by Ronald Weber
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In late April 1941 William D. Bayles opened “Lisbon: Europe’s Bottleneck” in Life magazine with a ship arriving at the docks and the passengers gazing down upon the “stranded foreign colony of Europe’s last free capital.” “Stranded” was only partly accurate since the waiting crowd was made up of American businessmen, filmmakers, Red Cross officials, secretaries of embassies and legations, spies, and “a bevy of Japanese.” Joining such figures, all with some reason to be present at shipside, were genuinely marooned Jewish refugees who apparently had come only “to see what kind of lunatic leaves the U.S. for a place as mad as Europe.” Well back in the waiting group were poor and patient Portuguese hoping for handouts from the newest batch of visitors.
Important arrivals and the “cream of the refugees,” said Bayles, stayed at the Aviz Hotel, a small and luxurious establishment that was once a private residence, where the top suite cost six dollars a day, inexpensive by standards other than Portugal’s, where it amounted to a month’s wages. Another attraction of the hotel was the absence of Germans, whose “hangout deluxe” was the Palácio in Estoril. There they mixed with rich Jews, Englishmen, and Americans. The Gestapo agents among them were in plain clothes, but their freshly Alpine-tanned faces easily set them apart. Some gamblers in the Estoril casino humorously imagined the bronzed skin as part of a Nazi intimidation strategy that assumed sun-darkened faces were more fearsome than the pale variety.
The Gestapo, of course, was not to be taken lightly, and Bayles reported that when Biefurn, whom he identified as the Gestapo chief in Portugal, strolled through the casino, he was greeted in German by the croupiers and gamblers who left their tables to shake his hand. When Bayles took up a position near him, Biefurn glared at him before moving away. Everyone assumed Portugal’s secret police were in the service of the Gestapo, and one evening Bayles found in his hotel room a Portuguese going through his belongings, then coolly ignoring any need for giving an explanation.
Rich Jews made up half the gamblers in Estoril, and Jews with and without money the bulk of Lisbon’s overall refugee population, estimated by Bayles at forty thousand. But in Sintra, the high, forested former summer quarters of Portuguese royalty, he found a group of some six hundred Americans who had stayed in France after World War I, married French women and moved in with their families, had large families of their own, and found work when and where they could. They had largely forgotten English and become essentially French, but because of alien status they failed to qualify for welfare benefits when France entered the war. American officials had evacuated them to Portugal and were maintaining them in Sintra until they could be moved home and to a future viewed without enthusiasm since it meant starting over as refugees in the country of their birth.
Except for Jewish gamblers in Estoril and glum Americans in Sintra, Bayles gave few particulars about Lisbon’s refugee population. Photos with his article added useful specificity yet visually glossed over the anxiety felt by many. Refugees were shown sitting with newspapers in a Lisbon café; leaving a hotel on a sailing day; boarding a ship; and crowding the office of American Export Lines (despite, as the caption noted, the fact that tickets were sold out and bookings had stopped). In all the photos the refugees, well dressed and seemingly well fed, could be mistaken for well heeled, if uniformly somber, tourists.
*
The same month Harvey Klemmer’s article appeared in the National Geographic, Demaree Bess in the Saturday Evening Post reported that Nazi ambition was not the only threat confronting Portugal. An experienced foreign correspondent of the popular weekly, Bess had reached Lisbon at the end of a year-long reporting tour through occupied Europe, and like other newcomers he was struck by the sight of refugees leaving the city, “admirals, aviators and ambassadors” coming in, and the ration-free food markets. But his central observation was conveyed in his article’s title, “American Strategy Pains Portugal.” “It may startle most Americans,” Bess wrote, “to learn that the Portuguese consider us the greatest menace to their continued peace. They think they know what to expect from Germany and from Great Britain, but they frankly admit they don’t know what to expect from the United States.”
