Clandestine guiding to the Franco-Spanish border during the Holocaust: the work, accomplices and solidarity-focused resistance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Guides who led Jews clandestinely across national borders played an important role in their rescue during the Holocaust. Yet we know little about their work, from their perspective. This is the subject explored in this article, which focuses on five guides, also known as passeurs, who helped Jews and non-Jews escape from France to Spain across the Pyrenees between 1940 and 1943. They were antifascist activists, farmers and a Christian brother. The sources analysed include oral history interviews, diaries, memoirs, accounts and letters by and about the guides; the letters and accounts of Jewish refugees; official correspondence and reports by French government officials near the border; and records of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Passeurs’ work consisted of both guiding and preparatory work, which was extensive. The guides had one or more accomplices, their circle of helpers constituting a resistance cell. Resistance like the passeurs’, in which individuals engage so as to help others, may be called ‘solidarity-focused resistance.’ It is also a form of transnational resistance, a concept that should be broadened to include assisting the persecuted in their efforts to cross international borders.