Every year, hikers trek the “Chemin de la Liberte” in the Pyrenees, to commemorate the 800 or so Allied airmen and Jewish refugees who risked their lives on a 60km (40 miles) route escaping Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.
“The good escaper,” says a 1944 British military document called Tips for Escapers and Evaders, “is the man who keeps himself fit, cheerful and comfortable.”[…]
Reflect on what it was like, for example, to be shot down over Belgium when you are only 19 years old. Your parachute works – something of a surprise in itself, since you have had only the most rudimentary training – and when you land you find yourself behind enemy lines, with most of Nazi-occupied Europe between you and freedom.
You have to ask someone for help, even though you know they are risking their lives if they give it to you. And if you are lucky and they do not turn you in, there is still the long journey south to negotiate, past German checkpoints and patrols with, at the end of it all, the climb over these massive mountains.
Or think of the Jewish families who attempted the Pyrenees just one step ahead of arrest and deportation to the death camps.
I was told the story of a woman who carried her two-year-old daughter across in November snow. When the child cried in the cold their guide said she should be suffocated because the noise might alert the German patrols.
And what of the French helpers? One local supporter of the Chemin remembered his mother hiding escaping Allied airmen in her mountain bed and breakfast, where she was providing lodgings for German troops at the same time. (more…)
It’s a long while since I did a Monday music post. This one follows on from my earlier series on Catalan music, but also kicks off a new (non-musical) series I’m going to start soon about the Catalan lands that are now part of France. Barre died earlier this year. He is very little known in the English-speaking world and consequently has no English wikipedia page. Below is my loose translation of the French page.
Jordi Barre (born Georges Bar on 7 April 1920 in Argeles-sur-Mer and died on 16 February 2011 in Ponteilla) was a Catalan-speaking singer-songwriter. Taking to the stage very young, he sang in the village dances of the plain of Roussillon and then turned sailor, typographer, foreman. In the mid-1960s he met the poet Albert Esteve, who encouraged him to devote himself exclusively to the song.
In 1974 he moved to Barcelona where he met the great figures of Nova Cançó, moving close to the autonomous musical community of the end of the Franco era. Still standing away from political movements, Jordi Barre advocated through song for a recognition of culture and especially of the Catalan language and quickly became an institution for the people of Northern Catalonia.
His voice was gravelly and profound, its deep timbre through “which run cool water streams, the rocky hills, the blue of the sea and the madness of the north wind” (Jean-Michel Collet); his impressive concerts are great moments of emotion and intensity on a par with a Paco Ibanez or a Silvio Rodriguez.
So it was that in the spring of 1939 I came to Prades. I could not have imagined at the time that I would spend the next seventeen years of my life in this little town in the Pyrenees. And in spite of the sorrow in me, I found respite in my surroundings. With its winding cobbled strees and whitewashed houses with red tiled roofs – and the acacia trees that were then in bloom – Prades might have been one of the Catalan villages I had known since childhood. The countryside seemed no less familiar to me. The lovely patterns of orchards an vineyards, the wild and craggy mountains with ancient Roman fortresses and monasteries clinging to their sides – these too were a replica of parts of my homeland. Indeed, centuries before, this very region had been part of the nation of Catalonia – from Joys and Sorrows by Pablo Casals, via On An Overgrown Path
Granados: Spanish Dance (played by Pablo Casals, c.1916-20)
For Granados, a Catalan composer of the late 19th century, see here.
Max Bruch: Kol Nidrei (played by Pablo Casals, 1923)
Pablo Casals: El Cant dels Ocell
This version of his classic Catalan melody was recorded in Puerto Rico in 1956.
Pablo Casals: El Cant dels Ocell
This version is from 1958’s Windjammer.
Victoria de los Ángeles: El Cant dels Ocell
A singer from Barcelona, who died in 2005.
The Socialisme ou Barbarie Scanning Project web site is back online with a nice new design. Criticism &c. hopes to review the newly-published history, Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing by William Hastings-King, soon.
As the war in Europe transformed into a virtual stalemate, American socialists intensified their discussions about the conflict and future prospects for the international socialist movement. The International Socialist Review continued to carry news from Europe as well as analysis of the ramifications of the capitulation of the International’s leaders to nat […]
A wraith-like figure from the U.S.’s still-not-entirely forgotten anti-Communist past briefly flickered across the field of American historical perception in mid-October of this year. The revelation of the July death of David Greenglass, brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg, resulted in nothing like the full-on cultural and political debates over the guilt or […]
Covers of the International Socialist Review and Mother Earth Magazine from December 1914. War was well underway in Europe and, while isolationist sentiment and Wilsonian neutrality still predominated in the U.S., the pro-intervention movement was begining to gather its forces. The ISR, edited by Charles H. Kerr, regularly featured contributions from the ant […]
In a recent letter published in Economic and Political Weekly (September 6, 2014), Paresh Chattopadhyay reminds us of the role of the Third International in the accession to power of the National Socialists in Germany. The context of the comments excerpted below is a critical response to an article on the BJP’s recent return to […]
The marking of the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, the prelude to the liberation of France, presents an opportunity to make available two brief texts on the role of the Stalinists in the resistance. The first comes from the extremely interesting short book Internationalists in France During the Second World War by […]
British publisher Lawrence & Wishart has issued a takedown notice to the Marxists Internet Archive concerning the availability of the Marx-Engels Collected Works for which L&W holds the copyright. A notice on the MIA site indicates that the material in dispute will be removed on April 30. Unfortunately, although the texts in question were written […] […]
