by Ronald Weber
*
During Salazar’s long reign there were many commemorative events to contain domestic grumbling by burnishing Portuguese pride and the authority of the regime, with the 1940 exposition his triumphal effort to date. Long preparation went into it. Artists, architects, composers, and writers were commissioned to create patriotic symbols and produce publications. From village churches and remote monasteries, nearly forgotten Portuguese primitive paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were removed to Lisbon for a major exhibition. (Some villagers took the removals as looting and angrily protested. In the northern city of Viseu, church members surrounded a truckload of paintings and kept it hostage for two days.) Academic conferences and sporting events were organized. Official pilgrimages were conducted to historical sites. Large works projects were set in motion, including in the Lisbon area a new international airport at Portela, a new road along the Sun Coast from Lisbon to Estoril to Cascais, and restoration of such landmarks as St. George’s Castle and the Romanesque twelfth-century Lisbon Cathedral.
Along the banks of the Tagus in the historic Belém district on the western outskirts of Lisbon, the launching point for Vasco da Gama and other Portuguese explorers, a vast area was cleared for the main exposition site. Erected across from Jerónimos Monastery and east of the Tower of Belém, both structures dating from the early sixteenth century and evoking in their intricate Manueline stonework the country’s seafaring past, was the striking riverside Monument to the Discoveries, cast in the form of a massive prow of a caravel lined with figures of explorers and other dignitaries leading, at the head, to Prince Henry the Navigator. (Constructed of temporary material, as were most exposition structures, the monument was redone as a permanent sculpture for an anniversary celebration of Prince Henry in 1960.) A central square was created, with a garden and fountain in the center and Jerónimos Monastery as a backdrop. Flanking the square were the principal pavilions of the exposition, designed in a mildly modernistic style meant to suggest an openness to the future that could be contained within Salazar’s vision of a Portugal devoted to traditional values.
Despite the coming of war, and with it a temporary halt of construction in Belém and dashed expectations about world attention directed to the celebration, the double centenary opened as planned on June 2, 1940. A Te Deum was sung in the Lisbon Cathedral before an array of clergy, high military officers, city fathers, government officials, the diplomatic corps, Knights of Malta, and the Papal Nuncio to Portugal. The following day German planes bombed the Paris area for the first time, killing more than two hundred people.
Some of the transients passing through Lisbon during the months of celebration left fleeting impressions of it. Lilian Mowrer was struck by the gaiety brought to the city: flags flying; brass bands parading through narrow streets from sundown to dawn; groups of youths in capes carrying banners and singing; fireworks. At the same time she found a “stunning touch of irony in a nightmare world” that Portugal should be “blandly inaugurating a pageant honoring its overseas possessions and recalling the glories of its colonizing days.” A hotel porter shrugged off the oddity, telling her that “In France, always war. In Portugal, always fiesta.”
The fabled author-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry enjoyed evenings wandering “through the triumphs of this exhibition in perfect taste, where everything was near perfect, including the discreet music, which wafted gently through the garden like the plashing of a fountain.” Nonetheless he sensed that in the midst of war Lisbon “smiled a slightly sad smile.” It seemed to conceive of its festival fancifully as a shield protecting it from attack:
“Look, how happy, peaceful, and beautifully illuminated I am,” Lisbon said. “Can they choose me as a target when I so carefully refuse to hide? When I am so vulnerable!”
For Saint-Exupéry the answer was obvious: impressive as it might be, the Portuguese exposition afforded no protection against “the monster’s voracious appetite.” He imagined “the European night inhabited by roving packs of bomber planes pressing down on Lisbon, as if they could have sniffed out this treasure from afar.”
Ben Robertson, a correspondent on his way from New York to England to report for the New York Herald Tribune, reached Lisbon just as the celebration was about to begin, and as a visiting newsman he received a gold-engraved invitation to the opening ceremony. But the Portuguese censor refused to allow him to cable a story back to the United States, so all he actually witnessed of the festivities was an inaugural torchlight procession glimpsed from the balcony of his hotel. Given the refugees descending upon Lisbon at the same time, he found nothing joyful about the event; it was simply “a ghastly festival.” The refugees made him think of trapped rabbits—“and you had the feeling that the hunters and hounds were getting closer and that this eventually would be the field they would use for the kill.” The only genuinely carefree people in all of Lisbon, he decided, were American sailors from among the ships massed in the harbor as part of the opening ceremony, since they knew they would soon be crossing the Atlantic for home.
*
With the closing of the Exposition of the Portuguese World in early December 1940, the London Times took stock of the activity that had drawn some three million visitors to various sites and concluded it would propel Portugal into the new year with “determination to fulfill that destiny which the records of the past seem to have laid down for her.” From this lofty point, the report might have lowered its sights and pointed out that, the doors of the exposition shut, the question of the moment was whether those to Lisbon would remain open for fleeing refugees. The bleak truth was that Portuguese determination would not be the deciding factor. The fate of the Lisbon route rested with Berlin.
