The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  Still ahead was rough treatment by Spanish customs officials and a last-minute holdup over the bicycles Downing and Dee still had with them—something about duty or taxes, though they were never certain because everything was announced to them in Spanish. Downing apparently smiled or nodded at the right point, and they were allowed to keep the bikes. A bus transported the British citizens (with another bus for Americans) to San Sebastian, then a train carried them to Lisbon, where they were put up in the Royal British Club, ordinarily male only and still decorated with flags and ferns from the recent visit of the Duke of Kent to the Portuguese exposition. Soon thereafter they were taken to the Rose of Ireland, the vessel awaiting more refugees and with no definite date of departure. Once on board no one was allowed to leave, irksome for some but not for Downing.

  For the next four days—some of the sunniest, happiest, laziest days of my life—we lay at the quayside. Lisbon rose in tiers above us on the starboard side; to port the Tagus stretched away blue and twinkling to the far-distant shore on the other side of the river. We slept a lot and ate tremendously.

  At last under way for England, the tranquil interlude quickly vanished into seasickness, the specter of German submarines, and the reality of a Heinkel bomber swooping out of a cloud and dropping four bombs, all narrowly missing their target.

  *

  Otto Strasser was a refugee of a different stripe. An ardent German National Socialist, he had been drummed out of the party in 1930 after disagreement with Hitler, and subsequently started his own political organization, the Black Front, a leftist ex-Nazi group resisting the Führer’s continuing ascent to power. Eventually Strasser, a veteran of World War I, began a long period of European exile, which took him to Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, and Switzerland, where he was living when the war began. In November 1939, after hearing a Hitler speech on the radio, he learned that a bomb had exploded shortly after the Führer left the hall—and learned further that he and an unnamed British intelligence officer were behind the assassination attempt.

  The following day, after a German ultimatum to surrender him, the Swiss gave Strasser four hours to leave the country. He took an air flight to France, accepting the common belief that the country was safe behind the Maginot Line; when it was speedily proven otherwise, the French government put him in a large concentration camp holding mostly Jews. Through a contact in the French Foreign Office he was released in late May 1940 and, accompanied by Hans, a Dutch friend made while in captivity, took rooms in a small Paris hotel. They were hardly settled before the flight from the city began. By train and auto they made their way to Bordeaux and then Bayonne, where they were able to get tickets on a small freighter making a last sailing to Casablanca.

  Amid a wild scene of shouted bribes, bloody fights, and looted luggage as a desperate mob tried to board the ship, it at last set sail—only to turn back to Bayonne when news was radioed of the armistice and a German order that all French ships at sea return to port. Pleas to the freighter’s captain to steam for England were ignored. Back in Bayonne the refugee situation was all the more unruly, with the absence still of German troops the only straw of hope. In a taxi acquired with a thick wad of francs, Strasser and Hans quickly made for St. Jean-de-Luz.

  At the town’s small harbor they found another mob and watched in horror as a German patrol suddenly came into sight and marched in rigid order along a nearby street. Onlookers were stunned to silence, with all chance of escaping France seeming to vanish with the appearance of the troops. Strasser immediately went into hiding while Hans sought to locate transport to take them the short distance to the Spanish border, a seeming impossibility with the Germans now present. Strasser was contemplating suicide rather than ending up in Gestapo hands when Hans appeared with a Belgian chauffeur who, for another wad of cash, drove them not to the border but to Oloron-Sainte-Marie, located just inside unoccupied territory. From here they moved on to a town near Lourdes, putting more distance between themselves and the Wehrmacht.

  In Vichy France they felt reasonably safe until Strasser read in a newspaper the complete text of the armistice agreement, with its provision that the French government surrender all refugees wanted by the Reich. He now had to keep an eye out for the French police as well as the Gestapo; at the same time he and Hans concluded that if escaping France by illegal means was nearly hopeless, their only alternative was the complex and equally dangerous way of legality.

