The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  In Lisbon, Fry put his name on the waiting list for a Clipper to New York, met with Charles Joy in the Unitarian Service Committee’s office, and took advantage of the city’s carnival of abundance. He felt “like a child taken for the first time to the circus, goggle-eyed,” he wrote in a letter. All about him were

  camera shops filled with cameras… . Typewriters—new typewriters—for sale at perfectly ordinary prices. Tailors’ shops displaying English cloth in their windows. The latest books from England and the United States. Yesterday’s Times, Daily Mail, and Daily Telegraph… . Time and Harper’s Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post and the New Yorker, all for sale as if it were perfectly natural to be so. A grocer’s window boasting boxes and boxes of MacVitie and Price’s Petits Buerres, Clotted creams—and Scotch Shortbread. Haig and Haig, Johnny Walker, and Dewar’s White Label. Shops where you just walk in and buy any number of packages of Player’s Navy Cut, Goldflake, or Lucky Strike cigarettes, for less than 25c a package.

  What he needed most of all was Lisbon’s plentiful food. He was seriously malnourished, and a vitamin shortage was causing memory loss. Nonetheless he spent his six weeks of waiting in Lisbon working for the refugee cause with Charles Joy and meeting with exiles waiting for transport.

  *

  Before departing Lisbon on November 1, 1941, Fry wrote in an emotional letter to Danny Bénédite that he had no wish to put Europe behind: “I prefer the blackout, and would gladly trade even an occasional bombardment for what lies in wait for me in America. But I have to go home … to the hard geometry of New York.” What awaited him in that hard geometry was a drawn-out and never wholly successful struggle to find a new role. For a time he continued his involvement with the ERC. Miriam Davenport and Hans Sahl from his Marseille committee were now working in the New York office, yet Fry found the group lacking the passion for exiles he had known at the CAS. His attacks on the State Department’s foot-dragging attitude toward refugees also had done nothing to endear him to the ERC leadership. When his Clipper flight landed in New York he had complained to reporters about the red tape “in which the American State Department enshrouds refugee procedures.” “The State Department,” he went on, “is pursuing a very stupid policy.”

  By letter and cable Fry kept in close contact with Danny Bénédite and others in France. American entry into the war sharply increased activity at the CAS, the Marseille consulate now issuing visas to refugees whose applications had long been delayed. Over the next few months a great number were able to leave France, including such luminaries as the artists Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp and the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. Fry also learned that Lisa and Hans Fittko had reached Lisbon and then taken a ship to Cuba. And he heard that an anti-Nazi journalist and editor named Berthold Jacob had reached Lisbon on a false passport, then had been kidnapped off a street after leaving the Unitarian office at the Hotel Métropole and taken to a concentration camp in Spain or Germany.

  The news about Jacob was distressing but not surprising. On his arrival in New York Fry had warned, as the press reported, of a “secret kidnapping organization” operated by the Gestapo in Portugal that was abducting anti-Nazis from the country. They posed as police and brazenly snatched their victims off streets and rushed them into fast cars. The Portuguese police were trying to preserve the country’s neutrality by stopping the Gestapo, but so far they had been unsuccessful, with the result that “at least a dozen valuable refugees have disappeared from Portugal in the past two months.”

  On June 2, 1942, French police confiscated the files and typewriters of the CAS, closed the office, and arrested the staff together with some refugees who had the misfortune to arrive that day. After hours of questioning the staff was released, but the office remained permanently sealed. Bénédite and other staff members carried on the center’s work elsewhere until, with the Allied landings in North Africa, German troops poured across the demarcation line to take control of the Mediterranean coast and occupy Marseille. Two years of silence passed before Fry learned that Bénédite had eluded capture but remained in France and joined the underground work of the French resistance.

