4: La Jorquera

"They stayed at a not so wonderful hotel, but still, it was better then nothing. They met a nice priest who was willing to help escaped prisoners from the camps get to America. Ziegfried said, “He was a very nice priest and told us to meet him at 2:00 am and he would show us the way to Spain.”

Following our journey to the camp at St. Cyprian, eating peaches on the beach and playing in the sand, we had a dinner back in Perpignan, where we were still staying. From the videos and in my fourth grade biography, we knew that somewhere along the boarder between France and Spain, the Kanfer family stopped at a hotel, where a priest from a nearby church had set them up and given them instructions to leave in the early morning and begin the hike to freedom in Spain.

After dinner, the four of us walked up and down the tiny streets of Perpignan, eyes open for bed and breakfasts, little hotels, and any churches that looked to be dated from the 1930s on, or had reputations for helping Jews escape during the Holocaust. It was nice to imagine Grandpa Fred and his family taking the same routes as us and looking at the same buildings, with a mindset opposite of the ones we hold today. Soon, though, we'd learn, the Kanfers, in Perpignan twice along the way, never encountered a priest there or walked across the boarder with his direction.

The following morning, a discovery from looking at a map at breakfast led us to the realization that Perpignan would have been much too far from the boarder to have walked over night into Spain. There must have been another stop along the way, or maybe a tweak in the story of the night hike.

We, having no plans to start with other than following our clues from the videos, set out with our rental car to drive around all day looking for some kind of town he could have stayed in. Though it seems extra uncharacteristic of my family to take a chance on a hunch, we were driving into unknown neighborhoods with a barely comprehensible map, based on the description we had of this "little village in a valley with a  stone bridge and overlooking the water and crossing into Spain." In short, it was hopeless.

Whipping out the map from our friend at the tourist center in St. Cyprian from the day before, we were reminded of the name of a town with a museum in Spain about the Spanish Civil War, of course, but also with an exhibit on WWII that she had told us about. Being close enough, it was a perfect place to stop and stretch our legs. We arrived in La Jorquera minutes later, lost in a deserted town of the language Catalan, which was completely foreign to the Spanish and French speakers of our group.

We ran into a man walking with a stroller and his toddler son around the park area where we stopped. While three of us remained at the car, my mom was wondering, and as usual for her, struck up a conversation with him, in broken English and Spanish, of course. It was exciting to find out he not only could show us to the museum, but that it was open and the caretaker was from English-speaking Canada. Repeating our story of the journey first to the man, and then to the caretaker, and then watching her translate it to everyone else in the museum lobby, was exhausting--but the outcome became quickly worth it.

Soon enough, our new friend, his son, the caretaker, the receptionist, my parents, my brother, a couple gift shop customers that would wonder in and help out, and I were all gathered around the tiny front desk, spreading out maps, books about World War II, and documents from my grandfather's travels that we had made copies of before our vacation. The eight of us stayed engaged and communicating, and translating, for a straight two hours, taking in all the information and knowledge the three natives of Spain/France could offer us.

They ended up theorizing about Grandpa Fred's journey in a new way, and we were presented with our first new mission since arriving in Europe.  We needed to keep traveling.

(story to be continued)

3: The Camp at St. Cyprian

"The Kanfers were finally free and reunited with Anna.  This was another of the happiest days of his life. Unfortunately, the family of three was not yet free.  They still had a ways to go to get to the train. They walked to a church with no belongings except their visas, VERY scared  that they would again be captured and separated only to get put in those awful concentration camps once again. Luckily, this did not happen."

Here is where the tale gets fogged. In my essay from fourth grade, I used the film of Grandpa Fred and my fourth grade thoughts to piece together a story.  In reality, though, everything became much more complicated as my family and I began to unravel every event that really occurred in Europe, leading up to Grandpa Fred's freedom in America. At this point in our family vacation, Perpignan was one of the first stops, and we were only getting a feel of the type of sleuthing we would need to continue on with. It was important to, if nothing else, find the beach in St. Cyprian, where we could imagine Grandpa Fred walking for miles, looking ahead to the mountains looming above, signifying freedom (or a freedom he only imagined existed).

In the video interview of Grandpa Fred, he mentioned eating peaches after peaches for days as they walked over mountains after escaping the concentration camp. In preparation for our day of finding whatever we could relating to St. Cyprian, we stopped at the local grocery store near our hotel and loaded up on fruits and candy, and of course, a peach for each of us.

