Eventually they were allowed to cross the frontier and continue their journey into exile. That same year 14,000 Aragonese Moriscos were force marched to the border town of Canfranc, where they, too, were refused entry by the French authorities and obliged to undertake a grueling forced march to the Mediterranean coastal port of Los Alfaques that killed many of them before they even arrived. In the summer of 1612, 22,000 Aragonese Moriscos were taken across the Pyrenees under armed escort. The anti-Morisco priest Pedro Aznar Cardona described their progress “bursting with grief and tears, in a great commotion and confusion of voices, laden with their women and children, their sick, the old and young, covered in dust, sweating and panting.”4
The expulsion of the Moriscos was then the largest single example of forced migration in Spanish history, but it was not the last time that unwanted people were driven across the Pyrenean border. Thousands of pro-French Spaniards known as afrancesados followed Napoléon’s defeated armies into France in 1813. In 1822 Adolphe Thiers encountered entire families of Royalist supporters camped out on the French side of the border near Prades. Thiers expressed his horror at the sight of “twelve or fifteen hundred poor creatures, men, women, children . . . stretched upon the ground, with their baggage spread out; some were lying on a little straw, others added their clothes, and endeavoured to make beds of them.”5
The following year Spanish liberals were obliged to seek sanctuary in France, following the French-backed restoration of Ferdinand VII. One of these exiles was Francisco Goya, who crossed the Pyrenees at the age of seventy-eight, accompanied by his maid, Leocadia, and her five-year-old daughter, and settled in Bordeaux, where he died four years later. The Carlist wars saw a new movement of refugees and exiles northward. In 1840 thirty thousand Carlist refugees poured into France, and the Baltimore journal Niles’ National Register warned that “fresh dissensions in the government of Spain . . . may engender another civil contest, and send across the Pyrenees swarms of refugees of new denominations, all destitute, and vastly more eager than grateful for French hospitality.”
Non-Spaniards also used the Pyrenees as an escape route. In September 1879 the Cuban nationalist writer José Martí escaped from a Barcelona prison and made his way across the Pyrenees to Paris and then to New York, where he continued to agitate for Cuban independence until his death in battle fighting Spanish troops in Cuba in 1895. In 1896 another Cuban, Fernando Tarrida, professor of mathematics and engineering director at the Polytechnic Academy of Barcelona, smuggled letters and documents across the Pyrenees detailing the savage police torture of dozens of prisoners in the Montjuïch fortress in response to an anarchist bombing in the Catalan capital that same year. These documents subsequently became a book, Les inquisiteurs d’Espagne: Montjuich (1897), which provoked widespread anti-Spanish protests across Europe.
Spain’s long history as a country of exile, persecution, and forced migration reached a peak during the Spanish Civil War. In the first year of the war fifteen thousand refugees crossed the Pyrenees, most of whom were Republicans fleeing the fighting in the Basque Country and Nationalist repression in Navarre and Aragon. Some Francoist supporters were also obliged to cross the Eastern Pyrenees in order to escape from Republican territory into France in order to reenter Nationalist-held Spain. On July 22, 1936, the parish priest at the sanctuary of Núria, Bonventura Carrera (or Mossèn Ventura as he was known locally), removed a Romanesque statue of the Virgin Mary from the sanctuary after hearing that anarchists had burned the church in nearby Puigcerdà. Father Ventura carried the statue in his rucksack through the Coll de Finestrelles and placed it in a Swiss deposit box, where it remained until it was returned to Spain in 1941. In November 1937 the pro-Franco priest Josémaria Escrivá de Balaguer (1902–75), the future saint and founder of the ultraconservative Opus Dei movement, hiked across the Andorran Pyrenees with seven companions from Barcelona. Walking for up to sixteen hours a day, Balaguer and his companions reached France via a route that has since become a pilgrimage route for Opus Dei followers, and reentered Nationalist Spain via Hendaye.
Nationalist refugee crossings in the Pyrenees were rare. Most exiles and refugees who crossed the mountains during the civil war were Republican victims of Francoist violence and terror. By the autumn of 1937 between fifty thousand and sixty thousand Republican refugees had already entered France, most of whom walked through the Central Pyrenees from Aragon or western Catalonia. These numbers increased in April 1938, when thousands of Republican soldiers and civilians fled northward into France, following the Nationalist capture of Lérida. Some ten thousand men, women, and children crossed the Pyrenees to escape the Nationalist onslaught, four thousand of whom reached France through the Port de Benasque and other snowbound mountain passes. “Not all found the haven they sought,” reported the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Some perished in snowbanks, unable to keep pace with their trudging companions. At least 15 plunged to death in canyons. Four literally fell into France and to their death at the same time.”
