The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  As soon as a visa for Spain came through, Israel left for Madrid, where he found, as expected, Jewish refugees held in wretched camps. He learned about the work of David Blickenstaff on behalf of Jewish internees, using funds supplied by the Joint and other Lisbon relief groups, and he set up his operation in Blickenstaff’s office. He met with British ambassador Samuel Hoare, whose prime concern was getting Allied prisoners of war out of the camps but voiced sympathy with the plight of all interned refugees; and he tried to make contact with those able to guide groups of Jewish children out of France across the Pyrenees. Most of all, he knew, he needed more immigration certificates at his disposal, and in cables he bombarded the Jewish Agency in London with requests. Only a few more came his way.

  During a reception arranged by the British embassy in Madrid in May, Israel was introduced to Leslie Howard as someone who had been making tours of refugee camps in Spain and had ideas about resettlement in Palestine. As the two sat together during a luncheon, Israel told the famed actor: “This persecution has left many of the older people quite aimless and broken. My hopes are in the young people, but we must get them to Palestine, to Eretz—Israel. It’s wrong that they should fester in camps and domiciles forcées here, as if they were still in the hands of Hitler.” To which Howard responded: “But you are the Scarlet Pimpernel. I’ve only played the part.”

  Back in Lisbon on May 25, Israel was again besieged by the great number of refugees wanting his certificates. He could tell them only that he would press for more when back in Britain. With a short time left on his leave of absence, he met with the Joint’s Joseph Schwartz—whom he told in confidence that, in his view, the only way of getting large numbers of young Jews out of France was over the Pyrenees—and with the USC’s Robert Dexter. He spent his last evening in the city, a typically long, sun-warmed, twilight period of the Portuguese spring, by seeing an acquaintance to her home and asking her to return a Baedeker he had borrowed from a bookshop in the Avenida da Liberdade run by a man he had known in Berlin in the 1930s. The next morning he again met Leslie Howard, the actor now distracted by a crowd of well-wishers come to the Lisbon airport to see him off on the Ibis.

  Some five months after Israel’s death, a colleague from England, Fritz Lichtenstein, came to Lisbon as the Jewish Agency representative. Using lists of names compiled by Israel, he began the work of filling the first of what eventually would be four refugee ships destined for Palestine. With the North African campaign over, the Nyassa crossed the Mediterranean without difficulty and reached Haifa in January 1944. Lichtenstein did not pursue Israel’s grand hope of illegally moving Jewish children from France. Later that year, however, a rescue effort was mounted with the help of Schwartz and the Joint, and a few hundred children were brought across the mountains, though at a cost of several lives lost due to the grueling physical demands of the journey.

  *

  A relief endeavor run from Casa Verde, a small villa in Estoril, was an entirely amateur effort but no less important to those on the receiving end of its mixed bag of largesse. When Louise Campbell’s husband, a British officer, was captured in France in 1940, he wrote her from a prison camp that he needed woolen underwear to endure the German winter. In her reply, Louise Campbell, an American, asked what else he needed, and wondered in a postscript if she could get something for his fellow prisoners. She got back requests for pipes, earphones, books, phonograph records, a mouthpiece for a clarinet, all of which she found and sent on.

  Word spread rapidly among British prisoners that a certain woman back in England would supply special needs if you wrote her. Cards and letters began pouring in, and soon Campbell found herself with a mail-order operation so large she decided to move it to Lisbon, where she had never been before, to improve her lines of communication. After leasing Casa Verde, she set to work with a band of helpers. The requests kept coming, and in time the Portuguese Red Cross gave Campbell use of an old Lisbon palace. From there in January 1941 she used a letter to the London Times to respond to hundreds of messages from relatives of prisoners, who were likewise seeking help for the captives. “As I am unable to deal with these letters at once,” she wrote, “may they consider this as an answer, and be reassured that I am trying to carry out their wishes to the best of my ability.”