The GPS took us about as far as St. Cyprian, the town. It revealed a deserted carnival set up, which looked like it both hadn't been opened for 10 years, but was, at the same time, ready for a debut that night. Creepy. We drove around looking for anything that hinted at an internment camp sight, both near the ocean and much more inland, with a vast terrain of empty, dry prairie land. Giving up hope of finding the camp on our own, we explored the town a little bit--mostly just looking for a center for tourism. It seemed weird to me that such an empty place would even bother with something like that, but sure enough, we were able to locate, and then wait outside of it for twenty minutes waiting for someone to unlock the doors and man the front desk. The woman we met took a while to understand what we were trying to ask her about--which was simply, where the camp was located during World War II. She explained to us first what World War II was, then more about the Spanish Civil War, and finally gave in. She used and encourage us to use hand gestures, like a game of charades, to communicate what we were actually looking to find. It worked, with a sigh of relief and excitement from both ends, before the letdown of "I don't know for sure." We worked it out though, and in broken English and a lot of gestures combined with pen markings on our map, she was able to give us an area along the sand where the camp would have been. With that, we set off.

I'll make a long story short and let you know off the bat that the one monument we found was, yet again, dedicated to those who were interned at the camp during the Spanish Civil War. Nothing related to World War II or the Jewish internment camps. Just like in Vienna, though, the real monument turned out to be the splashing and playing and families with their children spending a day at the beach. "The youth is our future," is, after all, what Grandpa Fred always believed.

This discovery was good enough for our family. We sat together, eating peaches and looking at the ocean and the mountains in harmony. My brother buried his peach pit in the sand, as if it was some sort of our own monument for Grandpa Fred and everyone else who suffered in these internment camps. We headed home for the day, with our first real success on the trip to France.

2: Perpignon

"Ziegfried continued on with his life. It took them months, still with three suitcases, to walk to France.  His family eventually just got too tired and abandoned all their suitcases, but still they went on.  Little did Ziggy know, that in about twenty-four hours, one of the saddest days of his life would occur.  Just before his family was expected to be at the U.S. embassy in France, French soldiers quickly captured the family.  Ziegfried and his father were separated from a wife and mother.  They were taken to separate concentration camps in France. This was not the saddest day of his life, but the saddest three whole months! Ziegfreid was taken to a room with a few thousand men, no bathrooms, and food as little as stale bread and dirty water. Can you imagine three months in that filthy, gross room? You’re now probably wondering, “If Ziegfried got to America, when was he released--after the Holocaust?”  Well, the answer is he was never released.  After Anna got out of her concentration camp using proof of the visa, she waited for days outside of Ziegfried and his father’s camp.  One night, when no one was looking, a kind, an extremely kind guard, did not speak, but pointed to a hole in the barbed wire.  Ziegfried, his father, and other men climbed through!  The Kanfers were finally free and reunited with Anna.  This was another of the happiest days of his life. Unfortunately, the family of three was not yet free."

This past summer, after my three week long Spanish language emersion trip with my school in Spain, my family joined me for a vacation on our own before heading back to America. Apart from seeing the cites of Barcelona and Madrid, we spent a lot of time hunting around for clues regarding Grandpa Fred's journey. 

We arrived in Perpignon, France, with minimal French comprehension skills and absolutely no clue about the town we found surrounding us. The only thing leading us to this cute little town was a stamp from it on Grandpa Fred's passport. We had hoped to uncover traces of his presence here, but had no idea where to start. 

Our first move was to look up the phone number for the local Chabad House, which is an Orthodox Jewish organization that has chapters all over the world. The woman from the phone, who was from Canada and spoke English as a first language, invited us into her home and offered to help us with whatever questions we had. This was the first time we told Grandpa Fred's story to a stranger on this trip, and we'd soon learn that it wouldn't be the last. We didn't know what we were looking for, and we didn't know what we wanted to hear. 

The camp Grandpa Fred was at is called St. Cyprian. It's a little town on the beach, not far from Perpignon, and we needed directions. Had this woman ever heard of a concentration camp in this area? Yes, she said, but wasn't sure of any museums or preservations at the site today. She called her husband and some other contacts she had relating to the Holocaust and St. Cyprian, and gave us the address of a cemetery, where many Jews are buried, and the location of a supposed memorial for them. 

Though our new friend invited us to dinner that night, we now had an adventure to conquer, and it was time to get moving! A quick stop at a market for fruit and candy to last the day began our expedition.  

Following a long drive filled with mapquest and car games, we spotted the cemetery, pulled up right in front of it, and pryed open the closed but unlocked entrance gate. It was most definitely one of the most eery experiences on the trip. It was still day time, but the cemetery was empty of livelihood, and the wind was howling just like in those ghost movies. We searched that cemetery up and down for the memorial said to be displayed inside of it, until we were all very ready to just give up. A disruption of the silence came from my dad's shouting, "I found it!" He was referring to an open space in a cut off section of the graveyard with benches and a fountain and plaques everywhere. We spent twenty minutes working to decipher the French, and the names, and the purposes of these plaques. 