These numbers paled beside the vast exodus that took place in the last week of January 1939, when hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the devastating Nationalist offensive in Catalonia to La Jonquera, Le Perthus, and other Catalan border posts. The French authorities were reluctant to give safe haven to a population it regarded as politically suspect, and they closed the border. It was not until January 27–28 that the right-wing Daladier government reopened the frontier. Over the next two weeks, nearly half a million Spaniards poured into France, doubling the population of the Pyrénées-Orientales. Appalling scenes unfolded as these refugees struggled to obtain food and shelter in freezing mountain conditions, amid the general indifference of the French authorities. On the road between Le Perthus and Perpignan, the French communist Jean Bénazet observed Spanish women prostituting themselves to French border guards in exchange for bread, and young children lying by the roadside in the snow under piles of straw, sacks, blankets, and tarpaulins. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of Spanish refugees found themselves subjected to the new forms of internment that had already begun to define the mid-twentieth century.
Spanish Republican women fleeing through the Pyrenees toward the French border, probably through Catalonia in 1939 (Alamy stock image).
Pyrenean Gulag
For governments on either side of the frontier, the Pyrenees have often provided a conveniently distant and remote place of imprisonment. During the Napoleonic Wars, French prisoners of war in Catalonia were held on the “natural prison” of Capolatell in the Sierra de Busa in the Pre-Pyrenees. Separated from the rest of the Busa plateau by cliffs as high as 377 feet (115 meters) and accessible only by a single metal bridge, this “island” became a literal death trap for hundreds of French soldiers, who were abandoned there and left to starve. In 1848 Henri IV’s former château at Pau was used as a temporary prison for the Algerian resistance leader the emir Abd-el-Kader, who fought the French invasion of Algeria for the best part of twenty years before his surrender in 1847.
Abd-el-Kader had surrendered on condition that he be allowed to retire to Egypt, but the terms of the agreement were broken and he was taken to Toulon and then Pau—a betrayal that inspired an ode from William Thackeray to the “wild hawk of the desert . . . borne away to France.” In 1848 the British writer Sabine Baring-Gould visited Abd-el-Kader in the Pau château, where he found the resistance leader and his wives in gloomy exile, “all insensible to the stateliness of the castle and the glorious panorama from the windows. They lounged about the rooms silent and smoking, sulky, without occupation and without interests. Their habits were so dirty that the tapestries and rich furniture had all to be removed.”6
Abd-el-Kadr and his wives were eventually allowed to retire to Damascus, but other Pyrenean prisoners never left the mountains. Hundreds of Republican prisoners were imprisoned after the civil war in the isolated Coll de Ladrones fortress built under Philip II to guard the Somport Pass; many were executed within its walls. In the wake of the Republican retirada (retreat) of 1939, the French authorities established a chain of camps along the southern Mediterranean coast and closer to the Pyrenees, where Spanish refugees were interned. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children were herded by the local authorities into compounds with little or no shelter and inadequate food, guarded by gendarmes and troops with orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape. As many as fifteen thousand Spaniards may have died of exposure and hunger between February and September 1939 in camps that have long since become beach resorts and holiday destinations.
Following the outbreak of World War II, many of these camps were used by the Vichy regime to imprison political dissidents and unwanted foreigners. They included the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, who was interned at the Pyrenean camp of Le Vernet in the Ariège as an “undesirable alien” from October 1939 to January 1940, and the Mexican-Spanish novelist Max Aub, who was imprisoned in the camp on two separate occasions. Le Vernet also housed many former International Brigadiers, some 350 of whom were interned in the “Leper Barrack” in what Koestler described as a “horrifying revelation of the abjectness and misery to which men can be reduced.”7
The largest of these Camps du Mépris (Camps of Scorn) was located at the village of Gurs in Béarn. Nowadays a visit to the village requires a complicated car journey from Orthez through a pretty Bearnese landscape of cornfields, forest, medieval villages, and old stone barns. Just outside the village there is a short stretch of railroad track, about fifty yards long, that connects an enclosed barbed-wire compound to the memorial that commemorates the former Centre d’Accueil (Reception Center), established by the French authorities for Spanish Republican refugees in 1939. Until the 1960s, much of this 1,998-acre compound was covered in forest, which had been planted since the war to conceal its original purpose. Various nations cofunded the clearing of the forest to make way for an official memorial to a camp where men, women, and children from more than fifty-two nations were interned between 1939 and 1945.
