A couple of posts ago, we were talking about how Dutch-Paris took care of the medical needs of their fugitives in Brussels and Paris. The situation was different again in the Pyrenees. The problem with guiding men over the Pyrenees in winter in the dark was that it was a hazardous trip even without the Germans lurking around every boulder.

Most of the Engelandvaarders and aviators escaping to Spain by walking over the Pyrenees, for example, were not wearing adequate boots. For two reasons, most of them had rather flimsy city shoes that didn’t fit properly. First, wearing hiking boots on the train from Paris to Toulouse would have looked very suspicious to the guards on the trains and in the train stations. Second, by 1943 decent footwear was in very short supply in occupied Europe. Aviators, of course, were wearing excellent boots when they landed, but, again, they couldn’t wear them in crowds of civilians without arousing suspicion. So they exchanged those good boots for whatever their civilian helpers could find. In Paris, Dutch-Paris resisters had arrangements with cobblers to get decent enough shoes, but there wasn’t always enough time or leather.

The natural consequence of walking through snow at high altitude in flimsy shoes is frost bite. Plenty of evaders made it to Spain with frost bite. On occasion, however, it was so bad they couldn’t make it that far On one occasion in early February 1944, two Dutchmen escaped from an ambush of their convoy not far from the Spanish border. They managed to find a courageous French family to take them in. But one of the men had such serious frost bite on his toes that they needed to be amputated. The local gendarmes who were in the resistance took him to the local hospital for the operation and then returned him to his hiding place. There are a lot of lucky breaks in this story: the Dutchmen escaped from the ambush, they found a friendly family to shelter them, the family knew French gendarmes who would help a fugitive rather than arresting him, and they found a hospital willing to do an illegal surgery.

Even without bad weather, hiking through mountains carries a certain risk. Earlier that winter, for example, an American aviator fell and broke his hip as his convoy struggled over a pass. His passeurs had to leave him with another friendly family. They got him to a hospital, where he had a clandestine operation. Needless to say, he stayed hidden in the mountains until the area was liberated in August 1944. Before then, however, one of Dutch-Paris’s leaders visited the hospital to pay the bill.