The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  With the refugees gone, the cards were reviewed and action decided upon. Always three main questions needed answers: who, and on what grounds, should be added to the list? What papers had to be procured for the escapees? How and when would movement to the Spanish border take place? Since there was fear of a police microphone placed in the room or someone listening in a connecting room, major decisions were made in the toilet with the water taps turned on. The last job of the three men each evening was to write out a daily cable to New York with the names and references of refugees judged right for visas.

  In time the refugees streaming through the hotel caused management to complain, and the police appeared. The only surprise was that, with German and Italian officers living in the hotel and circulating in and out themselves, they had not come sooner. Fry said under questioning that he was doing nothing more than studying the refugees’ needs and giving them advice. The explanation was accepted, but it was evident that to carry on he needed a more formal operation with a name, a real office, and additional assistants. His work, he told his wife in a letter, had become “a crushing job. I have never worked so hard in my life, or such long hours. Strangely, though there are a dozen harrowing scenes every day, I love the work. The pleasure of being able to help even a few people more than makes up for the pain of having to turn others down.”

  The pain of rejecting refugees only increased. Despite sharing his work with others, ultimate decisions were Fry’s alone, and he agonized over a litany of vexing concerns. How could refugee claims be genuinely verified? What did being an intellectual really mean? Were scientists intellectuals? Were journalists? Could nothing be done for refugees who were clearly anti-Nazi and in danger but fit none of his categories for saving? Fry continually cabled New York with names to add to his list, yet finally there were always those he had to turn away.

  Despite the guilt that weighed on him, Fry was able to unwind. During nightly conferences with fellow workers in his hotel room he would remove his Brooks Brothers clothing down to Black Watch or Royal Stewart tartan boxer shorts while all others stayed fully dressed, join in generous consumption of French wine, and hold up his end of often bawdy conversations. And he found time to leave his duties behind for bicycling trips through Provence to explore churches and old ruins.

  *

  In early September 1940 Fry set up shop as the innocently named Centre Américain de Secours (CAS), the American Relief Center, in an office on a side street near the Marseille harbor. There were three rooms, two for interviews, and the other for Fry’s office. He had taken on a secretary and had new staff members with varying backgrounds and language abilities. One of them, Miriam Davenport, had another useful skill beyond speaking German and French. An American, she had gone to Paris for art study after finishing Smith College, and with the war she joined the refugee escape to the south; in Marseille she began working for Fry for what she thought a grand salary under the conditions of about twenty-seven dollars a month. When refugees came to the CAS calling themselves artists though no one had heard of them, Davenport sent them to the harbor to make a sketch. When they returned with their work she made a quick judgment of their ability. With poets carrying folders of work, her judgment was made on the spot.

  The new quarters were meant to bolster the cover that Fry was running just another relief agency, his specializing in immigration to America, and giving financial help when and where it was needed. In fact the CAS was a rescue operation and was soon up to its neck in a range of illegal activities: dealing with a Marseille crime figure in exchanging dollars for francs; forging a variety of documents from the nimble hand of a Viennese political cartoonist then calling himself Bill Freier; and smuggling refugees in immediate danger and without exit visas across the French border and into Spain. Leon Ball, who had been with the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps before the armistice and knew France well, was one of a small band making regular clandestine trips with two or three refugees to the border, seeing them across into Spain, then returning to Marseille for another trip. Cryptic cables would be sent back when a refugee finally reached Lisbon.

  When Frank Bohn’s cherished scheme for a boat from Marseille fell through, Fry became directly involved in the smuggling operation. He had intended to put three major figures from his lists, all lacking French exit visas, on the boat: Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger. The last told Fry that, the boat no longer an option, he would attempt a border crossing on foot only if Fry went with him. Fry agreed and invited Werfel, Mann, and their wives to join them.

  Fry had his own reasons for going to Spain and then on to Portugal. Five of his clients, as he called them, had been arrested in Spain; he wanted to learn why and, if possible, get them out of jail. In Lisbon he wanted freedom to send a frank report to the ERC in New York, which included bringing up the matter of his possible replacement.

