Ninette Dreyfus, a young girl from grand Parisian stock, the Louis-Dreyfus family, did not know she was Jewish until the war broke out. When the Germans approached the capital, she and her family left for Marseille in a chauffer-driven Chrysler. They, like many others, were eventually forced to leave France in a perilous journey across the Pyrenees, a passage made in the rain to avoid sniffer dogs.
Her hands were so ragged that when the family reunited in Spain and her parents treated Ninette to a manicure, "the manicurist wept at the sight of her hands".
Former Today programme presenter Edward Stourton has walked in the footsteps of St Paul, Mohammed, Jesus and Moses. His latest journey is that of the Chemin de la Liberté, a commemorative four-day, 40-mile trek over the Pyrenees, in the footsteps of those, like Dreyfus, who escaped the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime.
He tells the story of the many "parcels", smuggled over the mountains, from Allied airmen, whose planes were shot down over enemy territory, to Jewish families who had escaped the savage round-ups. And he tells of those who helped them, the pockets of resisters like the fearless Dédée de Jongh and her father, and of their betrayers.
