Persecuted and Saved

Persecuted and Saved is an exhibition promoted by the Diputación de Lleida, whose curator is the historian Josep Calvet. The exhibition reveals the secrets of the escape of some 15,000 Jews through the mountains that connect France and Spain. The exhibition begins by explaining the two key events that marked the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany: the Nuremberg laws of 1935 that deprived the Jews of German citizenship and the Night of the Broken Crystals of November 1938, when they were sabotaged shops and synagogues, leaving a trail of 2,000 dead. The following year, with the beginning of the Second World War and the expansion of Nazism in Europe, Spain, along with Portugal and Switzerland, neutral countries, became the main destinations of the Jews who decided to flee before being killed. Through the biographies of several families the exhibition explains how they managed to flee after heroically crossing, under the cold, snow and Nazi surveillance, the difficult roads of the Pyrenees and from Spain to seek refuge, preferably in America and in the then British protectorate of Palestine.