BBC World Histories - 08.2019 - 09.2019

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guides they had contracted to help them. Most guides or

passeurs were French or Spanish shepherds, charcoal-burners,

smugglers or woodcutters. Some of these acted out of a genuine

spirit of solidarity with the refugees, whereas others merely

hoped to profit from these illegal journeys – and some were not

content with the fees they received. For example, when a

couple called the Gertners were arrested in Girona with their

two children in October 1942, they told the authorities that

the guide they had recruited to lead them across the Pyrenees

from Perpignan had robbed them of 6,000 pesetas and

abandoned them in the mountains.

Some met a much worse fate. In September 1942, Gustave

Allérhand and his Jewish wife Icla left Ussat-les-Bains in the

Ariège department, north of Andorra, accompanied by a

Spanish guide named Pepe Pou – but never arrived in Spain.

French gendarmes later arrested Pou’s brother-in-law, Miguel

González, as he tried to cash signed cheques from the missing

couple’s bank account. Andorra acquired a particularly bad

reputation for such incidents, and legends and rumours

abound of Jewish refugees murdered and buried in shallow

graves in the Andorran Pyrenees. No one knows how many

Jews suffered this fate.

Before the Second World War, escape routes for German

and Austrian Jews were often limited by the unwillingness of

the rest of the world to accept them. With the outbreak of war,

Nazi-occupied Europe became a trap for the whole of Europe-

an Jewry, and escape routes were constantly shifting in

Until 1941, the main obstacle preventing refugees from

entering Spain was bureaucracy. Spanish authorities tacitly

colluded with the Nazis by arresting and interning allied

servicemen or Frenchmen of military age, though other

travellers with the correct papers were allowed to pass through.

In the summer of 1941, however, Spain adopted a new policy

of automatically arresting anyone found within 5km of the

frontier. And after Nazi occupation expanded to encompass all

of France in the autumn of 1942, German and Austrian alpine

troops were deployed to bar the way through the Pyrenees,

forcing escapees to seek more difficult, dangerous routes.

Whole families attempted these crossings; not all survived.

Some Jews were killed in accidents or as a result of bad weather,

GETTY IMAGESwhile others were murdered in the mountains by the very

Some Jews were killed

in accidents or in bad

weather; others were

murdered in the

mountains by guides

Panic station

French refugees clutch

possessions as they head

for the Spanish border

after the German

invasion, 1940. At that

time Spain was officially

neutral, but bureaucracy

hindered many attempts

to flee France

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