" This road that you are taking was from 1940 to 1944 for many a route for escape and hope: Persecuted Jews, Resistance fighters hunted and threatened with death or deportation, Allied pilots shot down on French territory, young people leaving to join the Free French forces, escapees and courriers. For all this route was a road towards Freedom at risk to their lives. Some of these routes had been used in the direction South to North by Spanish Republicans in 1939, during the Retirada."
I saw this today on a walk above Villelongue, the village next to ours. I knew there were escape routes further West, but it was a surprise there was one so close. The Retirada was the mass escape of Republicans (fighters, sympathisers and their families, mainly Catalans in this region), after the victory of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. About 25% of the current population of Languedoc-Rousillon are descended from those people, so the Retirada is an important event for them to remember.