  *

  Eventually Fry was pushed out of the ERC by its head, Frank Kingdon. “Dr. Kingdon does not like me,” Fry informed Danny Bénédite, “and will not hear of me having anything to do with the committee. That’s that.” He moved on to usually short-lived editorial positions with various magazines, including a stint with the The New Republic, and began work on a memoir of his Marseille period. Published in 1945, Surrender on Demand closed with a capsule account of what some of his former clients had done after reaching the United States. “Not all, perhaps, have justified the efforts we made for them,” Fry added. “Some have died, and, in a very real sense, some have been crippled for life by what they have been through. But, as Beamish said, we had to bring them all back. At least we had to try.”

  4

  The Last Lap

  Lisbon became the new and magic goal of the growing thousands of refugees. There, if they were lucky, they would be able to begin the last lap in their long escape.

  —Lilian Mowrer, The New Yorker, July 20, 1940

  Despite having lost support of both the State Department and the Emergency Rescue Committee by the time he left Lisbon, Varian Fry retained enough status—and had sufficient money, thanks to funds cabled by the ERC—to return to New York aboard a Pan American Airways Clipper. This set him well apart from the great mass of transients coming and going through the city, given that limited space on flights ordinarily went to the prominent and the influential. As a top-tier foreign correspondent, William L. Shirer qualified as well, but when weather conditions intervened—the constant bugbear of air travel, especially on flying boats—the familiar CBS radio voice from Berlin abandoned plans to take a Clipper and went home by ship a few months after Fry left by air.

  In the autumn of 1940 Shirer concluded that censorship was making his reporting from within Germany impossibly difficult. He had to leave, and he knew the route to take. “The only way you can get to America now from Europe,” he wrote in his diary, “is through Switzerland, unoccupied France, Spain, and Portugal to Lisbon, the one remaining port on the Continent from which you can get a boat or a plane to New York.” It was early December, his wife and young daughter already in the United States, before Shirer himself departed.

  From Berlin he flew on Lufthansa to Barcelona, Madrid, and finally Lisbon, where airport officials briefly held him since he lacked a booked ticket for further travel to New York. “Lisbon and light and freedom and sanity at last!” he exulted when he was released. He found a room in Estoril, as did his CBS boss Edward R. Murrow, who came in from London for a brief reunion. After learning that bad weather was holding up Atlantic flights, Shirer tried the shipping office of American Export Lines, finding it

  jammed with a mob of refugees—jittery, desperate, tragic victims of Hitler’s fury—begging for a place—any place—on the next ship. But as one of the company officials explained to me, there are three thousand of them in Lisbon and the boats only carry one hundred and fifty passengers and there is only one boat a week. He promised me a place on the Excambion, sailing next Friday the 13th, though it may only be a mattress in the writing room.

  The date was ominous, but Shirer was anxious to move on. Aboard ship he joined a group of other American correspondents gathered in Lisbon—among them, James Reston of the New York Times and Whitelaw Reid of the New York Herald Tribune—and as it slid down the Tagus to the ocean he was entranced by a full moon above and “all the million lights of Lisbon and more across the broad river on the hills.” Like others, though, who marveled at the wartime show of light, he questioned how long it could continue.

  Beyond Lisbon over almost all of Europe the lights were out. This little fringe on the southwest corner of the Continent kept them burning. Civilization, such as it was, had not yet been stamped out here by a Nazi boot. But next week? Next month? The month after? Would not Hitl
er’s hordes take this too and extinguish the last lights?

  *

  What William L. Shirer had noted about Lisbon’s unique position as the last Continental port with regular passenger transport to New York had come about only recently. Before the war political and other exiles could leave on scheduled liners sailing from several European ports; with the fighting, departure points rapidly shut down. In April 1940, with German troops in Scandinavia, Baltic Sea routes were closed. In June, Italy entered the war and closed its ports. After Italy attacked France, the western Mediterranean was among the combat areas blocked to all American-flag shipping because of the Neutrality Act of 1939, leaving only the ports of Ireland, Portugal, and the Atlantic coast of Spain available to American vessels.

  By June 1940 passenger shipping from Western Europe had effectively narrowed to Lisbon and British ports, with transport from England in short supply due to German U-boat activity and too few protective convoy ships. Some refugees were still able to escape from French and Spanish fishing ports; some crossed the Mediterranean in small boats and got out from Casablanca; and, as mentioned before, some sailed from Marseille to the French island of Martinique. But from mid-1940 forward there was little choice for scheduled ship transport other than Lisbon.