The first prisoners at Gurs were Spanish Republicans and members of the International Brigades who arrived in the winter of 1939. From 1940 onward, German Jews, French political prisoners, and other “undesirables” in Vichy France were sent there, including the Jewish political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt. During the Vichy roundups of Jews in 1942, thousands of French Jews were placed under house arrest in Pyrenean villages, to await transportation to concentration camps, and many of them were also sent to Gurs. Even after its official closure in 1943, Gypsies and other “undesirables” were still being brought to the camp. Strictly speaking, Gurs was an internment camp where detainees were held before being transferred to somewhere worse, but the spartan and primitive conditions ensured a high death toll. In the winter of 1940–41, more than a thousand inmates died of cold, hunger, and illness. In 1940 most of its inmates were women, one of whom described her arrival at “Gurs—the old Spanish camp,” where she was confronted by the sight of “a miserable cohort of women . . . saw something resembling a grey swamp, three kilometres long, barracks lined up against each other, behind the barracks other barracks as far as they eye could see. Not a tree, not a spot of green. How to live in this desolated universe?”8
Some women survived by prostituting themselves to the camp guards in exchange for food for themselves and their children, who were imprisoned with them. Others died of hunger, exhaustion, and infections and were buried in the cemetery, which is filled with Jewish names like Kaufman, Dreyfuss, and Stein. Many of the names on the roll of the dead were in their seventies and eighties and would have died very soon after their arrival. Near the entrance to the camp, a small hut remains, the only original building still standing from the “city of wood,” where the Swiss Red Cross nurse Elsbeth Kasser, known as the Angel of Gurs, tended to inmates. Now a memorial trail leads through the woods that were planted to conceal this sordid chapter in French history, and houses with verandas look over the railroad track that symbolizes the journey to Auschwitz taken by four thousand of the camp’s Jewish detainees. At the education center, a copy of an inmate’s painting shows famished, shrunken men and women behind barbed wire with the snow-capped Pyrenees in the background.
It is a mournful but essential monument to one of the most shameful chapters in French history, and the largely forgotten role that the Pyrenees once played in the twentieth century’s detention universe. Arthur Koestler has written how “the scale of sufferings and humiliations was distorted, the measure of what a man can bear was lost,” during this period of twentieth-century history, to the point when “in Liberal-Centigrade, Vernet was the zero-point of infamy; measured in Dachau-Farenheit it was still 32 degrees above zero.”9
Something similar could be said of Gurs and the other Pyrenean camps, which the collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain continued to fill with new categories of prisoners throughout the war. In August 1945, Pétain himself was briefly imprisoned at the military fortress of Portalet in the Somport Pass, following his conviction for treason, only an hour’s drive from the camp where so many of the men and women imprisoned by the Vichy authorities had suffered and died.
The Mountains of Freedom
By this time, the Pyrenees had become an escape route for many of Pétain’s own countrymen for the first time since the expulsions of the Jews in the Middle Ages, as a refugee population that included French and foreign Jews, stateless “undesirable foreigners,” Frenchmen hoping to fight with the French army in North Africa or flee forced-labor conscription programs, and Allied airmen and soldiers made their way southward into Spain. In the summer of 1940, thousands of people streamed southward to escape the German advance through northern France. “All France was on the move. All France was in flight, and in all directions, madly, at random,” remembered the German-Jewish novelist and internee Lion Feuchtwanger. “All railways and all highways in southern France were crowded with fugitives—Hollanders, Belgians, millions of French from the North . . . plodding along the roads in endless throngs, under the torrential rains, toward the Spanish border.”10
For most of these refugees, Francoist Spain was not a safe haven in itself but a transit route to the United States or South America. Thousands arrived by train from Toulouse and crossed the border with forged papers or official exit visas at Puigcerdà, Latour-de-Carol, or Cerbère. Those unable to obtain these documents were forced to make their way across the mountains with the help of shepherds, charcoal burners, and woodcutters who were sympathetic to them or willing to act as guides in exchange for a fee.
On September 13, 1940, the sixty-year-old Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler, made her way up the steep path through the Albères hills beyond Cerbère, carrying a bag of jewelry and the manuscript of a Bruckner symphony, accompanied by her husband, the novelist Franz Werfel, Heinrich Mann and his wife, and his brother Golo Mann. All of them owed their escape to the American literary journalist Varian Fry, the “American Schindler,” who arrived in Marseille as a representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee in June 1940, tasked with helping writers and artists reach the United States. Many of the two thousand–odd refugees helped by Fry’s network were Jews, whose numbers increased following the mass roundups of Jews in France between October 1942 and January 1943.
