On board, Barbara and Mrs Probst befriended another mother and daughter, Mrs Mailer and her daughter Barbara, sister of the yet to be famous Norman, who was waiting to greet them as they docked in Cherbourg. Norman and his wife Bea were already settled in Paris, in an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens, and it was there that the two Barbaras were introduced to a stimulating mixture of artists and intellectuals, including many exiled Spanish dissidents. The exiles were not communists but, according to Barbara Probst, anarchists and socialists, totally at odds with the communists, and therefore vulnerable in France, which could not place them.
Within weeks the teenage girls had been persuaded by Norman to undertake a daring adventure which involved driving across France to Spain in order to rescue two young students held captive in one of the most brutal hard-labour camps run by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Nicolás (son of the historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, President of the Spanish Republic in Exile) and Manuel Lamana were being forced to work as slave labourers in Franco’s prison at the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), constructing the vast monument that was to be Franco’s tomb. Escapes were extremely rare and firing squads still carried out executions long after the Spanish Civil War was over. Yet, somewhat bizarrely, the girls had agreed to attempt to free the two boys, urged on by Norman, ‘who told us he had a car and a plan but it needed Barbara and me to participate. We agreed. He thought two young girls would have a better chance of crossing the border through the mountains because we looked too young, too American to be suspicious. We were just American kids trying to see the world.’
Probst remembers many details of the rescue. Also in the car was a young Spanish student activist, Paco Benet, whose father had been shot dead at the beginning of the Civil War, who knew the country well and spoke French as well as Spanish. ‘We had prearranged a meeting place. Nicolás and Manuel had been somehow sent a message telling them to be last in line at the end of the day and that a car would be waiting for them. It helped that, because Spain was too impoverished to provide uniforms for prisoners, they wore regular clothes,’ she recalls. While the police searched in the immediate area, the girls drove off to the south with the ex-prisoners and escaped.
By the time the group reached Barcelona, Paco and Barbara Probst had fallen in love, and the pair separated from the others. What’s clear from photographs of the time is that Barbara was beautiful as well as clever and well read. She remembers Paco as tall with blond hair, intense dark eyes and ‘very brainy’. They returned to Paris, where Barbara enrolled at the Sorbonne and started living with Benet, a relationship which lasted for four years. Like many Americans in Paris at the time, she was shocked by the deprivation she witnessed, never forgetting the disparity between her cushioned life in Paris and that facing most of her fellow students in 1948. She felt guilty about the food parcels which her parents regularly sent, believing it was morally wrong for a foreigner to have access to luxuries denied to the native population, which had suffered so much already.
Alongside her studies at the Sorbonne, she worked hard learning to be a journalist, badgering various editors into taking her stories. ‘Nobody wanted to know about the struggle to end Franco’s dictatorship after World War Two had ended. It seemed as if everyone had had enough of torture and concentration camps. The Spanish drama was a non-story.’ But, as Barbara’s life in Paris revolved around groups of dissident Spanish students in exile, she saw her mission as telling the world the story she had learned first hand. One of the motivating factors for her in undertaking the Spanish rescue had been an acute awareness, as soon as she arrived in Paris, that the Jews had had no one looking out for them. ‘My mother had several French relatives who had perished in Auschwitz. Only one, Cousin Leah, had survived in hiding. I knew I did not want to look back and think no one had been there for these kids. That was very important for me. That’s why I couldn’t refuse.’