The Saboteur: True Adventures Of The Gentleman Commando Who Took On The Nazis. Paul Kix

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СКАЧАТЬ hairy, and not particularly clean, but after introductions they promised they knew the routes to Spain better than anyone. Before trafficking Resistance fighters, they’d moved a lot of alcohol and cigarettes across the border. La Rochefoucauld snorted his approval.

      The French and sympathetic Spaniards had their preferred escape routes, and the British government even sanctioned one, through an offshoot of MI6, called the VIC line. But many border crossings shared a common starting point in Perpignan, in part because the city lay at the foot of the Pyrenees that divided France from Spain. A crossing through the range there, though arduous, wasn’t as demanding as in the high mountains, more than two hundred miles to the west. The problem, of course, was that the Nazis knew this too, and Spain was “honeycombed with German agents,” one official wrote. So if the Pyrenees themselves didn’t endanger lives, a résistant’s run to freedom might.

      The British pilots arrived, noticeably older than La Rochefoucauld and not speaking a word of French. Robert’s childhood with English nannies suddenly came in handy. He said hello, and soon found that they were career soldiers, a pilot and a radioman, who’d been shot down over central France during a mission, but parachuted out and escaped the German patrols. They had hiked for days to get here. La Rochefoucauld translated all this and the group decided to let the exhausted English rest. They would set out the next night.

      In the end, seven left for Spain: La Rochefoucauld, the Brits, and four guides—two advance scouts and two pacing the refugees. They took paths only the smugglers knew, guided by their intuition and a faint moon. The narrow passages and ever-steepening incline meant the men walked single file. “The hike was particularly difficult,” La Rochefoucauld later wrote. Vineyards gave way to terraced vineyards until the vegetation disappeared, the mountain rising higher before them, loose rubble and stone at their feet. As the night deepened, Robert could see little of the person in front of him. The people who scaled these mountains often misjudged distances, stubbing their toes on the boulders or twisting their ankles on uneven earth or, when the night was at its darkest, flailing their arms when they expected a jut in the mountain’s face that was nothing more than open air. This last was the most terrifying. Germans posted observation decks on the crests of certain peaks, which discouraged strongly lit torches and slowed or, conversely, sometimes quickened the pace, depending on whether and when the guides believed the Germans to be peering through their telescopes. The peaks at this part of the Pyrenees were roughly four thousand feet, and the descent was as limb- and life-threatening as the climb. The passage exhausted everyone. “Every two hours, we took a quarter of an hour’s rest,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. At dawn the group closed in on a stretch of the range that straddled the two countries, but didn’t want to risk a crossing during the day. So they hid out and waited for nightfall. When they resumed their hike, the going proved “just as hard, and increasingly dangerous,” Robert later recalled. The group nearly stumbled into view of a German post, etched into the night’s skyline. They detoured quietly around it, but then, having rejoined the route, saw another Nazi lookout, rising amid the shadows. So once more they redirected themselves, trying to be safe but also trying to take advantage of the darkness; they needed to cross into Spain before dawn. These were tense moments, moving quickly and silently and almost blindly, and all while listening for footsteps behind them. Eventually they made it to the Perthus Pass, a mountainous area right on the border. Nazi patrols were known to roam the grounds at all hours here. The group’s advance scouts went ahead and came back in the last small minutes before daylight. “The road is clear!” they said. With a rush of adrenaline and fear, everyone scurried across, into Spain.

      Robert and the airmen laughed, euphoric. They were hundreds of miles south, but so much closer to London.

      The guides said they needed to head back; smugglers out after dawn risked imprisonment. Everyone shook hands. The guides pointed to the road. “This will take you to a town,” one of them said.

      Robert and the Brits set out, with a plan to get to the village, clean up somewhere, and take a train to Madrid without raising suspicion. Once there, they would cautiously make their way to the British embassy.

      Though they had slept little and eaten sparingly, they walked at a good pace, full of life. They reached a thriving market town that morning; it was likely Figueres, the first municipality of any note across the Spanish border. They immediately discovered that it was crawling with police and customs agents. They were three men who had just climbed through the Pyrenees over two sleepless nights—“We looked more like highway robbers than peaceful citizens,” La Rochefoucauld wrote—and before they could find a hiding spot or a public washroom, two Spanish agents approached them on the street. The Spaniards were kind and one of them spoke French. Given their appearance and the toll the trek had taken on them, they felt that any story they might concoct wouldn’t sync with reality. So La Rochefoucauld tried an honest tack, to appeal to the officers’ intelligence. He said he had escaped from France with these British pilots, who had been shot down and fled to the border. The Spanish agents’ faces didn’t harden; they seemed to appreciate the honesty. But the lead officer told the men they had no choice but “to take you with us to the station.” In the days ahead, with Spanish bureaucracy in wartime Europe being what it was, La Rochefoucauld and the Brits went from one law-enforcement agency to another, and ended up at Campdevànol in Girona, twenty-five miles south of Figueres.

      Robert Jean Renaud, La Rochefoucauld’s twenty-two-year-old French-Canadian alias, was booked in the Girona prison on December 17, 1942. The Girona authorities found Renaud’s case beyond their jurisdiction and on December 23, they transferred him and, according to La Rochefoucauld, the British pilots to a place even less accommodating: the prisoner of war camp in Miranda de Ebro.

      Built in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, the concentration camp near the Ebro River in the homely flatness of northern Spain first housed Republican soldiers and political dissidents who defied Franco’s fascism. Its watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and barracks in parallel lines across 103 acres of Castilian soil were designed with the help of Paul Winzer, a Nazi member of both the SS and Gestapo, then working in Madrid. Franco’s men understood cruelty as well as any budding Nazi. They shipped the Republican prisoners to Miranda in cattle cars, starved them, humiliated them, exposed them to weather conditions and savage guards and all the diseases that thrive in overly populated spaces. The twenty-two barracks, made to hold two thousand men, held 18,406 prisoners at one point in 1938. All told, an estimated ten thousand people died there during the Spanish Civil War.

      With Franco’s victory in 1939 and the outbreak of World War II, the camp was converted into a prison СКАЧАТЬ