LISA FITTKO. La meva travessia dels Pirineus [Escape throught the Pyrenees]. Translation by Anna Maria Corredor, 2021, 298 p. Cover: photo by Isa Fontbona. ISBN: 978-84-124252-1-5
First translation into Catalan of the testimony of Lisa Fittko (Uzhhord, Hungary, 1909 – Chicago, 2005) that Walter Benjamin wrote in the crossing on foot of the Pyrenees. She is considered a heroine for having helped to escape many fugitives from France occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War. Cultured, brave woman, born into a Jewish family, active in the spheres of cultural life, first in Vienna and then in Berlin, where he lived through the rise of Nazism and made the commitment fight against fascism. Between September 1940 and April 1941 they helped to cross the Pyrenees in the direction of Spain more than a hundred fugitives pursued with the connivance of the French. His first client was Walter Benjamin (Berlin, 1892-Portbou, 1940), who invited Mrs. Henny Gurland and her son Joseph to cross with him. It is the first time that Lisa Fittko, inexperienced in the area, crosses the Pyrenees on a path of smugglers advised by the then mayor of Banyuls, Vincent Azéma, and which coincides more or less, with the so-called Route Líster in the Spanish Civil War, Route F., and later it will be known by Route Walter Benjamin, the German thinker who commits suicide in Portbou, once he knows that the day after his arrival he will be repatriated and returned in France. She dedicates to him the chapter "The old Benjamin".