  Promptly after the ban on shipping in Mediterranean waters, American Export Lines moved its European headquarters from Genoa to Lisbon and announced it would have one sailing a week between New York and Lisbon using its four Ex-named vessels, each a small liner with an expanded capacity of about 185 passengers. “Portugal is neutral,” said the firm’s passenger traffic manager, “and the port is the terminus of extensive rail and air connections to France, England, Spain and many parts of Europe. We will thus employ our four passenger ships on a route that has a lot of promise.”

  Far more than merely promising, the Lisbon-New York run became golden for the shipping firm—literally so when Portugal used the liners to transport gold reserves to the United States for safekeeping for the duration of the war. News stories of ship arrivals in New York often disclosed the value of a shipment—for example, when the Excambion docked in August 1940 a report said it carried “$2,500,000 in gold, consigned by the Portuguese Government to the Federal Reserve Bank.” In October the Excalibur brought a gold shipment worth $3 million. Gold transfers aside, the Lisbon end of the route was a business bonanza for the shipping firm, with refugees besieging its office in numbers that swamped the capacity of its vessels and those of other national passenger lines.

  When tickets were acquired they were usually for overloaded ships on which passengers complained of Queen Mary rates for makeshift quarters, unsanitary conditions, and poor food. When the Portuguese liner Nyassa arrived in New York in December 1940 it was considered at full capacity with 451 passengers; on a later voyage from Lisbon in April 1941 it carried 816, the added numbers stuffed in dormitories set up in compartments usually carrying cargo. On the Mouzinho bringing Franz and Ellie Schoenberner to New York, the vessel filled with more than 800 passengers, men and women occupied separate dormitories in the hold, with long rows of double-decker beds and just enough aisle room to squeeze through. The sleeping space allowed for a single suitcase, with other luggage stored elsewhere in the hold—and with luck left undisturbed. Rates on ships like the Nyassa and the Mouzinho typically ranged from $480 in first class to $160 for third class in the cargo holds. On the Spanish vessel Villa de Madrid, first-class passage soared to $1,200, and rough bunks set up between decks went for $450. Tacked on to stated prices could be payments demanded by speculators or by shipping-line agents for tickets reserved by refugees who were unable to reach Lisbon by their sailing dates, leaving empty spaces aboard ships that could be put up for sale.

  An infamous case of refugee overcrowding and overcharging came to light in September 1941 when the small Spanish ship Navemar, converted from a freighter with quarters ordinarily for fifteen passengers, docked in Brooklyn on a voyage that had begun in Seville and gone on to Lisbon before setting sail for the United States with more than a thousand people aboard. Of that number, eleven had left the ship in Bermuda, 330 in Havana, and six passengers died, with four of them buried at sea. Health officials who inspected the ship on its American arrival expressed surprise that more had not perished, given what those aboard called “floating concentration camp” conditions. Some of the refugees later filed a lawsuit to collect damages for inadequate accommodations, food, and medical services and to recover passenger fares said to have been from $375 to $604. In turn, the Spanish owners of the Navemar brought suit against a figure identified as A. S. Montiero of Lisbon, claiming he was the vessel’s agent when the refugees purchased passage in Marseille and set out for Seville. (On its return to Europe in January 1942, the Navemar was sunk by an Axis submarine off the Portuguese coast. Rather than passengers in its hold, the freighter carried wheat destined for Switzerland.)

  *

  At the same time passenger shipping from Lisbon was booming, news reports coming from the city disclosed another grim side of the transportation business—stories of fake passports and visas for South American countries going to the highest bidders at auctions run by consuls of small nations. A Japanese liner that had recently docked in Panama was filled with Jewish refugees who each paid $2,400 for visas that proved to be useless. Other reports told of refugee ships prevented from docking anywhere and left wandering the seas, usually the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, while various countries squabbled about proper visas and immigration quotas.