  Ten days passed before Strasser could get an interview with an official at the Portuguese consulate in Toulouse, who politely explained that an overseas visa was needed before Portugal would consider granting a transit visa. While Strasser stayed in hiding in Toulouse, Hans set out for Vichy, where North and South American countries had consulates. After several days Hans returned, without overseas visas but with the consolation of money provided by friends whom Strasser still had in high places in France.

  Strasser was again thinking of suicide when, walking the streets of Toulouse one night, he ran into the official from the Portuguese consulate. After Strasser poured out his story of frustration, though without giving his identity, the official suggested he go to the Netherlands consulate and apply for a visa to the Dutch island of Curaçao. With such a visa in hand, ship passage could be booked by telegraph and both Spanish and Portuguese transit visas issued.

  What seemed too easy to be true was not: Strasser was quickly granted a tourist visa for Curaçao, then the Spanish and Portuguese visas. All that remained was the large obstacle of a French exit visa, which Hans solved by making friends with a woman official who after some days saw to it that one was stamped in Strasser’s false passport. All went smoothly from here on, with Strasser—while Hans chose to remain in France for family reasons (Strasser had left a wife and children in Switzerland)—moving on to Cerbère for a night before, on August 1, 1940, entering Spain.

  In Portugal Strasser located his brother Paul, a Benedictine priest, who had made his own journey of escape across France and found refuge in a monastery in the Portuguese interior. After about a month of living with his brother, two well-dressed men in a large automobile appeared at the monastery and told the abbot that if he turned over Strasser to the German government they would donate a hundred thousand escudos to the monastery along with a car similar to the one they were driving. The abbot at once telephoned the police. The men made no objection since, as they informed the abbot before driving away, they were attached to the German legation in Lisbon and had diplomatic immunity.

  Knowing the Gestapo would not stop at trying to suborn the abbot, Strasser left the monastery alone and went into hiding in a remote fishing village in the north of Portugal. BBC broadcasts he could pick up about British endurance under German aerial assault encouraged him to resume his fight against Hitler, which meant leaving the shelter of the Portuguese coast and again living out in the open. An opportunity was handed to him when, at the end of September 1940, a weary and ruffled British figure drove into the village and, speaking to Strasser in French, told him the Gestapo knew where he was and Germany was preparing to seek his extradition. Strasser was wary that the visitor was himself a Gestapo agent; understanding his caution, the visitor suggested Strasser hire a taxi and follow his car at an interval of fifteen minutes to the nearest British consulate, where he would prove his identity. At the consulate in Porto, Strasser learned the British agent had been searching for him for some thirty-six hours, though why England was making a special effort to protect a prominent German was never disclosed.

  The British quietly moved Strasser to Lisbon and put him aboard the American liner Excambion, which sailed for New York on October 2. At the same time the Portuguese government issued a statement to the effect that it regretted its inability to locate one Dr. Otto Strasser, who was alleged to have entered the country. On October 10 the Excambion stopped at Bermuda, and Strasser was taken from the ship on a police launch. The British provided a temporary permit to remain on the island until he could get a visa for a Nort
h American country, and there he remained for six months before Canada and Mexico offered him admission. Strasser chose Canada because it was in the war, and once in the country he settled in for the duration and beyond into a secluded life of anti-Hitler writing and lecturing.

  *

  Like the “Catholic Writer,” Franz Schoenberner was among the anti-Nazi German intellectuals who fled the country well before the war. But rather than move to customary peacetime places of exile in Zurich or Paris, he and his wife, Ellie, went south to the French village of Roquebrune-Cap Martin, near Monte Carlo, and in 1933 they began new lives as freelance writers, he with articles for periodicals, she with popular fiction.

  It was a Spartan existence. With France now filled with German writers, German-language publications were overwhelmed with manuscripts. Fees dwindled, and even when stories and articles were sold, payment was slow. But the couple believed themselves out of harm’s way in France, and especially so in a village where they were known to officials who regularly inspected their identity cards and residence permits.