  At war’s end Louise Campbell was honored for her work at a party in London’s Claridge’s Hotel attended by the American and Portuguese ambassadors. She was presented with a piece of Georgian silver, a check for a thousand pounds sent in her name to a new plastic surgery wing of the Queen Victoria Hospital, and a bound book with the signatures of former prisoners who had subscribed to a fund for the gifts.

  *

  The Red Cross likewise moved to Lisbon in the sense of making the city its central storage and distribution point for a large-scale program of food packages sent to prisoners of war. Over the war’s course the British Red Cross sent about 20 million packets to European camps, each weighing an average of 11 pounds, with the food meant to arrive three times within every two-week period following an initial package to a newly captured serviceman. The American Red Cross sent 27 million packets to Europe, and like British shipments they were of uniform size and weight and meant to supplement often minimal prison fare. Along with the food parcels, both national Red Cross groups, and those of British Commonwealth countries, sent parcels with clothing, toiletries, and medical supplies.

  After packages were put together at vast sorting centers in England, the complex logistics of transportation loomed. Usually the packages were sent by post to ports and loaded on ordinary merchant vessels bound for Lisbon. After they reached the city the packages were transferred to rented warehouses, then to trains for shipment across Portugal, Spain, and France to Switzerland.

  With railway transport slow and unreliable, the Red Cross eventually switched to chartered ships—owned and manned by neutral countries, brightly lit, and bearing Red Cross markings but liable to be stopped and searched at any time—that moved along the Portuguese coast, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and arrived at the French ports of Marseille or Toulon for train delivery to Geneva. From Swiss warehouses the parcels were finally shipped to railway sidings near the camps, where they were often unloaded by prisoners. After Germany occupied all of France in late 1942, the Marseille-Toulon route was briefly terminated, then resumed by the British Red Cross virtually to the end of the war. In December 1942 the American Red Cross began bypassing Lisbon by sending parcels directly from Philadelphia to Europe, using Swiss-flagged ships on safe-passage routes.

  The food packets were so critical, with ex-prisoners often testifying they were what saved them from starvation, that any interruption in delivery was cause for alarm. When in September 1944 CBS radio recorded a Swiss broadcast about a temporary delay in shipments to American prisoners in Germany, the Red Cross in Washington put out a nationwide statement maintaining that war packages were still reaching Europe, and provided full shipping details. Two ships carrying packets were said to have just reached Sweden, and the exchange ship Gripsholm would arrive at the same port with additional supplies. Aboard the three ships were a total of one and a half million food packages, all destined for prison camps in Germany.

  9

  Gloriously Neutral

  Portugal is gloriously neutral; that is its gift from the gods and to Europe; a gift never, one hopes, to be snatched away.

  —Rose Macaulay, The Spectator, July 9, 1943

  In the same period Red Cross food parcels were flowing through Portugal, food shortages were cropping up within the country. “It would be a mistake to suppose that Portugal to-day is a country almost without a trouble in the world, a country flowing with milk and honey in the midst of devastated Europe,” said the London Times on September 8, 1943, marking the war’s fifth year. Meat had become hard to find, and there were days when butter and potatoes were unavailable. Limited fuel supplies led to unequal distribution of food that did exist in ample quantities.

  Added
to food scarcities in some areas, the financial windfall to Portugal from the deluge of refugees and wartime trade with both the Allies and the Axis had sparked inflation, and this coupled with higher charges for imports and a limited number of ships to carry them brought a sharp rise in the Portuguese cost of living. Traditional fish stocks of dried cod and sardines more than doubled in price over the war. Food shortages and high prices encouraged smuggling, black markets, and hoarding, abuses the government tried to combat through a constant round of prosecutions, with limited success. Portugal remained an alluring haven in the midst of war, yet for its ordinary citizens it was no longer the land of ease and unbounded plenty that greeted awestruck new arrivals. “We are not directly engaged in the struggle,” Salazar told his country in a speech in the early autumn of 1943, “but we are in the war like the rest.”

