Iparralde Against the Nazis

Via the Arizona Republic comes the amazing story of a woman that risked everything she had to work against the Nazi occupation of her land, Iparralde, the Northern Basque Country.

She was not the only one, thousands of Basques were involved in different resistance groups, hundreds died as a result of their commitment to the fight against the Fascists regimes from Germany and Spain.

But this is the story of Maita Floyd, as told by David Madrid:

Maita Floyd spent four oppressive years under German occupation in France, but that didn't dim her teenage spirit.

Despite the danger, Floyd was a courier from 1943 to 1944 for an underground escape network that smuggled Allied air crews, Jews and political escapees over the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain.

The Sun City resident was a teen when France fell to the Nazis in 1940 and German soldiers took over her town and her family's upscale hotel. Floyd, whose maiden name was Maita Branquet, was born in the Basque region of France, near the Spanish border. Her parents owned the Hotel de la Poste in St-Jean-de-Luz.

The article goes into her involvement in the operations by the resistance groups:

One day, Floyd saw an advertisement from the French Red Cross, looking for girls to train as nurses. When she began training, she had to go into town each day, so her brother sent messages with her.

Michel was a member of the French underground, a network that helped people escape the Germans.

"I was my brother's courier" for a year, Floyd says.

No message was written down, because if she were caught, she would have either been sent to a concentration camp or executed.

Finally, the article talks about an issue that is close to my heart, for this is the way I lost my Aitite, my grandfather:

"Two days after D-Day, 85 men in my hometown were betrayed to the Gestapo and arrested," Floyd says. "They were all taken to concentration camps. The Gestapo was ruthless.

"Floyd says someone turned the men in for a reward. She tells of another underground network that was caught by the Nazis. The men were taken into a barn and shot. The women were taken into a church and also shot, and then the church was burned down.

So there you have it, one more story of the Basque struggle against totalitarism. To think that the Allies allowed for Franco's regime to continue to oppress the Basques for 20 years after the war was over.

May those lessons never be forgotten.

*The article appeared at Arizona Central.com but can also be read at Artxiboak.

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