  Then came September 1939. Immediately posters went up announcing that all German and Austrian males between seventeen and fifty were to report without delay to a camp in Antibes, bringing with them blankets and food to last four days. Apparently the exiles were to be screened, and Schoenberner immediately set off, believing he had little to fear since his papers were in order, he had a public record as an anti-Nazi man of letters, and he had lived in France for seven years and volunteered for French military service. If he was too old at forty-five for front-line duty, his knowledge of French and German might be put to use in information or propaganda work.

  As it turned out, the camp was for internment rather than screening, and the refugees languished under vague orders of frequently changing commanders and an overall French policy that seemed more concerned with rounding up anti-Nazis than stopping the German army. For Schoenberner, however, internment lasted just six weeks. His editorial work in Germany and his publications caused the literary PEN organization in France to lobby for his release, with the result that one day he was called to the camp office and an officer asked, “Are you this great journalist?” When Schoenberner said yes, he was told he would be released at once. He was a bit of a poet himself, added the officer, and when the two separated they wished each other luck as fellow scribblers.

  Freedom was short-lived, as Schoenberner expected it would be. He and his wife prepared themselves, boxing up their belongings for what they believed would be another internment, this one likely lasting through a long struggle with Germany fought along the lines of the slogging trench combat of World War I. It seemed doubtful, at any event, that France could fall as easily as had Poland. When orders finally came, they were for Schoenberner to report to a camp near Aix-en-Provence, while his wife would go to the massive Gurs concentration camp for women and children located just over the Pyrenees from Spain. (A story made the rounds that when the commander of Gurs—set up originally in 1939 to hold Spanish Republicans and men of the International Brigades who had fled into France—was called from Paris and told, “We’re sending you ten thousand women to be interned,” there was no response from the other end of the line. The commander had fainted.)

  There was little or no mistreatment in Schoenberner’s camp, yet neglect and indifference made it seem more miserable than the camp in Antibes. Limited faucets and primitive latrines were available for some two thousand Germans and Austrians together with a group of discharged French Foreign Legion soldiers who had the misfortune of having been born in one of the two countries. Everyone slept on piles of straw in what had been an old brickyard. In the congested conditions, ordinary acts of washing, dressing, eating, and cueing up for latrines were so time consuming that everyone felt busy every moment.

  The camp held a large number of well-educated and important professionals, among them the rich and acclaimed anti-Nazi literary figure Lion Feuchtwanger. His novel Success, inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, was thought likely to bring him the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1930 it went instead to Lewis, who in his acceptance speech named Feuchtwanger, whom he had once met in Berlin, as among a number of European writers of merit. With news of the fast advance of motorized Nazi divisions through France trickling into Schoenberner’s camp, the detainees became frantic. If the Germans reached the camp, in one fell swoop they would have their hands not only on Feuchtwanger but a hundred or so of the most prominent German and Austrian anti-Nazis.

  Appeals to the commander to evacuate the camp were met with fuzzy statements that France would see to their safety. With neutral America as the only real hope of the anti-Nazis, cables were sent off (such freedom was possible in the loosely controlled setting, which included a thriving black market run by former Legionnaires and the French guards) to President Roosevelt and the American Red Cross, the only signature on them Lion Feuchtwanger’s because of the star-power of his name and the startling fact that he had once met the American president.

  Plans were also tossed about for overpowering the small contingent of guards and taking control of the camp, a notion abandoned when one day a company of young and well-equipped French troops came marching in. There was always the possibility of jumping the camp’s barbed-wire enclosure and running into nearby woods. But what was to be done then? Always available too was the final escape of suicide with a hidden razor blade. The hope most internees clung to was a rumor that any day the camp would be evacuated and everyone sent by train to an undisclosed destination. The likely direction would be toward the Pyrenees, or possibly through Spain to French labor camps in North Africa. Any destination was preferable to waiting for the arrival of the Wehrmacht.

