The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  The obstacle that remained was traveling through Spain to Lisbon to claim the visa. Rumors were rife that Spanish officials were cooperating with the Gestapo in stopping wanted figures, but the writer had no trouble crossing the border into Spain, and seven days on a train through the country were uneventful despite the extreme poverty and war damage he saw all about him. Wrecked ships were still in the harbor of Barcelona, and sections of many towns were nothing but rubble. Begging children were everywhere.

  When the train reached the Portuguese border he was struck that the officials who boarded it were dressed in civilian clothes rather than the military uniforms of France and Spain, wore white gloves while inspecting his bags, and spoke fluent French. When he reached Lisbon, the city lively and wondrously clean after Marseille, he joined the mass of refugees making the rounds in search of proper papers and overseas transport. While his American visa was waiting for him, arranging ship passage took three months.

  *

  Just before a chartered Swedish exchange ship carrying diplomats and correspondents was about to leave Lisbon for New York in May 1942, an American who had been interned in Germany had a dramatic change of heart. “I won’t go, I won’t go,” Louis B. Harl cried out as he bolted from the ship and through the customs shed before startled officials could stop him. A journalist with the International News Service, Harl had belatedly ended a long debate with himself about returning to America or rejoining his French wife and five children in occupied Paris, where he had been working before a transfer to Berlin. He had served in the American military during World War I and stayed in France after the war’s end.

  Faced with a parallel situation of family breakup, Eric Hawkins of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune made the opposite decision. A British citizen, Hawkins had joined the daily newspaper in 1915, when it was still under the autocratic hand of its founder, James Gordon Bennett, Jr. After inheriting the New York Herald from his father, Bennett started a Paris edition in 1887 and hired a mostly British staff. Hawkins rose through the ranks and in 1924 became the paper’s managing editor, a position he would hold—the paper now the Paris edition of the merged New York Herald and New York Tribune—for thirty-six years.

  With German troops in the suburbs of Paris in June 1940, the paper put out its final wartime edition, and what remained of the staff scattered. Hawkins and his sixteen-year-old son set off in a car for a country house he owned near Nérac, some eighty miles inland from Bordeaux, the property bought a few years before with an eye to having a refuge in the event of war. His French wife and daughter were already at the house, and another son would arrive. Reaching it on roads packed with refugees fleeing Paris and troop convoys heading there was a nightmare journey; an artificial fog spread by the French as a screen against bombing added to the misery by covering everything with soot. The sixty miles from Paris to Orléans took sixteen hours.

  The day after reaching Nérac, its population of three thousand inflated with refugees, Hawkins went to Bordeaux to survey the situation there. It was equally chaotic: brimming with confused refugees, short of food, thick with tales of the German advance. Accompanying Hawkins was his oldest son, of military age and hoping to escape France for Britain—a feat he managed, being fully bilingual, by talking his way aboard a ship leaving for Britain just hours before the armistice was announced.

  The demarcation line between occupied and unoccupied zones put Nérac forty miles inside Vichy France, leaving Hawkins free of German internment but under the rump regime’s rule. He had a British passport and wanted to get to London to continue wartime work for his Paris paper’s New York parent. Legally, however, getting out of the unoccupied zone required an exit visa, and in turn this required applying for a pass to enter the provincial spa town that was now the capital of Pétain’s government. For the time being Hawkins decided to lie low in Nérac, growing potatoes and trying to cultivate the favor of the local police, who were outwardly serving Vichy but, so Hawkins believed, sympathetic to the British.

  In the spring of 1941 he went to the American consul in Marseille, an official he had known in Paris, for help in prodding Vichy to issue a pass to the city. One was waiting with the local police when he returned to Nérac. In Vichy, Hawkins found newspaper colleagues who were still working but frustrated by heavy censorship, with one of them annoyed enough to offer Hawkins his own Vichy job so he could leave for Britain. Hawkins was tempted but realized that Germany could at any time decide to occupy France fully, in which case he was certain to be interned.