  Learning at the last moment that Spain would not allow into the country refugees without national identities, Feuchtwanger—in lieu of a passport he had only an affidavit provided by the U.S. consulate under a pen name used in some of his early writings, James Wetcheek (the surname of an English translator of Feuchtwanger)—and his wife were left behind in Marseille. The traveling party, which along with the Manns and Werfels included Golo Mann, Thomas Mann’s son, and the smuggling expert Leon Ball, took a train to Cerbère on the odd chance the refugees might somehow be allowed across the French border without an exit visa. When this failed to happen, Fry, who did have the pass, went across with the luggage—twelve suitcases belonged to the Werfels—while Ball led the others across the steep overland route.

  Ball shook hands and left them when they were in sight of a Spanish entry post. Except for Golo Mann, all the traveling party had passports; he had an affidavit in lieu of passport that said he was going to visit his father, who at the time was teaching at Princeton University. A sentry gave the affidavit close inspection and said, “I am honored to make the acquaintance of the son of so great a man,” then shook hands with Golo and called for a car to bring the entire party to a station in town, where they were reunited eventually with Fry.

  In Madrid, trying to get information about his clients jailed in Spain, Fry learned at the British embassy that Germany had Panzer divisions massed on the Spanish border, though it was unclear whether they intended to enter Spain or move east into unoccupied France. In Lisbon he met with Charles R. Joy, a Unitarian minister and European head of the Unitarian Service Committee, which was based in the city but had expanded its work into France with an office in Marseille. Joy’s Lisbon operation in the Hotel Métropole on busy Rossio Square was an important base point for Fry’s clients who reached the city, and here he had a happy reunion with Franzi, who was now working with Joy. From Joy and Franzi he learned that the Werfels were settled in a plush hotel in Estoril while the Manns were more modestly housed in Lisbon.

  The city seemed changed since Fry had passed through on his way to Marseille just over a month before. On the newsstands there seemed fewer American and British publications and more from Germany; and there were more Germans in the city trying to pass as tourists. Lisbon was also darkened for him by news that the Gestapo was lifting refugees off the streets and moving them back to Spain or Germany. To date a half-dozen or so anti-Nazis had disappeared in this way, none of them so far Fry’s clients, but the possibility remained that one could be kidnapped and as a result the whole underground rescue operation exposed. Fry met with clients who had made it to Lisbon and learned that their experiences in getting through Spain were so varied it was hard to come to any general conclusions; plainly, much depended on sheer luck. Despite the five arrested in Spain, the best route from France still seemed overland through Spain to Lisbon. The many schemes floated for sea transport from Marseille had all come to nothing, and when he returned to the city Fry was all the more determined to tell his refugees to take the Lisbon route before it was too late.

  Before leaving Lisbon he had bought a couple dozen bars
of soap, a desperate need back at the CAS office. The committee’s invaluable secretary, Lena Fischmann, had buried notes throughout his luggage, using the several languages she commanded, as reminders to bring as much as he could.

  *

  After weeks of waiting in Lisbon, the Manns and Werfels finally departed for New York on the Greek ship Nea Hellas. The leave-taking, as Heinrich Mann recorded it, was tinged with a sense of loss: “The view towards Lisbon presented the harbour—the last image as Europe faded. It seemed indescribably beautiful. A lost lover is not more beautiful. Everything life had given us had come from this continent… . It was a parting of exceeding sadness.” Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife, as Fry learned when he returned to Marseille, also had been led across the frontier by Ball (with Feuchtwanger bearing several packs of American cigarettes to persuade Spanish officials to look the other way if his affidavit were questioned) and were safely in Lisbon and waiting for ship transport.