For many Jews placed under house arrest or in internment camps in or near the Pyrenees, crossing the mountains was the only way to escape transportation to the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. Some paid shepherds and smugglers to guide them across the mountains. Others were helped by local sympathizers. Between twenty thousand and thirty thousand Jews are believed to have crossed or attempted to cross the Pyrenees in the course of the war. Not all of them survived these journeys. Some froze or fell to their death. Others were robbed and sometimes killed by their escorts in the mountains to steal their money. The French historian Émilienne Eychenne has estimated that 226 refugees died trying to cross the frontier between 1939 and 1945, mostly after being repatriated from Spain, while the Confédération Nationale des Anciens Combattants Francais Evadés de France estimates that 450 were killed through accidents or repatriations or died in Spanish concentration camps.11
For some of these refugees, politics transformed the Pyrenees into an impassable barrier. On a summer’s day you can see the hazy bluish outline of the Pyrenees from the village of Boeil-Bezing, on the Bearnese plain between Pau and Lourdes. At the rear of the cemetery just behind the village church, a marble headstone bears the inscription in French: “To the memory of Carl Einstein, Poet and Art historian, Fighter for Liberty, Born 26 April in Neuwied Germany, who committed suicide on the 5 July 1940 to escape Nazi persecution.” The nephew of Albert Einstein, Einstein was a novelist, scriptwriter, and art critic whose circle of friends included Picasso, Georges Braque, and the avant-garde writer Georges Bataille. He was also a committed anarchist and anti-facist who fought as an anarchist militia commander during the Spanish Civil War and delivered the funeral oration of the Aragonese anarchist Buenaventura Durruti.
Following the Republican defeat, Einstein returned to France, where he was briefly interned before escaping to Paris, and then interned once again as a German national in a camp near Bordeaux. In June 1940 he was separated from his wife as they fled the German advance, and he found himself in Béarn, in the shadow of the Pyrenees. For Einstein, the former anarchist commander, the Pyrenees offered no possibility of escape or refuge. On June 26–27 he cut his wrists and was taken to the monastery at Lestelle-Bétharram near Lourdes to recover, and ten days later, on July 5, he drowned himself in the Gave de Pau.
No Way Out: The Last Journey of Walter Benjamin
Einstein was one of six writers in the dedication of Arthur Koestler’s Scum of the Earth who committed suicide because they were unable to find a safe haven in this period. These dedicatees include the German-Jewish writer and literary critic Walter Benjamin, whom Koestler met in Marseille in the autumn of 1940. Benjamin was hoping to reach New York via Lisbon, and he had Spanish and Portuguese transit visas. But the Vichy authorities were refusing to give exit visas to German émigrés, and so he was obliged to walk across the Pyrenees. Benjamin knew that this was his last hope of survival, and he told Koestler that he had brought thirty morphine tablets, which were “enough to kill a horse,” in the event that he failed to find safe passage.
On September 25 he turned up without warning at the house of Lisa and Hans Fittko, two German anti-fascists and members of Varian Fry’s team, who had established themselves with false papers in the seaside town of Banyuls-sur-Mer, where they continued to escort refugees across the border. Benjamin was accompanied by a woman named Henny Gurland and her teenage son, Joseph, and he asked Lisa Fittko to take him and his companions across the mountains. Fittko’s husband was away, and she was immediately struck by Benjamin’s old-fashioned “Spanish court etiquette” and the “intellectual scholar’s head and the searching gaze behind thick lenses,” which led her to describe him affectionately as Der alte Benjamin—Old Benjamin.12 She agreed to help him, and that afternoon she led Benjamin and his two companions on a trial walk up a former smuggling route called la route Lister, named after the Spanish Republican general Enrique Lister, which led up into the Albères, at the point where the Pyrenees drop down toward the Mediterranean. Fittko intended to take her party up the 2,198-foot (670-meter) Querroig peak, in order to avoid the French border guards at the Col de Cerbère, and the route that she followed has now become a commemorative trail in Benjamin’s memory.
On a hot, blustery morning, I set out on the Chemin Walter Benjamin from the Banyuls town hall, past the French soldiers patrolling the main road to protect the crowded beach from an attack by Daesh/Islamic State. The heat was only partially relieved by the wind that whipped across the hills as I made my way up through a succession of terraced vineyards along the route that Benjamin and his companions had taken. Apart from the heat, it was not a particularly hard walk: Fittko herself described it as a “ramble,” but it would nevertheless have been a daunting prospect for a forty-eight-year-old asthmatic writer with a heart condition. Once again, Benjamin had weighed up his prospects of survival and calculated that he needed to stop for a minute every ten minutes in order not to strain his heart.
He carried with him a leather briefcase containing a manuscript that he described to Fittko as “more important than I am, more important than myself.” After three hours, the party reached a small clearing by a large boulder, where Fittko proposed that they return to Banyuls and continue the following day. To her amazement, Benjamin announced that he was going to spend the night where he was. The next morning Fittko and the Gurlands returned to find Benjamin waiting for them, and they continued the climb at his slow stop-start pace. It took me about an hour to reach the point where I thought Benjamin must have spent the night. To my left I could see the high ridge climbing up toward Querroig from the Col de Cerbère. Below me I could see Banyuls, where my wife and daughter were spending the day on the beach. As I stood by the large boulder, listening to the pylon line above my head humming like a distant carousel, I thought of Benjamin, the flaneur and connoisseur of urban spaces, sitting up there alone with his precious manuscript and his morphine tablets, and I wondered what thoughts had gone through his mind as he lay propped up on the hard, rocky slope with the high ridge looming above him from the south that separated France from Spain.
