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By Root 786 0

and main roads until they reached the town of Renteria, a few miles upriver from the ports of Pasajes. In Renteria, they got on the coastal tramway like any Basque commuter, hoping not to raise suspicion for the half hour it took to get to San Sebastián. They could rest in Hernani, a village on the southern edge of San Sebastián that is famous for its cider. The owner of a cider mill sheltered them. Or they could rest in San Sebastián at the home of Bernardo Aracama, a Guipúzcoan in his early forties. In 1936, Aracama had escaped the Francoists in Guipúzcoa and gone to Guernica. By chance, he decided to leave only hours before the bombardment had taken place, and he fled to Ciboure. In 1941, he somehow managed to get his papers in order and moved back to San Sebastián, where he worked as a garage mechanic.

The journey from St.-Jean-de-Luz to San Sebastián, today twenty minutes by highway, would take at least five hours—up to sixteen hours if the rivers were flooding with rain. The final destination of the Basque part of la ligne was the British consulate in Bilbao, which would then get the pilots back to England either through Lisbon or Gibraltar.

One night a German patrol on the French side opened fire with machine guns at shadows moving in the riverbed. The Germans captured a Basque smuggler, wounded in four places, and took him to the hospital in Bayonne. Not knowing that their prisoner was Florentino Goikoetxea, they placed him under light guard, while at the Hotel Eskualduna, the regular crowd was whispering frightening scenarios. Would the Germans be able to identify Florentino? Would they interrogate him? Could they get him to talk? The Gestapo could learn every Basque name in la ligne. The operatives decided that the only solution was to free Florentino before the Germans grew suspicious, while he was still just another casually guarded Basque smuggler. To communicate with him without the Germans knowing, the oldest of Basque tricks was used: Euskera. An operative visited him in the hospital and said, “Florentino, bihar zure bila etorriko dira, arraltsaldean,” a sentence that aroused no curiosity from the guards but means: “Florentino, tomorrow afternoon, they will come to get you.”

The next day it took three people and a truck exactly two minutes to get Florentino out of the hospital. He was then taken through the back roads of Labourd until hidden at a safe house, where he remained until the Liberation. He had personally escorted 227 pilots, mostly Royal Air Force, to safety.

Many were not as lucky as Florentino Goikoetxea. Juan Manuel Larburu’s farm in Hernani, supposedly safe in neutral Spain, was a rest stop for fliers until Larburu was turned over to the Gestapo in March 1944, only months before the Liberation, and deported to Germany, where he disappeared.

The final operation of la ligne before the liberation of France carried documents, a captured list of Gestapo operatives in France and Belgium who were escaping to Spain. The Basques got the list to the British to be used in the hunt for war criminals, which the Basques assumed would take place after the Allied occupation of Spain.

IN 1944, WHEN combat shifted to French soil, the Basques fought in small units attached to Allied forces. A Basque unit landed in Normandy on D-Day, and Basques fought in the liberation of Paris, insisting that the ikurriña fly among the victorious flags when de Gaulle entered the capital. They also fought with the French resistance, especially FFI, the Forces Français à l’Intérieur, and in small guerrilla bands in the Pyrenees.

Aguirre, wanting the Basque Nationalist Party to have its own unit, formed a battalion of 200 men commanded by a veteran of the Basque Army, Kepa Ordoki, a stonemason from Irún. Ordoki had commanded a battalion in the defense of Bilbao, had been taken prisoner and sent across the border to a camp in occupied France. Escaping, he became an expert at sabotage. The Germans captured and tortured him and were about to execute him, when he escaped again.

The new unit Ordoki commanded was called