‘Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees’, by Edward Stourton – review

‘One afternoon in September 1942,’ Edward Stourton opens this important and rewarding book, ‘a young man and a young woman could be seen sitting on the back steps of a farmhouse in south west France, looking up at the Pyrenees.’ It is like the first image in an album packed with snapshots set against this same glorious setting. ‘There is no neat way of telling this piece of history’, Stourton concedes; ‘it is a jumble of individual lives’. Collectively these brief glimpses tell the story of the perilous passages over the mountains between France and Spain during the second world war. Stourton is on a mission to ‘unlock the secrets of this most secretive region’, a task he undertakes vigorously, not only researching the stories of those on the run in the war years, and those risking their lives to help them, but under-taking the crossing himself.

Some of the tales he uncovers, of serial escapers and ‘very ugly’ middle-aged resisters carrying canes, ‘capacious handbags’ and legs of mutton in violin cases, seem to come straight from the pages of Boy’s Own.