  For their part, ship operators voiced complaints of a business sort. A half-year after finding promise in its Lisbon-New York run, American Export Lines’ traffic manager moaned in the press that the route had become “little more than a constant headache”:

  We have had to raise our rates to continue operation; we have had to put in extra sleeping quarters for anxious refugees who plead with us in Lisbon to provide any kind of space available. Then when they get safely here some of them write in to complain about accommodations, service and the fares.

  An unforeseen problem in handling refugees coming to the United States was that those found with unacceptable visas were held on Ellis Island, and the shipping line had to pay for their keep. One group of twenty-two refugees, said the traffic manager, had spent fifty-five days on the island while waiting for their paperwork to be cleared up. “We paid 44 cents a meal each day for those refugees on the island, and 50 cents a day each for their rooms,” he added. “And if one of our ‘guests’ require hospital treatment it costs us $2.75 a day.” And there were always cases in which the paperwork could never be straightened out.

  One man who came from Lisbon with a fraudulent Honduran passport, for which he paid 25,000 francs in France, was rejected here, and we had to keep him on Ellis Island. The government threatens to fine us $1,000 for bringing him here. And we have to take him back, with the definite prospect of entertaining him indefinitely when the Portuguese Government declines to permit him to land in Lisbon. The tug that we must hire to transport him from Ellis Island to the ship costs around $18 an hour.

  Yet another grumble from the shipping firm was that on the Lisbon end of the route a Portuguese law prohibited the use of trained American staff to handle the rush of business. With the exception of executives, all workers had to be Portuguese citizens. A further irritant was the belief, said to be common among refugees, that ticket allotments depended on bribes. Lisbon newspapers, it was pointed out, carried notices offering up to two hundred dollars to anyone who could influence steamship officials to arrange early passage.

  In March 1941, less that a year after saying it would employ four ships on the New York-Lisbon run, American Export Lines suspended advance bookings between the cities until further notice. The reason, as explained by a shipping official, was that increased demand in Lisbon had created a backlog of ticket seekers estimated to be in excess of ten thousand. With its present number of ships, the company could not expect to fulfill the need until th
e last of June at the earliest. Press stories added that a request by refugee organizations and the President’s Advisory Committee (a group formed to counsel President Roosevelt on refugee matters) to use on the route the United States Lines’ Washington, a large ship normally carrying eleven-hundred passengers, had been denied by the U.S. Maritime Commission due, among other reasons, to the danger of a ship so large in or near war zones. With tickets sales temporarily ended at American Export Lines, the only ships still offering passage between Lisbon and New York were small and irregularly scheduled Portuguese vessels that were equally booked solid for weeks ahead.

  *

  On December 10, 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, American Export Lines canceled a steamer set to leave New York for Lisbon and announced all future sailings were ended. The company also ordered its Lisbon staff to return home by any means possible. The United States’ legation in Portugal had already advised American businesses in the country to send employees home on the Excambion, the last sailing of an American ship from Lisbon. While passengers boarded, workmen were hastily painting out the Stars and Stripes on the sides—and rumors were rife that, with U-boats lurking just beyond the Tagus estuary, she was doomed nonetheless. (The Excambion made the journey unscathed. She was turned over to the U.S. Navy as a troop transport, renamed the John Penn, and eventually sunk by a Japanese torpedo plane off Guadalcanal.) For the duration of the war, Portuguese, Spanish, and a few other national liners continued making the Atlantic crossing, this despite the danger of coming under German attack, either by accident or intention. A chilling case in point was the Zamzam, sunk in the South Atlantic by a German surface raider on April 17, 1941.

  The aged vessel, sailing under the flag of neutral Egypt, had left New York for Alexandria, and after taking on cargo and passengers in Baltimore and refueling in Brazil, was on its way to South Africa when the attack came. In the first news stories in what became an extended saga of coverage, it was feared that more than 300 people—129 crew members, including the British captain and chief engineer, and 202 passengers, among them a large number of mostly American missionaries on their way to Africa—were lost at sea. Then it was learned that after the ship came under fire it had managed to indicate it was unarmed and neutral, with the result that all aboard were removed to the raider before the liner was sunk.