Escape Through the Pyrenees (Jewish lives)

Lisa Fittko had no room for self-pity. Their campaigns against terror were pure struggles; [her] accounts, even allowing for the retouching of memory, are pure too." -Smithsonian "The author takes delight in describing the people she met--the 70-year-old female hobo, for example . . . who read Baudelaire and sang the "Marseillaise" at the top of her voice. . . . It is in portraits like this that Escape Through the Pyrenees, well translated by David Koblick, transcends the documentary forumla and captures the poetry of human character." -New York Times Book Review

Though it reads like a suspense novel, this memoir is Lisa Fittko's extraordinary story of life as an "enemy alien" in France before and after the German invasion of 1940. Escaping a French prison, Fittko and her husband found their way to the Pyrenees and, while awaiting permission to enter Spain, helped hundreds of refugees, including Walter Benjamin, escape deportation, torture, and death at the hands of the Nazis.