Remembrance "It Was Incredibly Macabre"

By OTTO VON HABSBURG

The son of Karl, Austria's last Emperor (1916-19), Habsburg is now 76.

The evening the government fled Paris, former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Hugh Gibson invited us to a dinner at the Ritz with Clare Boothe Luce and a collaborator of Polish General Vladislav Sikorski. It was incredibly macabre: the city was two-thirds surrounded by German troops, the sky was lit up with artillery fire, and there, at the Ritz, everything was as it had always been: waiters in tails, the food, the wine. The proprietor asked us to sign his guest book. Years later, I learned from Field Marshal Rommel's chief of staff that he and Rommel were the next ones to sign, a few days later.

We left Paris the next day for Bordeaux, where we arranged for Portuguese visas for as many Austrians as we could. By that time I was on a list of 49 persons the Nazis had asked the French to hand over. When we arrived at the Spanish frontier, it was closed on order of the Germans. I thought this was the end. But a customs official gave me a sign to follow him, led me behind the customs shed and said, "I know exactly who you are. Have you heard that resistance will continue? A certain General de Gaulle has called on us to continue. I shall leave for England tonight, and I could not care less how many of you I let pass." And so we reached Spain.