The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  At the time of the armistice, the German military thrust into France along the Atlantic Coast had reached south to Bordeaux. Refugees still ahead of the Wehrmacht could head for Bayonne, Biarritz, St. Jean-de-Luz, and finally Hendaye on the border with Spain. The other main escape route was to the east, through unoccupied France to such centers as Toulouse, Nîmes, Avignon, and eventually Marseille on the Mediterranean. Despite its advantage as France’s largest port and major link with North Africa, the old Roman city was now under Vichy authority and its shipping subject to the British sea blockade. As result, most of the refugees reaching Marseille used it as a preparation area for, so they hoped, a continued overland journey to the Spanish border at Cerbère.

  Whether fleeing through occupied or unoccupied France or from Italy, by the summer of 1940 the final European goal for most refugees was Lisbon. Reaching it meant leaving France, crossing Spain, entering Portugal—a long, costly, often frightening three-stage journey further burdened by a gauntlet of bureaucrats and a maddening array of differing national demands for proper papers. A character in Erich Maria Remarque’s acclaimed 1964 novel The Night in Lisbon—published while the literary lion of World War I was living in the United States—bitterly recalled the frenzied gathering of documents that faced World War II refugees trying to reach Portugal:

  Bordeaux. The Pyrenees. You feel out the border crossing. Retreat to Marseille. The battle to move sluggish hearts as the barbarian hordes come closer. Through it all the lunacy of bureaucracy gone wild. No residence permit, but no exit permit either. They won’t let you stay and they won’t let you leave. Finally you get your exit permit, but your Spanish transit visa has meanwhile expired. You can’t get another unless you have a Portuguese visa, and that’s contingent on something else again. Which means that you have to start all over again—your days are spent waiting outside the consulates, those vestibules of heaven and hell! A vicious circle of madness!

  Finally arriving in Lisbon meant only another trek to leave Europe behind completely, yet without arrival there was little hope of total escape. Other neutral nations not already overrun by the Nazis—Sweden, Switzerland, Spain—also offered sanctuary, but Lisbon alone had an Atlantic port for resettlement overseas and the vital land buffer of Spain between it and the Nazi war machine. The Lisbon route, as the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont characterized it in his journal when he reached Portugal in August 1940, was the war’s lifeline of freedom.

  *

  Like Portugal, Spain had declared neutrality when the war broke out in September 1939. But whether the country would remain free of the war was, from the summer of 1940 onward, anyone’s guess. Three years of civil war had left the Spanish economy in shambles. Food shortages were now such that the American embassy in Madrid used its own truck to haul in supplies from Portugal. Politically the civil war had drawn the Franco regime deeply within the German orbit, and when the European war began, and especially after the fall of France, Spain leaned heavily in the direction of the Third Reich. Refugees pushed as rapidly as possible through the country, wrote Lilian Mowrer, because “no one knew how soon Spain would drop the mask of neutrality or how quickly Portugal’s independence would be threatened. It was this fear which kept us swiftly on the move.”

  There was ample reason to fear. Following a meeting of Hitler and Franco at Hendaye in October 1940—the second stop of the Führer’s private train on a journey that included talks with Pétain and Mussolini—Spain signed a protocol with Germany that pledged entry into the war at some future point agreed upon by the two governments. Spain never carried through with the pact, though for the next two years joining the Axis powers remained Spanish policy, and collaboration between Madrid and Berlin was pursued on many fronts.

  Nonetheless in the summer and early fall of 1940 Spain went its own way by liberally issuing transit visas to Jews and other refugees who also had Portuguese transit visas and some evidence of a final destination overseas. It was clear the refugees were meant to keep moving through Spain; in the words of the foreign minister of the time, Jordana y Sousa, they were “passing through our country as light passes through a glass, leaving no trace.” Spain wanted no trouble with Germany over the exiles, yet beyond the exclusion of fit men of military age together with some currency restrictions, the country kept its doors open to those with proper papers.

  Those without were another matter. In a country as large as Spain many illegal entrants avoided detection, but those caught were usually imprisoned, often in harsh conditions, though for the most part they were not returned to occupied France. A possible explanation for not turning over illegals was concern expressed by British and American envoys in Madrid for the welfare of refugees—a concern perhaps aimed mainly at freeing an avenue of flight for servicemen who had escaped prisoner-of-war camps or had been shot down over German terrain and managed to reach Spain on their way to British territory in Gibraltar.

  Portugal shared Spain’s insistence that refugees move on to overseas destinations. Its economy was in good condition compared to its battered neighbor, and Salazar had no wish to play a vassal’s role in a German-ordered Europe. But a country of Portugal’s diminutive size was necessarily wary of a large influx of temporary residents. In November 1939 Portuguese consulates were instructed to get prior approval from Lisbon before issuing visas to various groups, among them stateless figures and Jews who had been expelled from their countries of origin. While anti-Semitism was not considered a feature of Salazar’s government, anti-communism decidedly was, and the order also applied to Russian refugees.