  After fourteen months of trying, Hawkins’s exit visa finally came. He dug up sacks of potatoes to help his family get through the winter, then said goodbye to his wife, son, and daughter—believing that as French citizens and in a rural area they were relatively safe—and set out for Cerbère. It was illegal to carry money out of France, but with him he had a dozen ten-pound English banknotes concealed in the pages of a roll of newspapers, and he kept the roll tightly under his arm as, after he was cleared to leave French soil, he hiked up a steep slope and then down into Port Bou in Spain.

  In a customs shed an official immediately came up to him, grabbed the roll, tossed it on a bench, and said, “No newspapers allowed in Spain.” Hawkins decided the only card he had to play was outrage. He demanded to see the border captain, showed him his press identity cards and a letter from the American consul in Marseille, and insisted the newspapers were an integral part of his profession. Silently the captain went to the bench, picked up the papers, and handed them to Hawkins.

  In Lisbon he found a clamoring backlog waiting for air transport to Britain. A friend lucky enough to have a ticket took a message to the London bureau of the Herald Tribune saying Hawkins had reached Lisbon but was stranded there. It was autumn and Hawkins found the city, as he later wrote, “gloriously attractive.” His enjoyment of Lisbon would stretch on into December, when following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and American entry into the war the British embassy told him a seat on a London flight was at last available.

  *

  When war broke out in 1939 the Hungarian-born Jewish writer Arthur Koestler was living in Paris with the British sculptor Daphne Hardy and working on Darkness at Noon, his soon-to-be-celebrated novel about the brutality of Stalin’s Russia. Already a well-traveled life had taken him from Germany to Palestine to Russia to Britain to the Spanish Civil War, where he had worked as a correspondent for a British publication and been imprisoned under order of execution by Franco’s Nationalists. After pressure from journalistic groups and the British government, he had been released in a one-for-one prisoner swap.

  During the phony war’s long stretch of calm, Koestler was taken into French custody as an enemy alien along with Germans, Austrians, and other national groups now considered under the sway of the Reich, and delivered south to Le Vernet, an internment camp at the base of the Pyrenees. Conditions were squalid for the two thousand exiles used as forced laborers; when winter came there were no stoves in Koestler’s section of the camp, and few men had blankets. Well-placed friends worked for his release or at least a hearing of his case, but there was no authority that seemed to have charge of the prisoners.

  The first break in the dismal situation came in early January 1940 when the Italian consul from Marseille arrived to interview Italian detainees. Those who pledged allegiance to the country’s fascist regime were released and sent to Italy; those who refused—the bulk of Italians in the camp—stayed put in Le Vernet. The first person to leave after the few Italians was Koestler. One afternoon he was on a work detail emptying camp latrines; that evening he was on a train to Paris. When an officer told him of his release, Koestler was so overwhelmed he shook the man’s hand—an act he would forever regret.

  Back in Paris he finished his novel in a furious bout of work, combined with Daphne Hardy in translating it from German to English, and on May 1, 1940, mailed the manuscript to a London publisher, all of which he accomplished while going through a tangled and fina
lly futile bureaucratic effort to gain a new identity card that would give him legal status in France. When it became certain he would be arrested and interned again, he and Hardy joined the flight from Paris, landing first in Limoges. “My memories of those last days of France,” Koestler wrote, “are mainly of an acoustic nature”:

  the never-ceasing polyphone symphony of motor horns, the roaring and humming of the engines, the thundering of the heavy lorries on the roadway, the asthmatic rattle of old Citroëns, the neighing of horses and the crying of exhausted children, as the chaotic stream flooded through the town on its aimless course. Without interruption, all day and all night, the mechanized divisions of disaster passed by and the people in the streets stared at them; some pityingly, some with hostile contempt, some with anxiously thoughtful eyes, wondering when their turn would come to join the Great Migration to the South.