They had, however, some suspicions. Although Portugal had long since ceased to be a world power, it still had extensive and valuable colonial possessions in Africa and the Far East. Of particular wartime importance were its holdings of the Cape Verde islands off the west coast of Africa and the Azores islands in the North Atlantic. In World War I the American navy had operated bases in the Azores by agreement with Portugal, a neutral-turned-ally in the war. More recently Portugal had allowed Pan American Airways to maintain a flying-boat facility in the Azores. Now there was concern that the United States, if it entered the war, would seize the islands under the pretext that the action was necessary before Germany did so and used them for landing fields and ports for marauding submarines.
The apprehension had been sharply heightened on May 27, 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt, in a fireside chat to the nation about American strategic interests in the European war, had called the Portuguese islands the “outposts of the New World” and said their occupation by Germany “would directly endanger the freedom of the Atlantic and our own physical safety.” “Control or occupation by Nazi forces of any of the islands of the Atlantic,” he noted in another passage, “would jeopardize the immediate safety of portions of North and South America, and of the island possessions of the United States, and of the ultimate safety of the continental United States itself.”
Demaree Bess, in Lisbon at the time of FDR’s talk, found that Americans in the city thought the president was merely putting the Nazis on notice. But to the Portuguese the remarks, widely circulated and criticized by Lisbon newspapers and radio, were certain evidence that the United States would move on the islands, which in turn would provoke the Germans to occupy continental Portugal. (A correspondent for the London Times suggested that the Portuguese were even troubled that public attention had been drawn to the islands, “which they would like both the belligerents to pretend were part of the moon.”) Bess told of a taxi driver taking him along the waterfront and pointing out Portuguese soldiers being loaded on transport ships. “They’re sailing to the Azores,” said the driver. “When you Americans try to occupy the Azores this time, you will have to fight for them.”
So would the Germans. W. E. Lucas, writing in The Nation some months after his PM reports but before Bess’s article appeared, said Hitler surely had his eyes on the Portuguese islands and all else about the country. The Azores and Madeira provided “stepping-stones to the American continent” for launching German sea and air attacks. Within continental Portugal, Lisbon and Porto offered choice ports whose far western location made them strategically critical in the Battle of the Atlantic. Once the Nazi mechanized legions had reached the Pyrenees, Lucas recalled that it had seemed “a matter for wonder then that Hitler did not order his armies to roll into Spain and, fanning out, to occupy Gibraltar and Lisbon. There was nothing at that time to stop them.”
And still there was nothing, beyond what Lucas called Hitler’s possible calculation that the profit of occupation was not worth the loss that would accompany it. Supplying food to an Iberian peninsula cut off from outside trade by the British blockade would divert Germany’s needed homeland requirements. Britain would surely counterattack by seizing the Azores and Madeira. The long coastline of Spain and Portugal would have to be defended against attack. Finally, “in the background looms the shadow of the United States, which is being compelled to push farther afield the frontiers it must defend for its own safety.” As Lucas saw it, in early 1941 Hitler’s decision about taking Portugal was still pending.
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So abundant was the news of Lisbon in 1940 and 1941 that it inevitably carried over from newspaper stories and magazine articles into film and fiction. From Hollywood in the summer of 1941 came One Night in Lisbon, a light comedy-romance in which the wartime lovers, pla
yed by Fred MacMurray and Madeleine Carroll, escape bombed London for a brief interlude of Lisbon’s peace and plenty, only to find themselves entangled with a Nazi spy ring. In Casablanca, which appeared late the following year, Paul Henreid and Ingrid Bergman merely fly off to Lisbon at the end, yet that in itself—and the film’s grave voice-over opening—may have brought the Lisbon route to more international notice than all previous print accounts. A more substantial, if equally oblique, use of wartime Lisbon came in “A Little Door,” a short story by the writer and critic Mark Schorer in The New Yorker in September 1941. Here everything takes place in the safety and security of America, with Lisbon’s frenzied bottleneck of refugees a faraway yet deeply haunting presence.
