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Jewish leftists raised in Berlin, Lisa Fittko and her husband, Hans, became active members of the anti-Fascist German resistance. They fled the Gestapo in 1933 to what they thought was the safety of La France genereuse. To the French, however, they and thousands of other German emigres represented a grave political threat. In much the same way that the United States interned Japanese immigrants at the height of the war hysteria, French authorities rounded up the reviled boches and crowded them into filthy and isolated concentration camps.
As Hitler's army swept through France, Fittko and her imprisoned comrades seized their chance to escape. But life outside the camp was as full of danger and deprivation as that within: with the Gestapo bent on finding and punishing the emigre "traitors", and the French obligated by the terms of the armistice to turn them in, every move was