  With the fall of France, Koestler believed there would be total German occupation or a pro-German government under Pétain, and in either case he would soon be in Gestapo hands. He and Hardy had to flee the Continent. They had no visas for the United States, and no money to reach the country in any case. As a British citizen, England was the obvious destination for Hardy, but Koestler had tried and failed to get a British visa, and failed as well to gain permission to volunteer for the British military. Even if he could somehow get across the Channel he believed he would again be interned, a not entirely unhappy fate since he would be in British hands.

  Koestler’s immediate response was to go underground by walking into a French Foreign Legion recruiting office and, as one Albert Dubert, a former taxi driver from Switzerland, signing on for a five-year tour of duty. When he learned the barracks would fall within occupied territory, he slipped away, rejoined Hardy, and the two managed to hitchhike their way to Bordeaux. At the American consulate they ran into a journalist who had helped in getting Koestler released from Le Vernet, Edgar Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News, and the three set off in his Hillman Minx, just purchased from a fleeing British official in Bordeaux, for the Spanish border, believing themselves just a step ahead of German troops.

  In Biarritz they were stopped at a military checkpoint. Hardy’s and Mowrer’s papers passed muster, but Koestler was taken to a jail for questioning. The following day he was moved to a military barracks in Bayonne; meanwhile Hardy and Mowrer had taken the car on to the south. (After Hardy left from St. Jean-de-Luz on a ship to England, Mowrer reached Lisbon after a long holdup on the international bridge between Hendaye and Irun. He rejoined his wife Lilian, and the couple—well-cared-for correspondents rather than harried refugees—switched from a hotel in Lisbon, all the more crowded and noisy with the centenary celebration, to a luxury suite with servants in a British-owned palace near Sintra. Here Mowrer wrote a long newspaper dispatch about the fall of France, and after work he and his wife walked in a grandly landscaped park, went sightseeing in the area, drove into Lisbon for dining, and once went for a swim in Estoril. Mowrer noted the water was chilly.) While he was in the Bayonne barracks, Koestler learned that the German zone in France would include the entire Atlantic coast, and that under terms of the armistice all French troops in occupied territory had to be withdrawn to Vichy France and discharged. His military group, loaded down with equipment and luggage, slogged their way to the east, though not before, in a Bayonne street, Koestler got his first close-up glimpse of the advancing German force: dark green tanks followed by motor bikes with men in black leather and black goggles. In the shuttered, sunbathed street they seemed like a thundering funeral procession.

  On the second day of marching with his unit, Koestler went off on his own by joining an older couple driving toward Lourdes. He left them before reaching the town, and for several days he wandered about in the unoccupied zone, still a Legionnaire with an assumed name and now a large walrus mustache altering his looks, before linking up in a tiny village with a detachment of French soldiers waiting to be demobilized. He spent six weeks with the group, sleeping in a barn, feeling more secure than he had in a long time. Although the French troops were free to leave, they continued to wait because of a bonus that came with demobilization and a certificate allowing them to hold jobs. The process was slow because, so it was believed, officers among them wanted to continue drawing their pay.

  In early August Koestler and a handful of other enlisted foreigners were sent to the Foreign Legion depot at Fort St. Jean in Marseille for demobilization. His military duties here were light, leaving him free in the evenings to mingle with refugees and relief workers crowded in the city. On September 3 he joined four British soldiers who had been interned in the fort on a tramp steamer bound for Oran in Vichy-controlled French North Africa. Koestler had persuaded the servicemen to take him along as a translator, and had bribed a port official to issue them false Legionaire papers that said they were unfit for duty and were to be discharged in Casablanca.

