Fittko Hans

Fittko, Hans Hans Fittko was born into a blue-collar family in Finsterwalde in Brandenburg on May 16, 1903. Although he left school at the age of 12, he carried on educating himself and became a recognized journalist who moved in Berlin’s literary and Socialist circles. At the end of 1933, threatened with arrest as a result of his political activities, he fled to Prague. In the Czech capital, a center of German exiles, he met Lisa Eckstein, his comrade and future wife. Lisa, a Socialist who had also escaped from Germany, was from a Jewish-Ukrainian family. Shortly after their marriage, however, they had to leave Prague, by an extremely roundabout route eventually reaching Paris. As émigrés, the Fittkos were particularly vulnerable in the wake of Germany’s occupation of France and the armistice between the Third Reich and the Vichy government. They thus tried to leave the country through the unoccupied South. In August 1940, they were already in Banyuls-sur-Mer, not far from the Spanish border, on their way to Lisbon when Varian Fry*, an American journalist helping refugees in Marseilles, asked for their help. The Fittkos agreed at once, despite the added risk involved. The Socialist mayor of Banyuls, Azèma, showed Lisa an old smuggling path across the Pyrenees, which could be used to cross the border unobserved. From September 1940 onwards, Hans and Lisa Fittko led numerous victims of persecution, intellectuals, writers and artists, many of them Jewish, along this secret track, which was known as “Route F”. One of the first three refugees taken over the border on September 26, 1940 was the famous essayist and literary critic Walter Benjamin. When the Spanish police in Port Bou threatened to expel him, Benjamin committed suicide. However, his two fellow fugitives survived, as did many others whom Hans and Lisa Fittko smuggled across the border. In the autumn of 1941, the Fittkos themselves finally left Vichy France, which was becoming ever more dangerous forrefugees. They succeeded to leave for Cuba, where they lived for a few years, before settling in the U.S.A. On February 8, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Hans Fittko as Righteous Among the Nations.