Everyone passed without fear
Jean Rolin
P.O.L, 157 p., 18 €.
It was, for the resistance fighters, the allies, the Jews, the only way out. What remains of the passage from France to Spain and Andorra? Jean Rolin leads the investigation in his own way, made up of advances and detours, dead ends and discoveries. There is a commemorative march in Saint-Girons, in Ariège, every year. But are we sure of the route? No doubt there were as many paths as there were smugglers.
Drawing on testimonies from the past, the author reconstructs the paths of some of these sometimes unlucky “escapes from France”. Reaching Spain after twenty to thirty hours of continuous walking is obviously not easy.
Philippe Raichlen will later tell the story of his successful escape. He was 23 years old in 1943 and went back to war as a paratrooper. Also in 1943, Bud Owens survived the crash of his bomber in Normandy but died of exhaustion crossing the Pyrenees. The forced march is an ordeal. In 1940, hadn’t the German intellectual Walter Benjamin initiated a path of exile? But he will not go through with it, killing himself, exhausted, for fear of being captured.
in the footsteps of smugglers
We can follow Jean Rolin in his story: he searches the archives, questions the last witnesses and looks for traces in the mountain: “To think we were taking the same path as them, without the threat of imminent death, didn’t make the climb any easier. »
Among other fates, it remained to find the clues to understand how Jacques Grumbach, brother of the future filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, died. Far from being anecdotal, this Spanish door to freedom remains dramatically steeped in history.
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