By Meg Ostrum
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Of the thousands of people who escaped through the Pyrenees during World War II, at least one hundred owe their lives to a scheme so audacious it was conducted in plain sight of the Nazis. Belgian ophthalmologist Charles Schepens — operating under the alias “Jacques Pérot” — set up a fake lumbering operation in the remote Basque village of Mendive to move people and intelligence across the French-Spanish border. His most unlikely partner: Jean Sarochar, an eccentric local shepherd widely regarded as the village misfit. Part biography, part spy thriller, part cultural portrait, The Surgeon and the Shepherd tells their story in full for the first time — drawn from more than ten years of oral history research.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Meg Ostrum is a Vermont-based museum professional, arts consultant, and heritage preservation specialist with more than twenty-five years of experience. She has edited documentary studies and oral history collections, and brings that same careful, research-driven approach to this book. The Surgeon and the Shepherd, published by the University of Nebraska Press, is the product of a decade-long commitment to getting this story right — interviewing survivors, descendants, and community members before their memories were lost.
WHY IT MATTERS
The French Basque Country was not a passive landscape during World War II. It was a corridor, a hiding place, and an act of resistance in itself — and the Basque people who sheltered, guided, and protected those fleeing the Nazis did so at enormous personal risk. That chapter of Basque history deserves to be known, and Ostrum tells it with the rigor of a historian and the momentum of a thriller. The friendship at the heart of this book — between a Belgian surgeon and a Basque shepherd who should have had nothing in common — is also a reminder of what ordinary people are capable of when it counts.
📖 Available through the University of Nebraska Press and Amazon.
Sources:
The Surgeon and the Shepherd – Goodreads
The Surgeon and the Shepherd – University of Nebraska Press