The climb up toward the ridge was much steeper than the first part of the walk. Gurland later remembered how “we had to crawl part of the way on all fours.”13 At one point Fittko lost the way, and Benjamin helped her find it. At two o’clock Benjamin’s party reached the top of the ridge, where Fittko later described the view: “Far below, where we had come from, the deep-blue Mediterranean was visible; on the other side in front of us, steep cliffs fell away to a glass sheet of transparent turquoise. . . . Behind us, to the north, the semicircle of Catalonia’s Roussillon, with its Côte Ver meille, the Vermilion Coast, an autumn landscape with innumerable hues of red and yellow-gold. I gasped for breath—I had never seen such beauty before.”14
Fittko had no papers herself and was not able to continue into Spain. She told Benjamin and his companions to make their way down to the Coll de Rumpisa and present themselves to the first Spanish border post. Today this pass bears a plaque that marks the beginning of the Catalan side of the Walter Benjamin route and its incorporation into one of the Espais de Memoria (Places of Memory), which the Catalan regional government has established throughout the Catalan Pyrenees. For some reason, Fittko does not mention the Austrian-Jewish refugee Carmina Birman, who had reached the Coll de Rumpisa with her sister and two friends earlier that day. In a short memoir that was published in 2006, Birman describes how she and her party were joined by “an elderly gentleman, a younger female and her son. The gentleman, a German university professor named Walter Benjamin, was on the point of having a heart attack. The strain of mountain climbing on an extremely hot September day, together with the anxious endeavour to escape German arrest was too much for him.”15
Birman and her companions found Benjamin some water, and he was eventually able to continue with them toward their common destination at the seaside town of Port Bou. Even in my walking boots I found the stony path hard going, and the sharp, prickly bushes that scratched at my clothes and skin fully merited every description of the Pyrenees as a savage frontier. It would have been agony for a sick man wearing ordinary shoes and carrying a briefcase, who had nearly died of a heart attack. From time to time I passed commemorative plaques of Benjamin, containing the famous photograph with his chin on his hand and quotations from his books.
Both the photograph and the quotations were an incongruous sight in this harsh, unforgiving terrain—a reminder of the world of books and ideas that was waiting for Benjamin in New York. It wasn’t until I reached flat ground that the first signs of cultivation began to appear and the track widened past the railway station and into Port Bou. It was a relief to sit in a bar on the pier and contemplate the little bay and the crowded stony beach, where families were still sunbathing and playing in the sea. When Benjamin saw the town, it was still partly destroyed by the Nationalist bombing during the civil war. According to Birman, their party accidentally missed the first Spanish customs post, and they were arrested at the second on suspicion of illegal entry and taken to a “special police hotel,” the Fonda de Francia, in Port Bou, and told they would be returned to France the next day.
While Birman’s sister tried in vain to bribe the hotel owner and the police officials, Birman tried to console Benjamin, who was sitting on his hotel bed “in a desolate state of mind and in a completely exhausted physical condition,” staring at a “very beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little board near him.” When Benjamin hinted to Birman that he had some “very effective poisonous pills” with him, she tried to convince him to “abandon the idea of suicide.” Henny Gurland also tried to persuade him not to kill himself, before going to bed. These efforts appear to have been in vain. At seven the next morning Gurland returned to Benjamin’s bedside, where he told her that he had taken morphine during the night and asked her to say that he had fallen ill.
Benjamin gave her a letter to pass on to his friend Theodor Adorno, who was working at the New School in New York. Gurland committed its words to memory before destroying it: “In a situation presenting no way out, I have no other choice but to make an end of it. It is in a small village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, where my life will come to an end.”
She then called a local doctor, who diagnosed an embolism and refused her request to take Benjamin to hospital. Benjamin died that morning. Later that day, the local police reversed their decision and the rest of Benjamin’s party was allowed their journey to Portugal. Benjamin was buried with Catholic rites under the name Benjamin Walter to hide his Jewishness, in a ceremony by Mosen Andreu Freixa, without altar boys or a procession, in lot 563 in the local cemetery. In 1949 Benjamin’s remains were moved to a common grave in another part of the town, and his manuscript was never found, though an official document refers to unknown papers in his possession at the time of his death.
On October 7, 1940, the German-Jewish refugee newspaper Aufbau reported that “Professor Walter Benjamin, a well-known pyschologist,” had committed suicide at Port Bou. Today, outside the whitewashed cemetery, a haunting installation in Port Bou built by the Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan commemorates Benjamin’s doomed Pyrenean journey. Entitled Passages after Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus, Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, the monument consists of a metal gateway leading down a flight of steps to a glass window looking out over the foaming sea, where visitors can read Benjamin’s own words: “It is more difficult to honour the memory of the nameless than of the well-known. Historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the nameless.”