  When the camp was finally abandoned in June 1940 the internees spent five days on a train that kept changing directions—and learned from newspapers picked up along the way of the final fall of France with the acceptance of the armistice. In Nîmes the train stopped, and the men were marched to a new camp in St. Nicolas, which turned out to be a large farm in the middle of a woods. There was no enclosure, and no plans had been made for the new arrivals beyond providing a truckload of army tents. A single farm well with a pump served for everyone.

  The absence of guards and barbed wire seemed an open invitation to escape before the Germans came with lists of names that must be turned over by what was now Vichy France. There was, in any case, nothing stopping the internees from walking into Nîmes or simply leaving for their homes in unoccupied territory. On the third day in St. Nicolas a small group of Senegalese troops appeared and strung a single line of barbed wire around the camp. The camp commander dismissed the wire as symbolic and said the new troops were meant only to provide order; the detainees could still move about freely, even go for swims in a stream, and would be released as soon as papers were prepared.

  As it happened, Lion Feuchtwanger’s departure came about in another fashion. Shortly before the move to St. Nicolas, two cables, addressed solely to him, had come in response to the pleas sent to Roosevelt and the Red Cross. Feuchtwanger had destroyed the cables, which apparently said something about contacting the American consulate in Marseille. Then, after a brief period in St. Nicolas, the writer was seemingly kidnapped by people associated with the consulate and driven to a safe location in Marseille. As Schoenberner interpreted the astonishing development, even before the cables arrived the literary lion’s wife and friends were working for him with the consulate—and Feuchtwanger himself, in the all-consuming isolation of his ego, had ignored the fact that the messages were of intense interest to scores of others in the camp.

  Feuchtwanger’s escape was as dispiriting as it was exhilarating since the remaining internees could hardly expect to be kidnapped one by one by the American consulate. Beyond that, most wanted to put France entirely behind and reach Spain and Portugal, and for this they needed proper documents, with the paper trail beginning with legal release from a concentration camp. So they waited, all the while continuing to ple
ad with authorities for their freedom.

  Ellie Schoenberner was suddenly released from Gurs as an essential agricultural worker and went back to Roquebrune-Cap Martin. About the same time Franz Schoenberner learned that Vichy would not release German nationals until a Nazi commission had come to his camp, a delay that might yet take weeks or months. He was now volunteering to work in the camp’s office, and one day he initiated a conversation with a captain in charge of inmate records by mentioning that he had been the anti-Nazi editor of the Munich weekly Simplicissimus. He added, “I don’t know whether this name means anything to you, monsieur—.” “But of course, monsieur, I know Simplicissimus,” replied the captain. “You should have been released long ago.” Two hours later Schoenberner was released. He at once took a taxi into Nîmes, a night train to Marseille, and the next day joined his wife at home.

  In December 1940 word came that, through the efforts of a German literary friend who had reached New York, an American visa had been recommended for Schoenberner, and he should meet with the consul in Nice. In early January of the new year a precious emergency visitor visa was granted. Later that month Ellie Schoenberner obtained an immigration visa since, with a French father, she came under the American quota for refugees from the country. Still ahead for the Schoenberners were the need for permits to leave France and pass through Spain and Portugal, and then the need of funds for passage to New York.

  It took five months of cables, letters, and waiting in lines, all the while wondering if Vichy France would yet turn them over to the Germans, to arrange the required paperwork. Even this effort would not have been enough without work on the couple’s behalf and money provided by refugee organizations and individuals in Marseille and New York. On May 25 Franz and Ellie Schoenberner left their village for Marseille to pick up their papers, and four days later they were on a train headed to the Spanish border. When they reached Lisbon the atmosphere of Europe seemed instantly altered. Franz Schoenberner wrote: