Lisa Fittko

 

Lisa Fittko

 

 

 

She brought among others Walter Benjamin across the mountains and the border to Spain, on a secret way called after her "Route F" (in between Banyuls sur Mer and Portbou). With her husband Hans she was an antifascist fighter and saved much lives. Later on, she lived in Chicago, were she died 2005 with 95.

 

 

 

 

 

Ms. Fittko emerged from a leftist, artistic family to become active in the resistance to Hitler in the early months of his rule, then fled to continue the fight in other European countries for seven years. For seven tense months in 1940 and 1941, she escorted refugees on a tortuous path over the Pyrenees mountains so they could go on to Spanish and Portuguese ports to seek passage to safe havens. Many of the people she helped were intellectuals, artists and anti-Nazi organizers (from her obituary) 

 

 

 

 

 

She was born the23.8.1909 in Uschhorod (Hungary, then Austrian Empire) from a jewish family, which moved soon to Berlin. In 1934 in Prague she met her husband, Hans Fittko, a working-class leader and journalist from Berlin. Later they fled from the Nazis to Prag, Basel, Apeldoorn and finally Paris. The couple married 1948 in Havanna.