Benjamin was not one of the nameless, and that is one reason why his doomed Pyrenean crossing is remembered when the names of other Jews who failed to find a route to safety through the mountains have gone unremembered and unrecorded. Like them, Benjamin chose to die on his own terms rather than allow himself to be sent back to the certain death that awaited him. Having shown immense courage and resourcefulness in overcoming the physical obstable of the Pyrenees, he became a casualty of an international system that still prevails, in which “paper walls” can open and close in a single day, and transform themselves from a route to safety into the walls of a trap.
Escape Lines
Refugees were not the only ones to cross the Pyrenees during World War II. For thousands of Allied soldiers, airmen, and Frenchmen, the Pyrenees were not just a route to safety, but an opportunity to return to the war. Britons, Canadians, Poles, Romanians, Czechs, Bulgarians, Austrians, French, Greeks, and Americans all crossed the Pyrenees in the course of the war to escape imprisonment and live to fight again. In May 1941 Andrée “Dédée” De Jongh, a young female Belgian Red Cross volunteer, and a thirty-two-year-old Belgian cinema technician named Arnold Deppé established an underground network from Belgium to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, near the French-Spanish border, known as Operation Comet, which smuggled Allied airmen into Spain and onward through Spanish ports or the Portuguese “Lisbon route” to North Africa or their own countries.
More than seven hundred British, Canadian, and American fliers returned to combat through this route, most of whom were brought by train from Paris to the Atlantic coast, where Basque guides took them across the Western Pyrenees by night—a trek that could last from five to sixteen hours. Dozens of “escape lines” were established in other parts of the Pyrenees, where soldiers and airmen, Free French resisters or ordinary Frenchmen fleeing Nazi forced-labor programs, were transported to the embassies or consulates in Bilbao, Barcelona, and Madrid, that facilitated their onward journeys.
Until November 1942 the German army and units of the Grenzschutz—border police and customs—controlled only the western part of the frontier from Hendaye on the Atlantic coast to Roncesvalles, while the Vichy government exerted a more relaxed vigilance over the remaining section of the border. With the extension of the German occupation to the whole of France in 1942, the entire Pyrenean frontier was declared a forbidden zone 9.5 miles (15 kilometers) deep, and border security was reinforced by units of Gebirgsjäger alpine corps. As a result, escapees were obliged to try to get to Spain through more inaccessible and dangerous routes into Catalonia, Andorra, or Aragon.
One of the most famous World War II escape lines was the Pat line, established by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Captain Ian Garrow of the Seaforth Highlanders, and named after Lieutenant-Commander Pat O’Leary, the nom de guerre given to the Belgian cavalry officer and British intelligence operative Albert-Marie Guérisse, who was recruited by Garrow. Like many escape lines, the Pat line worked closely with Spanish Republican refugees in southern France, such as the Spanish anarchist and teacher Francisco Ponzán Vidal (1911–44), who collaborated closely with SOE and MI6, as well as the French and Belgian secret services.16 In addition to organizing safe houses for Allied escapees in Perpignan, Toulouse, and Foix, Vidal also arranged guides to take them across the Pyrenees. One of his most well-known “parcels” was the future conservative parliamentarian Airey Neave, one of the few British soldiers to escape from Colditz, who crossed the Pyrenees with a group of escapees in April 1942, led by a Spanish guide who wore white boots to keep himself visible as they walked from Port-Vendres into Spain through freezing winds and a rainstorm.
Facilitating such escapes was generally punishable by death or transportation to a concentration camp. Vidal was arrested in April 1943 and shot the following year. Some 155 members of the Comet line were arrested, including Dédée De Jongh, who was arrested trying to cross the Basque Pyrenees in January 1943, and tortured before going on to survive the war in Ravensbrück and Mathausen camps. The guides, or passeurs, who collaborated with these networks were driven by a range of motivations. Some were smugglers who took their “parcels” across the Pyrenees in order to make a living. Others acted out of political or religious conviction. The Comet line relied heavily on a Basque hunter and smuggler named Florentino Goikoetxea, who led hundreds of refugees and escapees to safety through the Basque and Navarrese Pyrenees. The Catalan anarchist Joaquim Baldrich Forné (1916–2012) fled to Andorra following the Republican defeat and became a smuggler out of economic necessity, before forming an escape line that transported British servicemen across the Pyrenees and delivered them to the very doors of the British consulate in Barcelona.