“How easy it would be,” wrote Denis de Rougemont about the refugee journeys through France and Spain, “to close off, at any point anywhere, this slender artery through which our old world is being little by little emptied of its elite at the same time as of its parasites.” The Nazis, he went on to speculate, were keeping the artery open precisely to rid Europe of its unwanted population of “ex-ministers, ex-directors, ex-Austrians, ex-millionaires, ex-princes” who were, fittingly, leaving Lisbon on American ships bearing names beginning with Ex: Exeter, Excalibur, Excambion. By whim or policy, the Third Reich could at any instant pinch shut the thin tube of escape, leaving Europe at the mercy of its new master.
In August 1941 Wes Gallagher of the Associated Press—a veteran wire-service reporter who had covered the German invasion of Norway, would report on the American landings in North Africa, and from London would oversee the AP’s coverage of D-day—filed a brief dispatch that movingly portrayed the refugee lifeline to freedom as a fragile and time-bound hope, nearly as much rumor as reality. His opening sentence read more like a short story than a news story: “Outside the sun beats down in muggy waves, but inside the six stinking railroad cars, fear—like a blanket of dark cobwebs—lies over the lives of 267 passengers.” The fear of the train passengers descends from a host of dire possibilities: visas might expire before they can be used; the train might be turned back at the next border crossing; money might not last; the war might overtake their neutral destination before they can reach it.
The train is delivering refugees from Central Europe to Lisbon, from where they will sail to North or South America. The refugees are mostly Jewish, but there are also non-Jewish Czechs, Belgians, and Germans. An American girl is among them, traveling alone now since her fiancé, a young Austrian medical doctor who is a refugee in a neutral country, was forced to leave her at the last border station. Both had tried not to show what they equally knew: he will never get the transit visas needed to take him across countries separating him from Portugal; they will remain apart.
A plump German woman attempts to divert the girl with chocolates and conversation. The woman may, though, be trying to divert herself as well. She has a son in New York, but her husband was refused permission to leave with her. She is trying to reach South America
, where she will stay until she can move on to the United States. “It may take years,” she tells the girl.
The train stops for hours at remote locations. There are no sleeping cars, and nights pass restlessly in crowded compartments. At border crossings the passengers must produce their passports and other papers. Luggage has to be taken from the train and inspected. Confusion reigns.
A Czech woman is told her visa has not been filled out properly; she must wait while verification is made by telegraph. “It will not take long,” an official tells her. “We may hear in a few days.” She is on her way to America, and her visa expires in three weeks; already she has waited three years because of American quota regulations. She is led away protesting. None of the other passengers dare come to her aid for fear officials may detain them too.
At the next stop a man, a professor of economics, is approached by two figures in plain clothes. “Come with us,” he is told. “A telegram has come. You must stay here awhile.” As he is taken from the train the other passengers are careful not to catch his eye. He may not return; they may be considered friends and also removed from the train.
At this stop the luggage search takes longer because there are few inspectors. Trains leave the stop without their passengers, and the refugees are frantic to find other transportation. Police make them stay together, and finally they are put aboard a hot, dusty train made up of passenger and freight cars. Americans in the group are allowed to wait at the station for a faster train.
As the refugee train pulls away, the plump German woman calls out from a window to the American girl on the platform “in a voice meant to be hearty but is cracked with fear.” She says: “I’ll see you in Lisbon—I hope—soon.”
Wes Gallagher’s story got fresh life when it was reprinted in 1942 in Free Men Are Fighting, a collection of early war reporting (and enduring life in 1995 when it was included in the first volume of the Library of America’s Reporting World War II). Book publication was appropriate since many firsthand accounts of refugee journeys across Europe found their way into hard covers. Among them, We Escaped, published in 1941, collected twelve personal narratives about flights that had eventually reached America. The stories bore no names to protect friends or family still in Europe, with only work or profession as identifying marks; all were written by the refugees themselves or recorded and translated. In each story it was the European journey that mattered, with the final port of exit—Lisbon for five of the refugees, with others leaving, when it was still possible to do so, from Stockholm, Hamburg, and La Havre—briefly mentioned if mentioned at all.
*
The “Artist from Prague” was in her studio in 1939 when German troops crossed into Czechoslovakia. Earlier, though she had had no political involvement, the Munich Pact of 1938 in which Britain and France acquiesced in Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland troubled her enough to apply for an American visa. Friends advised her to leave Prague, but, though her prosperous family had already left, she felt strong ties to the city. Finally, a Cook’s travel office got her an exit permit for Italy, supposedly for a vacation, and she left with one small suitcase.
From Rome, where she waited for several fruitless months seeking a French visa, she moved to San Remo near the border with France. Here she joined five others in each paying an agent seven hundred lire to smuggle them in a fishing boat along the coast to France. At night they followed a narrow path several hundred meters, their shoes off to mask sounds and sliding on their backs some of the distance to avoid sight; at the sea they were dropped over a high wall to a man in a boat below. When the boat came into French waters it quickly turned to land, the smugglers anxious to return to Italy under cover of darkness.