  Despite grave personal risk, one Portuguese consul found himself unable to follow the new regulation. From a distinguished family and a law graduate of the University of Coimbra, Portugal’s oldest and most prestigious university, Aristides de Sousa Mendes was a career diplomat in Portugal’s small but elite foreign service. His twin brother, César de Sousa Mendes, was likewise a diplomat and would occupy higher positions—he was ambassador to Sweden when, in Salazar’s first government in 1932, he was called to Lisbon as foreign minister; but by 1929 Aristides de Sousa Mendes had climbed to the modest rank of consul general in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1938 he took up the same post in Bordeaux. The work at the time was undemanding, and Sousa Mendes along with his wife and a family of fourteen children lived placidly in a large apartment on the Quai Louis-XVIII, which also served as offices of the consulate.

  With the German invasion of France and subsequent removal of the French government from Paris to Tours to Bordeaux, the consul suddenly found himself at the center of a storm of panic-stricken refugees. Among them was his nephew, the son of his brother César, whom Salazar had recently posted to Warsaw as ambassador. When the nephew reached Bordeaux he went at once to the consulate and found the offices “packed with refugees.”

  They were dead tired, because they had spent days and nights in the street, on the stairs and finally in the offices. They could no longer relieve themselves or eat or drink, for fear of losing their place in the queue. That sometimes happened and caused scuffles. The refugees consequently looked haggard, and were no longer able to wash, comb their hair, shave or change their clothes. In most cases, anyway, the clothes they were wearing were the only ones they had.

  All the Bordeaux consulates were under siege by refugees, but the Spanish and Portuguese consulates were typically, given the escape routes believed to be available through the neutral nations, the first ports of call. Those crammed together before the Portuguese consulate also may have heard stories of Sousa Mendes’s sympathetic concern for refugees before the prior-approval order was handed down by the foreign ministry. In any case, the consulate was now overrun with requests for transit visas, and before issuing nearly all of them the consul was required to seek consent from Lisbon. When Sousa Mendes telegraphed Salazar for instructions on how to deal with the newly chaotic situation, he got a stern reply: follow the regulation. When shortly thereafter he sought visas for some thirty people, the government flatly
refused. The requests had included permits for Rabbi Chaim Kruger and his family, with whom Sousa Mendes had struck up a friendship in Antwerp. Now in Bordeaux, the Krugers lodged in the consul’s apartment while he pleaded their case with Lisbon.

  At this point Sousa Mendes, acting from principle and conscience, chose to defy Lisbon. As his nephew recalled, he stepped outside the consulate and announced his decision to the massed gathering of refugees:

  My government has denied all applications for visas to any refugee. But I cannot allow these people to die. Many are Jews and our Constitution says that the religion or the politics of a foreigner shall not be used to deny him refuge in Portugal. I have decided to follow this principle. I am going to issue a visa to anyone who asks for it—regardless of whether or not he can pay… . Even if I am discharged, I can only act as a Christian, as my conscience tells me.

  The consul then commanded a police officer protecting the consulate door, “You are no longer to prevent these people from seeing me. You are to merely maintain order.”

  On June 16, 1940, Sousa Mendes began his extraordinary rescue operation. With the help of Rabbi Kruger and some members of the Mendes family he began signing visa after visa, with no questions asked. To hurry the effort along he sent Kruger outside the consulate to collect the passports of Jews. “He was carrying fistfuls of passports,” Kruger’s son, Jacob, remembered of his father. “But the most extraordinary thing was that he was so engrossed in his task, so keen to act fast and save as many people as he could, that he went out into the street without his black jacket, without his hat and even without his skullcap—something I’d never seen him do before.” Once the passports were brought to his desk, Sousa Mendes rapidly signed his name—the signature in time falling off from a flourishing “Aristides de Sousa Mendes” to simply “Mendes”—and a consular aid stamped them.

  As news spread about what was occurring in the consulate, it was swamped all the more with refugees. For two additional days and nights the mass visa signing went on, allowing scores of refugees to begin the journey from Bordeaux to Lisbon. But the consul was not finished with his work. With the Franco-German armistice he traveled south to Bayonne, where a vice consul under his supervision was not following the same open visa policy. Once again Sousa Mendes set up an assembly-line operation, working from the consular office but also, in the recollection of some, authorizing visas in the street, his hotel, and his car.

  Lisbon knew of the consul’s defiance, and on June 24 he was instructed to leave his post in France and return to Portugal. But since the order had not yet been delivered to him, he made a final effort to assist refugees by signing more visas at the Spanish border and personally driving his car across the border with a group of refugees behind. “I’m the Portuguese consul,” he announced to Spanish border guards. “These people are with me. They all have regular visas, as you can check for yourselves, so would you be so kind as to let them through?” After the guards did, Sousa Mendes returned to France and Bordeaux. German forces had now entered the city, but the consul, stripped of his powers, continued to receive refugees at his apartment. On July 8 he and his wife returned to Portugal. Salazar had already set in motion disciplinary action against him.

