71village named Rogalle (whom Jeanne later married). At
daybreak, the two parties reached the frontier, pausing briefly
for a meal of bread, cheese and sugar lumps before continuing
on a shepherds’ track to reach the village of Tavascan, from
where the French guides returned to France.
In 2003, French researchers traced the next steps of the
Belgian family the villagers had saved, discovering that they
had reached Canada. Claude Henle, the baby whom Jeanne
had “carried to a new life” in 1942, was by then 61 years old
and living in Montreal. The following year, Henle was present
in Aulus-les-Bains as Jeanne received the Légion d’Honneur
(Legion of Honour) – a belated recognition of the selfless act of
courage that she and her father had long ago performed at great
risk to their own lives.
It’s estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews crossed
the Pyrenees over the course of the war, following dozens of
routes along the length of the range, from Catalonia to the
Basque Country. Many of them owe their lives to people such
as Jeanne and her father. Today, the checkpoints and border
posts that blocked escape and denied survival to so many Jews
have been dismantled. Each year, thousands of tourists and
hikers converge on the Pyrenees, crossing effortlessly back and
forth between France and Spain over the now-open border.
Few of these visitors will remember the not-so-distant time
when the Pyrenees became what the Catalan historian Josep
Calvet called “the mountains of freedom” – a barrier represent-
ing the divide between life and death.
Above the beach at Portbou, a sculpture of a descending
metal staircase commemorates Walter Benjamin’s final
journey. Descend those steps and you can see the ocean
beating against the rocks below through a glass pane, and
read Benjamin’s observation that “history is consecrated to
the memory of those who have no name.” It is a poignant
memorial to Benjamin’s journey, and those of many others
who undertook the same perilous
trek across physical borders and
through paper walls that today,
as then, can open one minute
and snap shut the next.The Pyrenees became
“the mountains of
freedom” – a barrier
representing the divide
between life and death Æ
accordance with the direction of the war. Between 1939 and
1941, for example, some 300,000 Polish Jews sought sanctuary
in Soviet-occupied Poland. In 1941, more than a million Polish
Jews fled into the Soviet Union in the wake of Operation
Barbarossa, the German invasion of the USSR launched on
22 June. Elsewhere, Jews sought safety in neutral Switzerland
and Sweden, or made their way to Palestine after complicated
journeys through Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.U
ntil the Allied liberation of France in the
summer of 1944, the Pyrenees continued to
offer an escape route for Jews seeking to reach
the United States or South America. Though
the Franco regime softened its policy towards
refugees and escapees as the war began to turn against the Axis
powers, Jews were still being deported back to France even
in 1944, and some of them were transported to concentra-
tion camps. Certainly, tens of thousands who attempted the
crossing never found the safety they sought. Between March
1942 and January 1943, hundreds of Jews rounded up by the
Vichy French authorities were placed under house arrest in
Pyrenean villages and spa towns as a prelude for transportation
to concentration camps.
This systematic internment was employed in the village of
Aulus-les-Bains in the Garbet valley of the Ariège, where some
686 Jews were housed, surviving on handouts from the Union
Générale des Israélites de France (General Union of French
Jews), an organisation created by the Vichy government. In
November 1942, German units took over the village, establish-
ing a military headquarters in the Hotel Majestic to facilitate
the transportation of Jews to concentration camps.
One night in December 1942, a shepherd named Jean-
Pierre Agouau and his daughter Jeanne led a group of nine Jews
out of the village to cross the Pyrenees into Catalonia. They
climbed through the forest above Aulus past the magnificent
tiered waterfall known as the Cascade d’Ars, today a popular
picnic spot for tourists. High in the mountains at the Lac de
Cabanas, the party encountered and joined a family of four
Belgian Jews, including a baby, led by another man from theMatt Carr is a journalist and
writer. His latest book is Savage
Frontier: The Pyrenees in History
(Hurst, 2018)Last steps
A sculpture in the form of a metal
staircase at Portbou in north-east
Spain commemorates Walter
Benjamin’s final journeyИЗП
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