  For the transients streaming in and out, that Portugal was not in the struggle was the central wartime fact about the country. Its external neutrality eclipsed concern with food supplies, prices, or all other internal matters. Portuguese neutrality might be imagined as a glorious gift, as Rose Macaulay lightly characterized it, yet in actuality it was held in place by a complex diplomatic dance that was hedged with uncertainty for much of the war period. And uncertain not only because at any moment the Allies or Axis might choose to upend it. Like a character in Arthur Koestler’s 1943 novel Arrival and Departure, Portugal in effect went through the war as a neutral while openly displaying a toy British flag in its buttonhole.

  In Koestler’s story, in which Portugal is thinly masked as a country named Neutralia, a university student and radical from Central Europe takes the Lisbon route as a stowaway in a ship’s hold. With the vessel anchored in the dark offshore, he leaps from the deck and swims to a small bay with a cluster of bathing cabins on the beach. When he wades ashore he races to the nearest cabin, instinctively hiding though no one is present to notice him. The time is three o’clock in the morning in the spring of 1941, and the young refugee, Peter Slavek, is twenty-two years old.

  In the cabin Slavek changes clothes from an oilskin bundle brought with him from the ship, smokes a cigarette, and in the warmth of the darkness falls asleep. He awakens to bright sunshine, and when he leaves the cabin sees a toy flag that had once topped a child’s sandcastle. In the country he has come from, “the possession of this flag meant high treason and death; here children were allowed to stick it into their castles.” When he leaves the bay he inserts the flag of Britain—the country never named but easily identified—into his buttonhole, knowing there is no danger in doing so since “this was Neutralia, the land without blackout.”

  He walks a long distance into an unnamed city that is manifestly Lisbon with its white buildings, clanking trolleys, cafés with tables spilling across sidewalks, and bright awnings shading the hard light of the sun. He has money to last a fortnight, which will be long enough to conduct the business that has brought him to Neutralia; after that he will be “far from here, across the water, in a tidy uniform with a tilted cap.” His business, in other words, is to present himself at the British consulate, obtain a visa, and enlist in the country’s military.

  In a café he has a huge breakfast and talks with other refugees who have been waiting months for overseas visas. Easy conversations, he realizes, are normal in Neutralia since “the exiles here were tied together by their common fate—travellers on the same caravan path huddled around the oasis well.” The exiles follow well-worn passageways in the city and consequently keep running into one another; many had already crossed paths on their flight to Neutralia.

  This shrunken world sparks a plot in which Slavek falls in love with Odette, a young girl he first sees in the café, and comes to stay in the apartment of Sonia Bolgar, a psychotherapist he had known in his university days who is practicing in Lisbon while awaiting an American visa. The story leaps ahead, weeks passing during which Slavek keeps calling at the British consulate in hopes of a visa. He has a short, torrid affair with Odette, and on the day she leaves Neutralia, her American visa come through, he learns that his to Britain has been granted.

  When he suffers a strange nervous breakdown that causes paralysis in a leg, Sonia becomes his analyst and talks him through episodes in childhood and the experiences of Nazi brutality that have darkened his life. Health at length regained, he is granted an American visa (he has relatives in the country who offer him a job) and a place on a departing ship. He has boarded the ship, about to leave for assured safety, when he realizes he cannot ignore his earlier plan to join the war. “I want to go back,” he tells himself. “I have never been on the winning side.”

  At the last moment he leaves the ship and goes to the British consulate to see if his visa is still valid. In a final scene the story comes full circle, shifting to Britain as Slavek parachutes from a British plane, just as in the opening scene he had leaped from a ship. Earlier in the consulate, seeing about his visa, he had outlined for an official what he might do for the British cause: “I have been told that people who know local conditions [in occupied Europe] are trained for special tasks. Some are even dropped by parachutes… .”

