A House at the End of the Track by Michelle Lawson

Author:Michelle Lawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

In The Steps Of Piston And His “Trout”

While looking into the events described by Iris, I’d had little inkling that my own village had a wartime history linked to a well-known member of the resistance, and, moreover, that I had unknowingly been walking a route he’d used to smuggle escapees over the Pyrenees to Spain. The Ariège Pyrenees had a number of routes that had been operational for wartime escapees to Spain as well as earlier evaders fleeing Spain in the 1930s. The most well-known of these routes had opened as an official hiking trail in 1994. Le chemin de la liberté had an annual four-day commemorative hike, that until recently had been organised by the late Scott Goodall, a British man who’d settled in the area.18 The Freedom Route had been featured on a BBC radio programme and described in Edward Stourton’s painstakingly researched book on the wartime activities in the Ariège. More recently, the route had been featured within Channel 4’s series WWII’s Great Escapes: The Freedom Trails.

There was even a dedicated museum to the route, which I visited at the former site of the railway station in Saint-Girons. With just a receptionist watching television, I had the place to myself and wandered around the boards, discovering that some 33,000 French and 6,000 Allied service personnel had escaped over the Pyrenees, with 782 of the former said to have used Ariège routes. From 1943 anyone attempting to flee to Spain would have had to pass under cover of night through a Reservation Zone created by the Germans. This zone, some 20km deep, ran parallel with the frontier just north of the Pyrenean chain, strung out along the German posts within the settlements of Sentein, Seix, Oust, Aulus les Bains, Auzat, Tarascon and Vicdessos. Freedom of movement was limited to those granted a circulation permit. Many of the isolated barns that were still dotted around had sheltered would-be escapees, sometimes for weeks or months on end.

All of this helped a continuing commemoration of the guides and helpers who’d risked their lives. It also contributed to the sense of Ariège being wild and untamed, resistant to the decrees of the central powers, and as a form of tourism it was seen as something to encourage. In the spring of 2017 there had been a call by the National Office of War Veterans and Victims in Ariège to develop more of what they termed commemorative tourism, asking for suggestions of lesser-known places and routes that might have potential. The Freedom Trail and its related museum were held up as exemplars of the kind of activity relevant to young and old, visitor and local, bringing more visitors to the Ariège but also satisfying the need to remember victims of conflict and war veterans.19 At the same time I couldn’t help wondering whether these reminders were helping to maintain the open wounds within the towns and villages where not everyone had been on the same side. I noted that in Rimont there had

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