birds of prey circling high above.
Through this epic landscape around a thousand Jews – the young and the old, the strong and the weak – headed for the Col de Cerise or the Col de Fenestre – the two routes established just days previously by the young Zionists. It was an exodus. Many carried in small fibre suitcases all that they owned. Most took two days to make the journey, some more. The first day on either route was relatively easy, along mule tracks. That night, the refugees slept under the stars. The second, where the trail – such as it was – ran through a boulder field, was much tougher. There were no yellow waymarks to point to the next mountain restaurant: rather a switchback climb with the rocks shifting underfoot and snow-clad peaks staring down. The two passes themselves were high, windy, bleak places, windows from one valley – one world – to the next. On the third day the exiles descended into the Gesso valley and what they believed might be sanctuary.
As the ill-shod, poorly clothed parties – in ones and twos and groups of half a dozen or so – straggled down the rugged paths clutching their suitcases, they were watched with gathering interest by the Italian locals. Men, women and children loitered on their doorsteps and hung around on street corners, observing the refugees with considerable curiosity. One of the footsore, William Blye, ‘thought it was because the Jews were speaking languages other than Italian and wearing city clothes … Only later was he told that the peasants were looking for horns. They thought that Jews had horns on their heads, like Moses and other Old Testament characters they had seen in church.’ 7 Full of hope and fear, the exhausted refugees wound their way down the paths leading to the communities of Entraque, Valdieri and BorgoSan Dalmazzo in the province of Cuneo. These were medieval villages hewn out of rock, where the peasant community gleaned a subsistence living out of the thin Alpine soil.
*
The haven the Jews had hoped for they did not find. As in Nice, Rommel’s forces had got there before the persecuted could escape. On 12 September 1943 the a battalion from the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler had occupied the provincial capital of Cuneo, within a few miles of all the refugees fleeing from Saint-Martin. On 18 September the battalion commander, SS-Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, ordered the Jews in the area to assemble at the barracks close to the railway station in Borgo San Dalmazzo. Two months later, of the 349 who had gathered or who were subsequently captured, 328 were dispatched to Drancy. On 7 December 1943 they were entrained to Auschwitz. Twelve survived.
Most of those who remained in Saint-Martin-Vésubie were captured by SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner’s police, who arrived in the mountain settlement on 21 September 1943. They were deported and gassed. A few remained in hiding, helped by the locals. Only when Allied soldiers reached Saint- Martin-Vésubie from the beachheads of the south of France landings on 2 September 1944 did they know they would survive.
3
Further south in Italy, Operation Achse had similarly momentous consequences for a large group of Allied prisoners of war.
On the day of the armistice between the Allies and Italy, there were around 75,000 British and Dominion POWs in Italian camps. They were mostly infantrymen who had surrendered at Tobruk in 1941, scattered in some fifty-two camps all over the Italian peninsula. One of the terms of the armistice between the Allies and the new Badoglio administration was that the prisoners should be transferred to the care of the Allies. Churchill had demanded ‘the immediate liberation of all British POWs in Italian hands, and the prevention, which can in the first instanceonly be by the Italians, of their being transported north towards Germany’. 8 The chaos that accompanied the armistice and its announcement, and the rapidity of Rommel’s advance
Through this epic landscape around a thousand Jews – the young and the old, the strong and the weak – headed for the Col de Cerise or the Col de Fenestre – the two routes established just days previously by the young Zionists. It was an exodus. Many carried in small fibre suitcases all that they owned. Most took two days to make the journey, some more. The first day on either route was relatively easy, along mule tracks. That night, the refugees slept under the stars. The second, where the trail – such as it was – ran through a boulder field, was much tougher. There were no yellow waymarks to point to the next mountain restaurant: rather a switchback climb with the rocks shifting underfoot and snow-clad peaks staring down. The two passes themselves were high, windy, bleak places, windows from one valley – one world – to the next. On the third day the exiles descended into the Gesso valley and what they believed might be sanctuary.
As the ill-shod, poorly clothed parties – in ones and twos and groups of half a dozen or so – straggled down the rugged paths clutching their suitcases, they were watched with gathering interest by the Italian locals. Men, women and children loitered on their doorsteps and hung around on street corners, observing the refugees with considerable curiosity. One of the footsore, William Blye, ‘thought it was because the Jews were speaking languages other than Italian and wearing city clothes … Only later was he told that the peasants were looking for horns. They thought that Jews had horns on their heads, like Moses and other Old Testament characters they had seen in church.’ 7 Full of hope and fear, the exhausted refugees wound their way down the paths leading to the communities of Entraque, Valdieri and BorgoSan Dalmazzo in the province of Cuneo. These were medieval villages hewn out of rock, where the peasant community gleaned a subsistence living out of the thin Alpine soil.
*
The haven the Jews had hoped for they did not find. As in Nice, Rommel’s forces had got there before the persecuted could escape. On 12 September 1943 the a battalion from the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler had occupied the provincial capital of Cuneo, within a few miles of all the refugees fleeing from Saint-Martin. On 18 September the battalion commander, SS-Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, ordered the Jews in the area to assemble at the barracks close to the railway station in Borgo San Dalmazzo. Two months later, of the 349 who had gathered or who were subsequently captured, 328 were dispatched to Drancy. On 7 December 1943 they were entrained to Auschwitz. Twelve survived.
Most of those who remained in Saint-Martin-Vésubie were captured by SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner’s police, who arrived in the mountain settlement on 21 September 1943. They were deported and gassed. A few remained in hiding, helped by the locals. Only when Allied soldiers reached Saint- Martin-Vésubie from the beachheads of the south of France landings on 2 September 1944 did they know they would survive.
3
Further south in Italy, Operation Achse had similarly momentous consequences for a large group of Allied prisoners of war.
On the day of the armistice between the Allies and Italy, there were around 75,000 British and Dominion POWs in Italian camps. They were mostly infantrymen who had surrendered at Tobruk in 1941, scattered in some fifty-two camps all over the Italian peninsula. One of the terms of the armistice between the Allies and the new Badoglio administration was that the prisoners should be transferred to the care of the Allies. Churchill had demanded ‘the immediate liberation of all British POWs in Italian hands, and the prevention, which can in the first instanceonly be by the Italians, of their being transported north towards Germany’. 8 The chaos that accompanied the armistice and its announcement, and the rapidity of Rommel’s advance
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