  *

  Peter Slavek’s sense of duty in wartime trumps his desire for freedom from war. Failure to join the cause on Britain’s side would burden him with guilt; in an America still outside the war, his throat would “be dry and thick with loneliness.” On the other hand, choosing Britain and the comradeship of war may be a suicidal gesture. While he wrestles with his decision on the ship about to leave for America, Sonia Bolgar’s imagined voice cautions him, “He who offers himself for the sacrifice will be accepted. So better lie back on your bunk… .”

  In Slavek’s rejection of Sonia’s advice, Arrival and Departure is finally a statement of personal nobility. At the same time, in naming a refugee’s country of arrival Neutralia the novel draws attention to the larger public matter of Portugal’s wartime neutrality. Within the story the country’s sole importance for refugees is its freedom from the war, hence its fictional name. The Portuguese people exist only as ghostly background figures. To the waiting exiles they seem like “silent members of the chorus in an operetta … performed in the midst of the Apocalypse.” Or as a character more simply remarks about the “natives”: “They are nice and polite, but they live in another world.” Britain’s glory is its engagement of the evil enemy, unnamed but obvious. In a shop window Slavek sees its symbol: “There it spread, with its scarlet foundation, the thick black ring, and in the middle of it the cross with its broken limbs turned into a spider.” When refugees hear rumors that Neutralia may be invaded, they have no doubt who the invader will be.

  In casting his lot with Britain over America, Slavek aligns himself with what he understands is the sole force standing in the way of the Third Reich adding Neutralia to its string of victims. Private fiction here mirrors international fact since Europe’s oldest diplomatic pact joined Portugal and Britain in a bond of mutual support. First signed in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1373 and reinforced with a second treaty in 1386, the Anglo-Portuguese alliance required that—in the agreement’s language—if one member “need the support or succour of the other, and duly apply to the other Party for such assistance, then the Party so applied to shall be obliged to afford such help or succour to the requiring Party, in as far as is compatible with the dangers threatening himself, his Kingdoms, Lands, Dominions, and Subjects.” Over the centuries there were periods of friction and varying interpretations of what had been assented to. But the alliance held. It formed the centerpiece of Portugal’s foreign policy, led to major British investment in Portuguese finance and infrastructure, and opened the way to a long and rewarding trading partnership.

  For Portugal, the far smaller and weaker party, the importance of maintaining the tie with Britain could not be overstated. “If for London the alliance was a diplomatic instrument whose obligations were only taken seriously when Britain’s vital interests were at stake,” wrote a Portuguese h
istorian, “for Lisbon it was nothing short of essential for Portugal’s survival as a state.” For Salazar’s regime, as for every Portuguese government in the first half of the twentieth century, the alliance was the fundamental guarantee of the country’s mainland and colonial sovereignty. Consequently Portugal’s neutral status in World War II was from the beginning yoked to an ancient union with one of the warring powers.

  *

  Portugal was in the same divided position at the start of World War I. When London invoked the alliance by requesting confiscation of German merchant ships that had sought refuge in Portuguese ports, Lisbon complied, and in response Germany declared war in March 1916. At British invitation, Portugal subsequently joined the Allied cause and dispatched an expeditionary force of more than fifty thousand to the Western Front while also placing troops in its African possessions to defend against German colonial expansion. War involvement cost the country some seven thousand dead, thirteen thousand wounded, and scores of lost ships.

  Immediately after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939—bringing from Salazar an indirect rebuke in the form of praise of “the heroic sacrifice of Poland”—Portugal both announced its neutrality and acknowledged “the duties of our alliance with England.” The government’s statement read in part:

  Fortunately, the duties of our alliance with England—which we do not fail to confirm in such a grave moment—do not force us to abandon our situation of neutrality in this emergency. The government will consider it as the highest service and the greatest gift of Providence to be able to maintain the Portuguese people in peace and it hopes that neither the country’s interests nor its obligations and dignity will impose on itself any deviation in this determination.