  Later came the appalling news that when Feuchtwanger reached New York (while his wife was still stuck in Lisbon) he told reporters gathered at the dock both about his escape from a French concentration camp and how he had been taken over the Pyrenees into Spain. “The author spoke repeatedly,” said the New York Times, “of unidentified American friends who seemed to turn up miraculously in various parts of France to aid him at crucial moments in his flight.” He refused to name the friends or the French city in which he had hidden after he was freed from the camp, but he did not shy away from revealing details of his crossing into Spain.

  After hiding in this unnamed southern city [the newspaper account went on], he received a false passport already provided with Spanish and Portuguese visas, and again he started out by train for the Spanish border. The way had been well prepared, and although he was questioned and his papers examined several times he passed through successfully. Mrs. Feuchtwanger had joined him, and together they were guided, again by friends, to a smuggler’s pass over the Pyrenees, and they climbed together for four hours, entering Spain. It then took them a week to get to Lisbon, where Mr. Feuchtwanger identified himself to an American consul.

  Fry’s repeated denials to French and American officials of CAS involvement in illegal operations was deeply compromised by Feuchtwanger’s reckless talk, as a follow-up round of press stories made all the more clear. “Refugee Tales Wreck Underground Railway,” read a headline in the New York Post. Time magazine reported that “charmed were newshawks by [Feuchtwanger’s] colorful details, lack of the reticence usual in such cases. Far from charmed was the Emergency Rescue Committee. They thought Author Feuchtwanger might as well be talking to the Gestapo. They wondered why he talked at all, believed that, whatever his motives, he had gravely jeopardized the Committee’s undercover rescue work in France.”

  While the notoriety surrounding Feuchtwanger’s American arrival caused Fry ongoing headaches, the writer’s movement from Marseille to Lisbon to New York was a major CAS success story. Walter Benjamin’s similar attempt was a tragic failure. The eminent German intellectual, age forty-eight but in poor health and looking much older, took the mountain route into Spain while carrying with him his latest manuscript in a heavy briefcase. He had been advised to leave the briefcase behind or have it carried from France by someone with an exit visa, but he refused to let it out of his sight. Fry’s instructions to Benjamin were that if he were turned back for any reason after crossing the Spanish border, he should go back to France and keep trying; eventually luck would be on his side. Instead Benjamin took his own life with morphine pills in a hotel in Port-Bou, where Spanish police, given his exhausted condition after the border crossing, had allowed him to rest for a night before returning to France. (While in Marseille before attempting his escape, Benjamin had met with Arthur Koestler in a bar near the harbor and told him that, in event of failure, he was carrying morphine pills. Since he had more than he needed, he offered Koestler half his supply, and Koestler accepted with gratitude.) In a letter to New York, Fry made only brief mention of Benjamin’s death, adding in a note that it was the third suicide of a figure on his rescue list.

  *

  Lisa Fittko had just recently discovered the route Walter Benjamin had taken over the Pyrenees. She and her husband Hans had been on the run across Europe since 1933; now in hiding in Marseille, they were finally in a position to leave France. They had Czech passports, transit visas for Spain and Portugal, and overseas visas for China; all they lacked were exit visas for France, which meant they would have to cross the mountains.

  While Hans remained in Marseille, Lisa had gone to Port-Vendres on the Mediterranean coast in unoccupied France near the Spanish border to scout out a path to replace the one from Cerbère that had become too dangerous. At the harbor she had spoken with dockworkers and was advised to contact the socialist mayor of the nearby fishing town of Banyuls-sur-Mer, who was believed to have sympathy for the refugees. He had gone to great lengths, including drawing a map from memory, to instruct her about a trail at higher elevation that had been used in the Spanish Civil War to evacuate Republican troops. Lisa had taken the route to guide Walter Benjamin, together with a woman and her son, leaving them when they were inside Spain and retracing the route alone. When she returned to Marseille she learned from Hans that two Americans wanted to speak with them.