Unlike the Alps, which played a similar role for refugees and escapees seeking to reach neutral Switzerland during World War II, the évadés who reached Spain found themselves in a country that was formally neutral but sympathetic to the Axis powers. At the beginning of the war, men of military age who crossed the border illegally were liable to be imprisoned in the border town of Sort or taken to concentration camps such as Miranda del Ebro and Nanclares de la Oca, before they were handed over to their embassies. Between 1942 and 1944 the Franco regime adopted a harder line in response to German pressure and began sending escapees and refugees caught within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of the French frontier back to France. As the war turned against the Axis powers, Franco became more willing to allow evaders and escapees to reach their respective embassies and consulates. Altogether some fifty thousand men, women, and children were arrested by the Spanish authorities, according to the Catalan historian Josep Calvet, and estimates of the overall numbers of soldiers, refugees, and résistants who crossed the Pyrenees in the course of the war vary from thirty thousand to one hundred thousand.17
The Chemin de la Liberté
Today some of these Pyrenean escape routes are remembered through the commemorative walking trails that have been established in the mountains in recent years. On a muggy evening in mid-July 2015 I stood with a small crowd of British and French spectators at the site of a former Nazi command post by a large rock at Kercabanac, in the Couserans area of the Ariège, while French and foreign soldiers and members of the British Legion, many of them holding their regimental standards and in full uniform, paid tribute to these escapees and the passeurs who had guided them across the mountains. During World War II, Kercabanac marked the beginning of the zone interdite (the forbidden zone) alongside the Spanish frontier.
A plaque now commemorates the Spanish and French men and women who defied these regulations, and every year, walkers, veterans, and local dignitaries gather here at the beginning of the annual trek known as the Chemin de la Liberté (Road of Freedom), which follows one of the toughest of these wartime escape routes. I was one of a group of more than fifty men and women who had come to walk the chemin from Saint-Girons to the Catalan village of Esterri d’Aneu in Spain. We stood to attention while bouquets were laid at the monument and the strains of a bagpipe echoed through the thickly forested hills, and a retired French air force colonel hailed “those who thought their future could be dreamed differently, all those who acted so as to change their present and thanks to whom ours can be enjoyed peacefully.”
The following morning more than sixty-five of us assembled at the site of the former railway bridge in Saint-Girons, where escapees coming by train were once alerted by the drivers and jumped off to begin their trek. Our group included a former British consul-general in Barcelona, a serving Royal Marine Commando, a former RAF wing commander with the word for “peace” emblazoned on his T-shirt in more than fifty languages, a team of NATO soldiers on a personal development course, fund-raisers for the British Legion, a Welsh furniture upholsterer who kept fit by dancing to salsa music, a former Cardiff rugby team second row forward, a young punk-jazz musician, and numerous soldiers and veterans. All of us carried packs weighing an average of twenty-six pounds, containing supplies of food and equipment that were not available to wartime escapees. British airmen in World War II were issued “escape boxes” that included silk maps, compressed food, and six tablets of Benzedrine to help them make their way across the Alps or the Pyrenees, but some escapees had only a crust of bread or a chunk of cheese to tide them over. One British serviceman had walked this route wearing a slipper on one foot and a shoe on the other.
In 1943, Nancy Wake, the New Zealand–born French Resistance courier known to the Gestapo as the White Mouse, crossed the Pyrenees with the assistance of two Spanish guides, a man and a woman connected to the Pat O’Leary line. Wake made five failed attempts to find guides to take her from Perpignan across the 12-mile (20-kilometer) forbidden zone along the French frontier before she succeeded on her sixth. Accompanied by a Frenchman, two Frenchwomen, and two American airmen, the guides, and their dog, Wake walked for forty-seven hours, often in deep snow, stopping every two hours for ten minutes’ rest. As was the custom, the party wore espadrilles and were under strict orders not to speak during their journey. Despite a blizzard and the near exhaustion of some members of the group, the party reached Spain, and Wake returned to England via Barcelona, from where she subsequently returned to France as an agent for the Special Operations Executive.18
The American fighter pilot and future test pilot Chuck Yeager, the hero of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, crossed the mountains in even more challenging circumstances. On March 5, 1944, Yeager was shot down near Bordeaux and taken by the local maquis to the Pyrenees with a group of Allied airmen. Yeager and a B-24 navigator named Pat Patterson left the main group and soon got lost in the mountains after climbing 7,000 feet (2,134 meters). “The Pyrenees make the hills back home look like straight-ways,” Yeager recalled in his autobiography. “The climb is endless, a bitch of bitches.”19
After three days in the mountains the two airmen encountered a German patrol and Patterson was shot in the leg before they managed to escape. After amputating his leg at the knee, Yeager carried his wounded companion toward the frontier. On reaching Spain, Yeager pushed him over a ridge and rolled him down to the road, in the hope that a passing car would pick him up. Patterson was found by the Civil Guard shortly afterward and survived the war, and Yeager also made it back to Britain and resumed the war.