  From Oran the five traveled to Casablanca, where a British intelligence agent provided the soldiers with emergency visas for Britain. Koestler did not qualify for one, but the agent got him aboard a Portuguese fishing boat with the soliders and some fifty others for a seasick-ridden voyage to Lisbon. While the soldiers were at once flown to Britain, Koestler anxiously waited some two months for a British clearance that never came. He took in the delights of Lisbon but with mounting frustration over British inactivity and fear the Portuguese authorities might arrest and deport him, possibly to Franco’s Spain. Through cable contact with Daphne Hardy in England, he learned that she and others were laboring behind the scenes on his behalf, but as yet to no avail.

  Finally, a stroke of luck came his way. Some months earlier he had applied for a ticket on a British commercial air flight to England, and his name had remained on a list. When a ticket suddenly became available, the British consul-general in Lisbon went against the rules and allowed him to leave Portugal on an emergency permit. Upon arrival in Britain he was arrested for illegal entry and jailed for six weeks, during which Darkness at Noon was published. Released from jail just before Christmas 1940, Koestler was now a literary figure of some repute and the holder of a British national registration card—“proof,” he would write, “that I had regained my identity, and the right to exist.”

  *

  Rupert Downing’s Paris-to-Lisbon escape took place at the same time as Arthur Koestler’s and covered some of the same terrain. The book he wrote about the journey appeared in 1941, the year of Koestler’s account. But Downing’s playful title, If I Laugh: The Chronicle of My Strange Adventures in the Great Paris Exodus—June 1940, set his work decidedly apart from Koestler’s embittered Scum of the Earth. A British playwright and screenwriter, Downing gave full attention to the fear and misery of refugee flight while at the same time recording moments of ease, pleasure, and amusement.

  When war came Downing was in Paris, where he had arrived two years before to write a play and was now working on a translating job with a woman named, simply, Dee. For health reasons he had been turned down for military service and as a war correspondent. From the radio he learned that German troops were within twenty miles of Paris—and of a government decree that all civilian men who were not aged or infirm were to leave the city, presumably to avoid ending up as prisoners of war or slave laborers. Nothing was said about where they should go or how.

  Downing and Dee set off by bicycle, Dee perched on the handlebars. Soon they were able to buy a second bike, a transaction that seemed miraculous given the demand for transport of any sort, and together rode south through Bordeaux and Biarritz and St. Jean-de-Luz, avoiding main roads that might come under air attack and fearful, before the armistice terms were clarified, that the roads would fall under German control. Among the flow of refugees they also felt an odd sense of community that came from passing and then meeting up again with familiar faces. “And they all seemed,” wrote Downing, “as pleased about these chance encounters as we were. At such a time in a stricken country the sight of a face you know (however s
lightly) can bring a curious glow to the heart.”

  In the Pyrenees bicycling meant roads twisting up and down and sudden semi-tropical rainstorms. Yet we were “extremely happy in a detached sort of way,” Downing recalled. “We talked … of this very book (should I have the chance to write it), and discussed possible titles.” One bittersweet possibility they tossed about was Cycling round Europe. It took two weeks of cycling from Paris before Downing and Dee reached the Spanish frontier. On the French side of the Hendaye-Irun international bridge they found long lines of waiting people and vehicles from Rolls-Royces to taxis to horse-drawn wagons. A barrier on the French side was raised long enough to fill with people and vehicles the gap to the closed barrier on the Spanish side, then closed again until the Spanish barrier was briefly lifted to allow some passage. Here Downing’s and Dee’s British citizenship came to their aid since British and American consular officials were present at the French barrier and working on behalf of citizens without visas.

  One problem still loomed. The Spanish, bowing to German pressure, were not allowing into the country men of military age, with the age limit set at forty, and Downing’s papers said he was thirty-eight. The only way around the situation was a doctor’s certificate saying he was unfit for military service. Downing had one, but it was in Paris, so he had to seek out a French doctor to examine him, certify he had a weak heart, and hope Spain would accept the French document. Spain did, and after hours on the bridge and several rain showers, Downing and Dee finally were allowed in. Later Downing would learn that British authorities had struck a deal with Spain to get their citizen in and out of the country within forty-eight hours.