Dissolving Music In Mind Chapter 12

How far we had to travel, through strange countries, and how exhausted we felt.

How many times in this century of wars and revolutions has the world witnessed tragic exoduses, watching refugees flee their homeland in large numbers! Each great exodus is a long story of human suffering, and the exodus of anti-fascist Spanish refugees in early 1939 was particularly horrific. In the dead of winter, more than half a million refugees crossed the Pyrenees, men, women, and children struggling to make their way through the narrow mountain roads in the freezing cold. The roads leading out of Barcelona were filled with refugees, some in cars, trucks, and horse-drawn carriages, while tens of thousands of others walked on foot, carrying very few belongings. Many of the sick and elderly died in this sad procession. At night, in the freezing rain and snow, the refugees slept on country roads or in the fields beside the highways. On their way to the French border, they suffered from hunger and cold, and were repeatedly bombed by fascist aircraft.

Among these refugees were the best and noblest people of Spain, soldiers and poets, workers and professors, judges and peasants, who stood for freedom and refused to bow to tyranny.

You would have thought that when these suffering and brave people arrived in France, they would have been met with sympathy and respect. Alas, this was not the case. The Daladier government in France was the same group of politicians who had recently signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler. 

They had little sympathy for these refugees who were fighting against fascism, and they had only reluctantly granted political asylum to the people of the Spanish Republic because of public pressure. These border incidents were what my countrymen, who had come to Paris in terror, told me. "Our compatriots were sent to concentration camps with armed guards," they told me, "and they were treated very unfairly, as if they were enemies or criminals." I could hardly believe that such a thing could happen, but it wasn't long before I saw the concentration camps with my own eyes.