The Lisbon Route by Ronald Weber

Author:Ronald Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

9

Gloriously Neutral

Portugal is gloriously neutral; that is its gift from the gods and to Europe; a gift never, one hopes, to be snatched away.

—Rose Macaulay, The Spectator, July 9, 1943

In the same period Red Cross food parcels were flowing through Portugal, food shortages were cropping up within the country. “It would be a mistake to suppose that Portugal to-day is a country almost without a trouble in the world, a country flowing with milk and honey in the midst of devastated Europe,” said the London Times on September 8, 1943, marking the war’s fifth year. Meat had become hard to find, and there were days when butter and potatoes were unavailable. Limited fuel supplies led to unequal distribution of food that did exist in ample quantities.

Added to food scarcities in some areas, the financial windfall to Portugal from the deluge of refugees and wartime trade with both the Allies and the Axis had sparked inflation, and this coupled with higher charges for imports and a limited number of ships to carry them brought a sharp rise in the Portuguese cost of living. Traditional fish stocks of dried cod and sardines more than doubled in price over the war. Food shortages and high prices encouraged smuggling, black markets, and hoarding, abuses the government tried to combat through a constant round of prosecutions, with limited success. Portugal remained an alluring haven in the midst of war, yet for its ordinary citizens it was no longer the land of ease and unbounded plenty that greeted awestruck new arrivals. “We are not directly engaged in the struggle,” Salazar told his country in a speech in the early autumn of 1943, “but we are in the war like the rest.”

For the transients streaming in and out, that Portugal was not in the struggle was the central wartime fact about the country. Its external neutrality eclipsed concern with food supplies, prices, or all other internal matters. Portuguese neutrality might be imagined as a glorious gift, as Rose Macaulay lightly characterized it, yet in actuality it was held in place by a complex diplomatic dance that was hedged with uncertainty for much of the war period. And uncertain not only because at any moment the Allies or Axis might choose to upend it. Like a character in Arthur Koestler’s 1943 novel Arrival and Departure, Portugal in effect went through the war as a neutral while openly displaying a toy British flag in its buttonhole.

In Koestler’s story, in which Portugal is thinly masked as a country named Neutralia, a university student and radical from Central Europe takes the Lisbon route as a stowaway in a ship’s hold. With the vessel anchored in the dark offshore, he leaps from the deck and swims to a small bay with a cluster of bathing cabins on the beach. When he wades ashore he races to the nearest cabin, instinctively hiding though no one is present to notice him. The time is three o’clock in the morning in the spring of 1941, and the young refugee, Peter Slavek, is twenty-two years old.

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