Saved by brave helpers In the footsteps of a WWII escape through the Pyrenees
BY PETER AND MARGARET BEHR
I
am lucky to be alive, I’ve discovered. And not because of my recent difficult hike across the Pyrenees. But because of my father’s experiences and long-ago trek over those same mountains – steps I retraced this October. My father, Knut Behr, was captured during World War II in German-occupied France and put in a detention camp in 1940. The Nazis later killed his father Hans, my grandfather, in a concentration camp. The same fate would have awaited Knut – who was 26 years old at the time. Instead, a kind Quaker aide worker helped him escape from the camp. His journey was just beginning.
Still in occupied France, my father and his friends hid for a year from the Nazis and their allies near Montauban on the farm of an 80-year-old French peasant named Marguerite. She did this out of the goodness of her heart and had no previous relationship to the people whose lives she saved. Knut left her farm and then fled south to join his sister and her husband in Marseilles in 1942. In the autumn of 1942 they took a train to Banyuls-sur-Mer, at the very southern tip of France on the Mediterranean Sea, and crossed the eastern Pyrenees into Spain on foot. Their Spanish guide deserted them when they got near the French-Spanish border and, after jettisoning their suitcases, they wandered in the wild steep mountains without food or water for four or five days.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON: Peter and Towagh Behr retraced Knut Behr’s WWII escape from the Nazis this fall.
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