The son of an Engelandvaarder who crossed the Pyrenees with Dutch-Paris sent me a link to a documentary he participated in last year. Unfortunately the documentary, Chased and Saved, is not available online, but if it comes near you I highly recommend it. It’s part of an historical project sponsored by the provincial authority in Lleida, Spain, that remembers the refugees who crossed the mountains into Spain during WWII.

Dutch-Paris took only young men in good health, and possibly one or two women in excellent health and with a dire need, across the mountains into Spain. But Dutch-Paris was an unusually large and well organized network. They had the luxury of being able to take older people, women, and children to safety along the physically less demanding route to Switzerland and, when necessary, arranging for certain Engelandvaarders to traverse the Pyrenees in a train (albeit at staggering cost).

This documentary reminds us that tens of thousands of fugitives crossed the Pyrenees into Spain during the Second World War. Many of them were young men wanting to join the Allies or Allied soldiers and aviators wanting to get back to their bases. But many of them were civilians, mostly Jews, who were not likely candidates for climbing mountains in the dark wearing city clothes. But they did it because their choice was that or capture by the Nazis. Some of them were small children, including a woman in the documentary who took the path it films when she was five years old.

The others in the documentary are the children or nieces and nephews of other wartime refugees who trekked into Spain. They stop along the way to talk about what the experience was like for their relatives and what it means to them as Jews today. My friend, the son of the Engelandvaarder, says something important in one of those conversations that’s worth pausing to consider.
The conversation comes around to the observation that remembering the WWII border crossers is important because the same sort of thing is happening today. Someone comments that these things are cyclical. Our Engelandvaarder’s son says that this is true, but no one is obliged to accept the weight of history.

No one is obliged to accept the weight of history. It sounds banal but is actually explosive. Certainly none of the resisters in Dutch-Paris accepted the weight of history as it showed up in their day as the Third Reich or the Etat Français or internment camps or deportation trains. If they and other resisters like them had accepted it, who knows how or when the war might have ended.