The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [87]
Basques discovered that the pass near Sare had particularly lax sentries. Sleepily, the sentries, Austrians who had no enthusiasm for watching someone else’s mountains, performed their rounds at the exact same time every day in exactly the same way. The Basques would move the refugees up the Nivelle Valley, past the St. Pée Gestapo headquarters in the large stone house across the street from Jeanine Pereuil’s pastry shop, to the mountain village of Sare, up into the forest, where horses grazed on the rich, wooded pastureland. When the refugees had no more trees for cover, and found themselves in fields like green domes next to the rocky crests, they were in Spain—Navarra.
For a time, the Basques were even helping Germans across, deserters, who went to a certain hotel to make Basque contacts. But then the Gestapo came, pretending to be deserters, and arrested the entire network of operatives, most of them never to be seen again.
Torture, execution, disappearance—the Germans made the risks clear. But to the Basques, it was an opportunity to go on fighting. To them, the current war was a continuation of the one they had already fought. The Americans had to be made to see that it was all the same fight, that Europe had to be purged of not just Hitler and Mussolini but Franco too.
The Basques, especially Aguirre, had confidence in the United States, with a mixture of an old Basque belief in Amerika and a new belief that the United States was the antidote needed to cure this ancient European sickness—the endless struggle among nations that had been both Basque and European history. It is interesting that this dedicated Basque nationalist saw assimilation, the ability to blend tribes, as America’s strength. In May 1942, from his exile in New York, Aguirre added to the American edition of his autobiography:
Hear me, American readers. Perhaps others have been quiet about this, but I am going to be brutally frank. This huge war, the most decisive and cruel in history, rests on you more than anyone. Dollars, war materials, tears, blood—in order to win, you are going to have to give more than any other people in the world . . . Everything depends on you, this new man that you are, symbolic fusion of all races and lands, all who can hope are hoping, those who will fall for the Cause, those who suffer for the Cause, and those who trust it is the holiest of Causes.
You will do it, you who encompass all the old blood in your new heart. And on that day, the Tree of Guernica—a universal symbol—will again give shade to a land of freedom.
A YOUNG Flemish Belgian Red Cross volunteer in Brussels, Andrée De Jongh, determined to resist the German occupiers, joined a small underground group with more conviction than skill. Soon the Germans had dismantled the group and arrested all its members except De Jongh and a man named Arnold Deppé.
Wanting to continue to resist, the two decided to establish a kind of underground railroad that could give shelter to Allied pilots shot down over northern Europe and return them to England. Before the war, Deppé had lived in St.-Jean-de-Luz, where he worked for the film company Gaumont. He knew a number of Basques who trafficked in contraband across the Pyrenees, and on several occasions during the Civil War, they had gotten him in and out of Spain. Deppé reasoned that he and De Jongh could get fliers to Paris and down to the Basque coast, to St.-Jean-de-Luz, where Basques could help them over the Pyrenees.
This was the beginning of “Operation Comet,” or as it was more commonly called in the Resistance, la ligne. Operations began in May 1941, and by the time France was liberated in the summer of 1944, 1,700 agents had been involved in returning to combat 700 highly trained and valuable British, Canadian, and American fliers.
St.-Jean-de-Luz, a seaside town of a few narrow streets, a medieval church and