The Beast of Berlin

Surprisingly enough, the Pyrenees were a focal point in Resistance activities. Here, where Basque shepherds and smugglers had made a living off lawlessness for many years, their experience in evading police and crossing the border by the safest paths into neutral Spain was invaluable. To get Airmen that had been shot down over France out of the Occupied Area to Gibraltar, and to help Jews to escape the Nazis, it was necessary to evade three groups in the dangerous crossing of the high mountains and swollen rivers of the border country: the Nazi Gestapo, the Vichy Milice and the Spanish Army. In the desolation, fear and starvation of a cruelly occupied France, when several armies are after the life of any Resistance worker and hundreds are being caught and tortured and killed all the time, who can survive? This is the story of two French orphans and how they survived not only this but much more, and of what they found out along the way.