The time of year in the story is early autumn, the setting a quiet beach in New England, perhaps on Cape Cod. The Abrams family—Harold, Eve, two young children—have come for a picnic lunch; with them is Eve’s mother, Mrs. Herman. On the nearly empty beach the air is still, the sunlight mellow, and the ocean quiet as the family glimpse it between two long rocky arms stretching out to the water.
Mrs. Herman, however, is far from quiet. With her gaze fixed at a point where ocean and sky meet, she asks Harold and Eve as the story’s opens, “Do you know that we are probably looking directly at Lisbon?” “Lisbon,” she answers herself, “a little door toward which half the population of a continent crowds, or yearns to.” Eve is impatient with her mother; she tells her not to be so gloomy, especially with the children about. But Mrs. Herman presses on: “Lisbon. Think of it! That one little outlet for the millions who long to pass through. The enormous aching.”
When Eve maintains she is as aware as her mother of what is taking place across the water (“I feel it as much as you. Everyone does”) but refuses to be perpetually burdened by it, Mrs. Herman tries even harder to make her daughter understand:
It’s not a matter of burdening or not burdening ourselves. We are burdened. Form a picture of Europe in your mind. Try to see it. That one open port. The few airplanes and the few ships, the money it costs, and the impossible number of people, and the terrible difficulties. See it as a picture, and you may feel it—all of Europe, and all the roads crowded, and all leading here. In spirit if not in body. All crowding down, or yearning to. That longing means nothing to you. It’s only an idea, all of it, only something you read about. But you’re young.
After the children play and the family eat their sandwiches, the weather begins to turn. The wind picks up, there are dark clouds on the horizon, and Harold predicts a storm. The tide, Mrs. Herman notes, has also turned and is now going out, which brings her thoughts back to Portugal and the refugees. “What a strange thing!” she says. “Here the tide rolls out, and I suppose that means that on the other side it is rolling in. That brings us close, doesn’t it.” She adds that, though she has been abroad many times, she had never been to Lisbon. When Harold remarks that it was never much of a place to go, she returns to the image of Lisbon as the last open door: “But now it’s everything. The only door. A little, narrow door, and behind it millions of lives that can’t possibly squeeze through it, ache as they may.”
With the wind rising, waves hit the rock arms with more force, the sound now like “a distant booming, like remote thunder, or cannon.” And to make all the more manifest that the sound evokes the European war, Harold says, “It sounds far away, doesn’t it, as though it’s from the horizon somewhere, not from that rock at all?” “Yes,” Mrs. Herman agrees. In a final scene that paradoxically duplicates the faraway struggle of the refugees to reach Lisbon, the family flees from the beach to the protection of their car before the storm hits. Eve carries one child and drags another behind her, “as if their very lives depended on reaching the car before the rain began.”
2
Tramping Forward
Refugees, refugees, refugees, in various degrees of destitution, flowed on. Some dropped by the roadside, but the majority tramped forward… . It was a heartbreaking spectacle, and we drove on in stunned silence.
—Ronald Bodley, Flight into Portugal
The sudden change of weather in Mark Schorer’s short story might have been suggested by a powerful hurricane that hit Portugal and Spain in February 1941. Early reports gave a death toll of nearly two hundred, with twenty in Lisbon, and injuries numbering in the several hundreds. Later stories put the number of Portuguese dead at four hundred, with fifteen hundred injured. Waves up to sixty-feet high had rushed up the Tagus River, tearing ships and barges loose from their moorings and smashing them against piers; a British flying boat sank, with three Portuguese guards aboard lost. At the airport in Sintra ten military planes were destroyed. Shipwrecks were recorded up and down the coastline; trains were stalled; trees and electrical lines were down everywhere. The American Red Cross cabled ten thousand dollars to Lisbon for emergency relief.