  While Sousa Mendes’s heroic work was brief, his period of official disgrace dragged on and on. The consul apparently believed he could quickly clear up matters by talking with Salazar, and sought an audience. It was never granted. During an investigation from August to October 1940, Sousa Mendes responded to a bill of indictment against him by, among other things, presenting an article from the daily newspaper Diário de Notícias—considered semi-official by many—praising Portugal’s hospitality to refugees. While the investigation’s verdict was that the consul should be demoted in rank but remain in the foreign service, Salazar’s personal ruling suspended him for a year on half-pay, then forced him into permanent and financially crippling retirement.

  *

  Exiles fortunate enough to get transit visas from Bordeaux and other Portuguese consulates also needed entry visas to ultimate overseas destinations stamped in their passports, and for a time the consulates casually accepted permits to China, Siam, and the Belgian Congo despite the fact these countries lacked transport from Lisbon. Once holders of such questionable credentials reached Lisbon they could seek entry visas to the United States or other countries they actually intended to reach, their Portuguese transit visas regularly extended by the local police. Holders of legitimate overseas visas had only to contend with the frustrating shortage of further transport.

  On June 21, 1940, an American press report told of three hundred Americans, most of them former residents in France, who were gathered in Biarritz, St. Jean-de-Luz, and other towns in occupied France’s frontier area with Spain while awaiting an official dispatched from the embassy in Madrid to aid them in border crossing. They were hoping to reach Lisbon for passage to New York on weekly sailings of liners of the American Export Lines. Space on Pan American Airway’s seaplane flights to New York, added the report, was already booked weeks ahead.

  A report five days later said seventy Americans had crossed from occupied France into Spain and another four hundred to five hundred, including many well-known correspondents who had been posted in Europe, were still waiting in the southwestern corner of the country. Time was of the essence since German forces were expected to soon penetrate as far south as Bayonne. The road from St. Jean-de-Luz to Hendaye on the border was already solid with cars, some stranded without gasoline; refugees reaching Hendaye said they had “lived for the past three days almost entirely on lettuce.” Once the Americans crossed over and reached the Spanish cities of San Sebastian or Bilbao, they would come under the authority of embassy officials—Madrid’s condition for waiving their lack of Spanish transit visas—for their journey to Lisbon.

  On July 1 the London press reported on a British contingent managing to cross into Spain just before Nazi troops reached Hendaye and raised the German flag. Those safely across in Spain told harrowing tales of traveling through France on lorries, bicycles, and French troop trains. All were now part of the refugee bottleneck of Lisbon, though for the time being they were being put up in comfortable quarters in the Royal British Club.

  A lengthy report in the American press about the city’s refugee buildup came from James Reston of the New York Times on December 15, 1940. Earlier, writing from London, Reston had tried to capture the overall enormity of the movement of refugees with a dispatch that began: “In the whole story of the world’s confusion nothing is quite so tragic or so complicated as the desperate plight of Europe’s refugees.” His Lisbon story, thick with statistics, concentrated on the plight of those freed to the extent of reaching Portugal. It opened: “Another handful of that tragic horde of European refugees—twenty-seven children from Southern France and ten Jewish youngsters from Vienna—sailed for the United States tonight on the American Export liner Excambion, but eight thousand homeless and stateless persons still are waiting in Portugal to get away from the war zone.” The exiles caught in the city were part of an original eleven thousand who had reached Lisbon by the end of August 1940, and they constituted a mere fraction of the many thousands hoping to follow them.

  Jews holding passports from Poland, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, Reston went on, made up 90 percent of the eight thousand, with fifteen hundred of them considered destitute. The latter could be seen circling through the cafés and squares of central Lisbon, searching for war information and trying to console one another, then at noon trekking up into the Lisbon hills for meals provided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, one of the local relief groups providing humanitarian aid. Later they flowed back to the docks to say goodbye to friends lucky enough to be leaving on ships. The wearisome routine would be repeated for weeks and months until they obtained permission to enter another country, and then turned up funds for getting there.

  The Portuguese people were said to be unfailingly kind in provi
ding housing and clothing, and the government had extended visas that allowed those already legally in the country to stay. In an effort to ease the blockage in Lisbon, refugees were now distributed in towns throughout the country. “These people,” wrote Reston, “are being well treated by the Portuguese authorities, who have taken the general line that it is willing to help those refugees who already are here, but unwilling to establish a permanent refugee colony.” The United States was also helping relieve the pressure by allowing its Lisbon consulate to provide refugees presently in Portugal with needed immigration papers for America rather than requiring they be sought from American consulates in countries of origin.

  “Lisbon’s Refugees Now Put at 8,000,” read the headline on Reston’s story. Such numbers attached to the uprooted, usually derived from data gathered by government officials or estimates by relief organizations, varied considerably in press and broadcast reports about wartime Lisbon. A seemingly extravagant Reuters wire-service story carried in August 1941—with attribution simply to “a summary today”—said that “since November, 1939, about two hundred thousand refugees have sailed from Lisbon,” and “several thousand have also left by air.” A house magazine of Pan American Airlines reported that between June and December 1940 more than eighty thousand refugees in the city needed overseas transportation.