All of us were conscious of this history as we trudged across the Mont Valier massif in temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius), on a four-day trek that was unlike any walk I had ever done. Before leaving Saint-Girons, one of the walk coordinators warned us that there were “multitudinous ways to seriously hurt yourselves” en route, and these warnings were not exaggerated. Within two hours of leaving one woman had broken her collarbone. By the end of the walk eleven people had been forced to retire from exhaustion and heatstroke. The first two days we walked mostly through grassy meadows and shaded woodlands, sweating our way upward in a long snaking line through fern-lined paths and forests, under the vigilance of the French accompagnateurs in their lime-green T-shirts, toward the high peaks that revealed themselves only intermittently.
Our rest breaks were invariably preceded by speeches from the ubiquitous French air force colonel who had greeted us on the first day, followed by renditions of the haunting resistance anthem, the “Chants des Partisans,” with its fulsome tributes to bombs, grenades, machine guns, and snipers. Few of the British walkers knew the words, and most of us merely hummed along, but it was a stirring spectacle to watch former Resistance fighters and their descendants singing this sombre paean to resistance and patriotic killing with their hands on their hearts. On the first afternoon we gathered outside a barn where the young passeur Louis Barrau—a local shepherd—refused to surrender to a Nazi/Vichy patrol. Barrau’s father and uncle had already been deported to a German labor camp for similar activities, and neither of them survived the war. When the soldiers set fire to the barn, Barrau tried to make a break for it but was shot dead on the spot. These were the episodes that we had come to remember. History, war, and survival were recurring subjects in our conversations as the forest began to thin out and we found ourselves clambering up stony paths and over high boulders. On the second day we camped out in the open next to a shepherd’s hut, where a plaque dedicated the chemin to “the evaders of France, to the beauty of memory and the peace of the heart” (my translation).
That night our French accompagnateurs sang and danced joyously and passed around the wine, and I went to sleep that night beneath a sky that was filled with more stars than I had seen in years. The next day we hiked up and down two peaks of more than 7,000 feet (2,134 meters) between them. It was a punishing but exhilarating experience to walk above cloud level through a corrugated, weatherworn moonscape of limestone rocks and great piles of boulders, toward the jagged ridge that the locals call Le Dinosaur. The only signs of life were a few scattered Méren horses, Napoléon’s old workhorses during the invasion of Russia, and the occasional shepherds with their dogs and cattle. In the morning we passed the wreckage of a Halifax bomber whose seven-man crew had all died when their plane crashed into the mountainside in July 1945. One of my companions, a former wing commander, commented sadly on the “waste of men and machinery” before the names of the crew were solemnly read out one by one.
Even then, despite the pieces of broken metal, and the tributes to the dead from the British Legion, it was difficult to reconcile this history of destruction, death, and escape with the beauty of the Pyrenees, as the sun slowly began to emerge above the sea of clouds that completely obscured the world below. Wartime escapees had once traveled at night across the same terrain, sometimes running down the same vertiginous slopes that we gingerly descended, with German patrols in pursuit. Some members of our group would not have been alive had their parents or grandparents not made these crossings. Jaz, a sixty-three-year-old retired head teacher, had come to honor his Polish father, a former airman with the RAF, who had escaped twice across the Pyrenees.
For all its associations with war, danger, and hardship, the chemin was by no means a gloomy experience. On the last day of the trek, we trudged for forty-five thigh-burning and nerve-wracking minutes up a precarious glacier made up of tired, worn-out old snow that seemed ready to crumble beneath our feet at any moment. At one point a female member of the group began humming “La vie en rose,” and the whole group joined in. For a few moments the anxiety and exhaustion were gone as the sound of our voices echoed in the silence above the steep gulley. Finally we emerged on solid ground once again at the narrow ridge at the Col de la Pale de Clauère that looked down toward Spain.
Here the NATO soldiers passed around a bottle of whisky to mark the occasion, and we shook hands, embraced, and congratulated one another as we looked down over the pine-covered mountains stretching out far below us. In that moment there could have been few members of our party who did not feel something of the exhilaration that so many escapees had once felt at having gone this far. One member of our group, an amateur escape-line historian named Keith Janes, scattered the ashes of Dot Collins, the widow of the RAF pilot Maurice Collins, who had taken this same route as a wartime escapee in 1942. In 2007 Janes had scattered her husband’s ashes at the same spot. Now we watched in solemn silence as he scattered the ashes of Collins’s widow, and I felt once again the invisible presence of those men and their guides who had once looked down from the pass with us, before we began the long descent, exhausted, triumphant, and exhilarated, into the Noguera Pallaresa Valley, toward the road that led down from the mountains and back to a world where freedom was too often taken for granted.