Bad as it was, the storm could have been more devastating had it struck just months earlier during an ambitious national celebration. While Lisbon’s sudden appearance in the limelight as Europe’s refugee capital was an unforeseen consequence of the war, by a surreal coincidence of timing Portugal, beginning in the summer of 1940, had intended to showcase itself with a six-month commemoration of two centenaries: eight hundred years since its founding in 1140 as an independent state, three hundred years since the restoration of independence in 1640 after sixty years of Spanish rule. What Time magazine labeled an “audacious pageant,” at a time when the country might prefer a low profile, was properly known as the Exposition of the Portuguese World, with Lisbon as its main focus and including programs throughout the nation and the overseas possessions.
Major events were ordered around three historical epochs: the twelfth-century medieval founding of the country; the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century imperial period of exploration and colonization, which saw Portugal at its zenith as a world power; and the seventeenth-century origins of the Braganza era (named for Catherine of Braganza, who in 1662 had become the wife of Charles II of England) and the return of national autonomy. “There is one period of history,” observed the London Times, “which will not be commemorated, but which will be implicit in everything that is done. It is the Salazar period, now at its height.” Clearly the double centenary had the contemporary ideological aim of bolstering the status of António Salazar’s authoritarian regime by linking it to a continuum of Portuguese history. The country’s propaganda chief, António Ferro, had acknowledged as much when plans for the exposition were unveiled in 1938: “What we will celebrate is not … only the Portugal of yesterday but that of today, it is not just the Portugal of D. Afonso Henriques and D. João IV, but the Portugal of [President António] Carmona and Salazar.”
A distant and paternal ruler—dubbed a “plainclothes dictator” by The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling in contrast to his uniformed European counterparts—Salazar had begun his rapid rise to power in 1928 when a military government named the University of Coimbra economics professor minister of finance with a mandate to bring financial order to the country. This he did through raising taxes, cutting public spending, banning strikes, and instituting rigid fiscal controls that kept wages and profits low, virtually ended inflation, and created annual budget surpluses.
His ultimate aim was an all-encompassing political order. In 1932 he was appointed president of the Council of Ministers, or prime minister, and a new constitution the following year put in motion his New State, a nationalist dictatorship with some trappings of Benito Mussolini’s unitary or corporative regime in Italy. (A signed photograph of Il Duce occupied a place of honor on Salazar’s desk until it was replaced by one of Pope Pius XII.) The Portuguese government now had an elected but largely ceremonial president (in keeping with the role of the armed forces in the new order, the president was a senior military figure), a prime minister as effective head of state, and a compliant national assembly. As prime minister, Salazar, while leading the austere personal life of a lifelong bachelor and devout Roman Catholic, would exerci
se total personal control over the domestic and foreign affairs of Portugal until 1968.
During the double centenary he was lauded in the Anglo-Portuguese News—a fortnightly (later a weekly) English-language tabloid miscellany published in Lisbon and mainly given over to the comings and goings of the local British community—for the financial acumen that had brought the country to a position of economic independence. “But financial reform was of no avail,” APN pointedly added, “if it was not backed up by strict and willing obedience to the orders which were given. Fortunately for Portugal Dr. Salazar, in addition to his financial ability, possessed a moral force of character which won for him the immediate support of all those who had the welfare of the country at heart.”
The London Times was equally effusive in its praise of the effective ruler. Visitors to the celebration were certain to “appreciate the healthy changes brought about by the present Administration, which, on the philosophical basis of Christianity and the financial basis of solvency and good business, has built up one of the most successful régimes of modern times.” In an editorial the paper added that “the Portuguese would not be human if they had not grumbled now and then as the firm hand [of Salazar], cruel only to be kind, gave one more twist to the financial screw”:
But they stuck to it, cultivating their garden, going quietly and steadily about their business, working and paying their way, until they have reached a state in which every right-minded man and nation will wish them increased prosperity, and would passionately resent any attempt to disturb their happiness. In the Europe that will follow this war the example set these last twelve years [during which Salazar was in power] by Portugal will be a guiding light.