While getting out of the boat one of the six travelers fell overboard and called out, alerting French police, and everyone was taken into custody. The next morning, after a civilized breakfast of coffee and croissants, they were questioned, photographed, fingerprinted, and driven back to the Italian border. The Italians, however, refused to accept them, so they huddled on a bridge between the two countries while officials squabbled and drivers of passing cars stared at the curious visitors from the French Riviera. When at last an Italian official told them their passports would not be returned until they were transported to the Italy-Germany border, the artist burst into hysterical tears—which saved the day. A woman weeping was more than the Italian could bear, and after much solicitous concern the refugees got their passports back and were driven to San Remo.
The smuggling agent returned their money, and the effort to reach France resumed with another agent. This time money went to a border official, and Italian militia escorted the artist and two men to a border wall with a door in it. On the other side French officers led them to a road and a waiting car. When they reached Nice, there was an argument with the chauffeur about payment. While the artist, able to speak French, was maintaining that the cost of the car was part of the arrangement with the agent, the two men slipped away and she was left alone.
With friends in Nice she settled down to wait for her American visa to come through. In the strange quiet of the phony war after France declared war on Germany, she made a business trip to Paris; then in Nice she got a job teaching drawing to children, some of whom came from refugee families. When Italy joined Germany in the war, many of the refugees fled Nice, fearing an Italian invasion. There were periods of German bombing and rumors of approaching troops, but with the armistice the refugees returned and the city resumed its character.
The artist considered staying in France through the war, but just as food and fuel were beginning to run short she learned that an American visa was waiting for her, and she immediately booked a ticket for a ship leaving from Lisbon. She began making trips back and forth to Marseille in hopes of getting Spanish and Portuguese transit visas, and as time dragged on she was about to cancel her ship reservation when at a party she charmed a French high official and he promised to intervene. In two days she had her transit papers, feeling guilty at being singled out for preference but nonetheless heading without delay for the Spanish border.
Here there were long waiting periods before a train left for Barcelona and the sight throughout Spain of ruined buildings and starving children. Madrid appeared even worse, with men clearing rubble by hand as if they were still in the Middle Ages. In Portugal she found a country “where one could really eat,” though the bounty was a brief delight. After just a single day in Lisbon she was on a ship for New York.
*
The “Catholic Writer” was born in Frankfurt, earned a doctorate after serving in World War I, and wrote about cultural matters and politics for a Catholic publication in Frankfurt. With the Nazi rise to power he left Germany for France and found work on a Paris newspaper, interpreting events taking place back in Germany. In France he kept seeing more and more German refugees but believed it important to live as closely as possible within French life and not absorb the exiles’ tendency to dream of return. In his work he moved on to the press service of the Austrian legation in Paris, but after the German annexation of Austria he was told to resign. Thereafter he joined a Paris group in an anti-Nazi Austrian information office.
Following France’s declaration of war on Germany, he found a position in the French propaganda ministry. The work allowed an exemption from military service demanded of refugees in return for asylum, but it was a disorganized venture whose shortcomings would have been enjoyably comic were it not locked in combat with Germany’s efficient propaganda machine. With Nazi forces nearing Paris he was abruptly told to report to an internment camp as part of the general movement of the French government from Paris. He languished for a time in the camp, then, when it was evacuated, he was assigned to a military unit made up mostly of Austrians and sent by train to Nîmes. From there he was posted to the small hill village of Langlade where, given that the Austrians came from a variety of professions and were generally viewed as intellectuals, their French officers had no idea what to do with t
hem.
They were given an imposing name, Compagnie des Travailleurs Intellectuels, and fantastic uniforms of dark blue linen suits, long brown capes, and brown Basque berets. As intellectuals it was assumed they would occupy themselves with books. They were divided into five sections, and every fifth day there was kitchen duty; otherwise there was nothing to do. They ate well, drank well, and were paid a soldier’s salary.
The pleasantly unreal interlude ended when retreating French troops came through with stories of how close the Wehrmacht were. With the armistice and demobilization, the Austrians who had come from now-occupied Paris were left to fend for themselves. The writer drew on a connection with a mayor in an unoccupied southern French town and was allowed to make his home there. What followed was another peculiar interlude from war in an ancient and lovely town that easily absorbed the hundreds of refugees who drifted through. Yet despite the contentment the town allowed, the refugees had an ominous feeling that even in unoccupied territory danger was growing.
In the armistice France had infamously agreed to turn over all anti-Nazi refugees wanted by Berlin. Now the Gestapo was requiring that Vichy officials provide exact lists of refugees remaining in France and where they were located. The writer had hoped he could remain in the town through the war, living inconspicuously, yet when he learned of the lists, and later learned that the Gestapo had come looking for him at his Paris home, he knew he had to abandon the country.
He went to Marseille, carrying a letter to the American consul from the mayor of the town where he had been staying. The division of the consulate handling passports and visas had been moved to a mansion outside the town on the Mediterranean coast, the beauty of the setting in vivid contrast to frightened refugees crowding the waiting area. Before he could fully tell his story to a vice consul, he was told a visa was already waiting for him. Some time ago he had written a friend in America about his situation, and the friend had turned over the letter to the American Federation of Labor, with the result that the writer was put on a list of endangered refugees granted emergency visitor visas.