  The small bistro on a narrow side street near the harbor struck Lisa as exactly the wrong place for the meeting. The neatly dressed refugee agents, Varian Fry and Frank Bohn, were conspicuously out of place. Albert Hirschman, a refugee who worked closely with Fry, had come with them, and that much was reassuring. The Fittkos knew that Hirschman was a fellow anti-Nazi German and aware of the underground work of getting Gestapo-hunted refugees into Spain.

  Still, Lisa was concerned since she and Hans were close to making their own flight to freedom and she wanted nothing to endanger that. Only when Fry started talking did she begin to relax. Hans had suspected the Americans wanted information about the new route she had discovered, and that turned out to be the case. She was happy to supply the details; she and Hans had intended that others use the route after they did. It soon became apparent, however, that Fry and Bohn had something more in mind. With hundreds of endangered figures needing to escape, the agents believed the crossing should be organized in the sense of having definite starting and ending points, guides taking the refugees along the route, and someone permanently in place and in charge.

  Fry asked, “Would you, for a few months—?” He promised that if Lisa and Hans took on what he was calling the “border project,” he would get them out of France when the work was finished.

  Hans relented to the extent of saying, “Oh, maybe for a short time we can break someone in there.” Lisa agreed but thought it best that a Frenchman take on the job. And she had reservations about the ability of the Americans to keep their promise of future help.

  At this point Hirschman joined in the conversation, speaking in German and telling Lisa and Hans that the Americans could be trusted and had money and connections. Hearing the mention of money, Fry misunderstood and asked how much the Fittkos wanted. Hans erupted in irritation. “Do you know,” he told Fry, “that assisting men of military age in illegal border crossings now rates the death penalty? And you offer us money. We would have to be insane indeed. Do you actually understand what an anti-Fascist is? Do you understand the word … convictions?”

  Fry apologized for the confusion, explaining that he only meant money would be needed for living expenses and emergencies. Once the new route was organized, he and Bohn would provide the necessary funds.

  Lisa and Hans said they needed time to consider the project. They knew putting their own plans on hold was unwise, as was trusting two men they had just met. They also knew they could not shrug off the opportunity to set up a border-crossing base by telling themselves, “Let others do it.”

  From a house in Banyuls-sur-Mer using forged French identity cards and posing as French refugees who could not return home (which q
ualified them for a small allowance from the Vichy government), Hans and Lisa Fittko operated as refugee guides on the new route over the Pyrenees from mid-October 1940 to early April 1941, taking as many as three trips a week with Fry’s and Bohn’s refugees as well as British soldiers and airmen who had been captured in France and were interned in Fort St. Jean in Marseille. Officially prisoners of war, the British were allowed to roam about town during the day. Officers had to report only for Monday roll call; with food rations issued at the time, many sold their allotment on the black market and lived in town the rest of the week on the earnings. Since the fort held more than three hundred POWs, it was relatively easy for Fry—drawing on funds supplied by the British embassy in Madrid (about which more in a later chapter)—to move two or three at a time to Banyuls. Once across the border they reported to Spanish authorities as prisoners of war and waited for British officials from Barcelona to pick them up and move them to Gibraltar.

  The Fittkos identified the refugees who came to them, ordinarily no more than three at a time, with a simple checking method. A go-between from Marseille would bring them a torn piece of colored paper with a number on it, and a refugee when he appeared would give them the other half of the torn sheet with a matching number. Among those led across the frontier was Hirschman, forced to make a last-minute dash from Marseille when police came looking for him.

  The end for the border project came when Vichy ordered all frontier areas cleared of foreigners, and the Fittkos left Banyuls. They had succeeded in getting more than a hundred people across the border. Back in the Marseille area, they were supported with funds from the CAS before new overseas visas to Cuba were obtained for them and they began their own exit from France to Lisbon. “It had been exactly one year,” Lisa recorded, “since the [Fry] committee had given us its assurance that it would help us in our own flight when the time came. We had always considered this promise to be a dim glimmer of hope; the more time that passed, the nearer it got to cutoff time, the dimmer it seemed to be.” Now, the time come, Fry was as good as his word.