66

ALAMY

Travellers crossing into

Spain without papers

were routinely arrested,

imprisoned and

returned to France

Flight from Spain

Jews flee Castile, depicted in a 14th-century manuscript. Waves of

Jewish refugees crossed the Pyrenees during the Middle Ages

I

t was a warm afternoon in early autumn 1940

when Walter Benjamin arrived in the seaside town

of Port-Vendres, on the French Mediterranean

coast near the Catalan border. There, the middle-

aged German writer, accompanied by a photogra-

pher named Henny Gurland and her son Joseph,

tapped on the door of Lisa Fittko, a German

anti-fascist living in France with false papers.

Fittko, along with her journalist husband Hans,

had taken on the dangerous task of guiding Jewish refugees

and other escapees out of Vichy and Nazi-occupied France

across the Pyrenees into neutral Spain.

Benjamin and his companions were in urgent need of her

assistance: along with many other foreign and French Jews,

they had joined the chaotic flight southward following the

Nazi invasion in June 1940. Benjamin had left Germany years

earlier, after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, living first in

Ibiza, then in Paris. After France fell, he travelled to Mar-

seilles, hoping to take a ship to the United States or South

America – a route taken by a number of Jews before him. Not

all were lucky enough to find passage from Marseilles,

though, and instead attempted to cross the Pyrenees into

neutral Spain, aiming – many with the assistance of the

Lisbon-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

• to sail to the Americas from Barcelona, Gibraltar or Lisbon.
  This was not the first time Jews had been forced to flee for
  their lives across the Pyrenees. In 1306, thousands trekked
  over to Spain after Philip IV of France expelled 100,000 Jews
  from his realms. Invited back by King Louis X in 1315, French
  Jews were again forced to cross the mountains in 1320 to
  escape violent pogroms – the so-called Shepherds’ Crusade. In
  1391, the tide of persecution turned once more, and Sephardic
  Jews living in Catalonia fled into France to escape a wave of
  anti-Semitic pogroms that spread across Spain.
  In the 20th century, of course, crossing state borders was
  dependent on possession of a passport, an array of exit and
  entry visas, and other ‘paper
  walls’. Although Spain was
  officially neutral during the
  Second World War, the Franco
  regime was not sympathetic
  to the refugees, political
  dissidents and would-be Free
  French fighters who attempt-
  ed to enter after Germany
  invaded France. Travellers
  crossing the border without
  papers were routinely arrested,
  imprisoned and returned to
  France, regardless of their
  motives for entering Spain. The
  crossing might be a short one as

the crow flies – but during wartime it was far from easy or

even safe.

With the help of friends in New York, Walter Benjamin

had been issued a US visa, and he also obtained Spanish and

Portuguese transit visas. Crucially, though, the French authori-

ties refused to grant him an exit visa – so he was forced to cross

the border into Spain illicitly, on foot through the Pyrenees.

“Old Benjamin”, as Lisa Fittko affectionately called him, was

ill-suited for such a journey. Though only 48 years old, he

suffered from asthma and a heart condition, and he knew that

his chances of succeeding were slim. In Marseilles, he had told

fellow writer and refugee Arthur Koestler that he had brought

enough morphine tablets “to kill a horse”, for use in the event

that he failed to find safe passage to Lisbon.

Had Benjamin attempted the crossing earlier that summer,

he might have been able to join other refugees entering Spain

via the relatively easy route at Col de Cerbère, helped by the

Marseilles-based Emergency Rescue Committee. By late

September, though, the Col was heavily guarded by French

soldiers, so Benjamin and the Gurlands were taken by Lisa

Fittko on a more roundabout route over the 670-metre-high

Querroig peak. Though not a particularly hard walk by

Pyrenean standards, it was a formidable obstacle

for a middle-aged smoker with an ailing heart.

In the afternoon of their arrival in

Port-Vendres, Fittko led the three

refugees via the nearby town of

Banyuls-sur-Mer into the moun-

tains. Though this “ramble”, as Fittko

described it, was intended as a trial

run, Benjamin found it exhausting,

and spent the night among the

peaks. The following day, Benja-

min struggled in the heat; it didn’t

help that he was weighed down by

a leather briefcase containing

a manuscript that he described

to Fittko as “more important

than I am – more important

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