Just like in Vienna, disappointed feelings came next. The plaques, the whole memorial even, was dedicated to the Spanish Civil War and the refuges from it that were interned when they arrived in France. It was a vast memorial, and did inspire us to look more into Spanish Civil War research after we returned. Even leaving with some newfound knowledge, though, we hadn't reached our goal of seeing something relevant to my Grandpa Fred or the multitude of Jews also interned in the camp at St. Cyprian. 

It was a letdown, but so many excursions on the trip were and will be. But all it meant was that we needed to wake up again the next day, and be ready to work even harder. 

Poland in NYC

Though I barely remember our vacation to New York City in 2007, other than the dazzle of my first broadway show, the pictures help me recount our search for the graves of my Grandpa Fred's parents, Oscar and Anna Kanfer.

The graves seemed a compelling thing to go looking for and visit, but considering even my Dad barely  knew the people they belonged to, it was more of a "while we're here" activity for a cold afternoon that day we arrived in the city. We took a cab, or took a nap in the cab ride, I should say, over 20 minutes to the graveyard.

It was, regardless of my age and maturity, a touching experience. My great-grandparents were buried in New York, where they had immigrated to, but with a group of their friends, neighbors, and community members from their original home in Poland who had also made it to the freedom of America. The sense of closeness within this group of families who had been fighting for their lives each step of the way to New York, was so real to all of us, that the couple hours we spent wandering around went by in an instant. It didn't even feel weird to us, hanging out at a cemetery for the majority of the afternoon.

Five years before our trip to New York to visit his parents, on today's date, October 18, 2002, Grandpa Fred died at Provena Hospital in Champaign. He was buried in town, at the spot we had specific instruction to reserve for him under the big oak tree at an intersection of side roads in the cemetery. He chose this spot a couple months before he died, so it would be easy, comfortable, yet private enough for Grandma Ruby to visit him after his passing.

1: Vienna

"Ziegfried had pleasant memories of his apartment as well as of school.  When he was not very old, the ferris wheel in Prater Park (an amusement park) was opened. “I would walk there with my friends and we would have a great time,” he remembers. On occasion, the Kanfer family would take a train to the mountains and stay at a farm. Ziegfried has some more good memories of all his family and a few good school experiences, but, as I said, only up until he was twelve years old. Then his education was cut short. On November  8th ,  1938, when Ziegfried was almost 13, something terrible happened that affected the rest of his life.  Something bad called Krystallnacht when German armies came and burned the torahs, shattered the windows of temples, and did very horrible things.   During Krystallnacht, Ziegfried’s neighbor, Pashinski, had to hide him under a table, risking his own life for a good friend because the army was close by, and all the Jews were afraid they would be arrested. Luckily, it didn’t happen that night.  But over time, more and more bad things happened. Instead of what the Jews had hoped for, which was for things to get better and better, things got worse; they knew their hope was only in their dreams.  Jews were very scared that they would be obliterated. That effectively started the next chapter of Ziegfried’s life because his non-segregated Jewish high school in Vienna had now closed,as well as his father’s business."

First stop in Vienna, while in Europe already for a family vacation, was finding 2 Odeongasse, the apartment my grandfather had spent the best years of his childhood coming home to every afternoon, and leaving for school from every morning. With full stomachs from a breakfast cafe we'd eaten chocolate croissants at that morning, and directions to the Prater ferris wheel from our server there (which we'd somehow managed to get with my dad's broken German), my dad, mom, brother, and I headed toward our destination. With some help from passing strangers, we were eventually directed in the way of Grandpa's apartment building.

Not only excited about finding the location, but about catching a glimpse of the big memorial plaque which looked to be relating to commemorating the Jews who had lived there, you can imagine our disappointment when we saw it was instead for a composer who was from the general area and died in the 1940s. Only after the initial letdown came the discovery of a small plate drilled into the wall on 2 Odeongasse memorializing "272 Jewish women and children who have been deported from the Odeongasse, only 13 of them having survived." It was nice to see attention to such a fateful event, especially in my family's history, but my attitude, and certainly my brother's (who was 7 at the time), was more reflective of a "We came, we saw, let's leave" feeling.

 Across the street from the building, though, in the complex where the tailor Pashinski had hidden Zigfried and his family during Krystallnacht, now stood an International Kindergarten and it's playground, filled with kids and parents running around during their recess. Grandpa had always believed that people could change, and based many of his life accomplishments on teaching the youth, because, like he would always say, "the youth is our future." I watched my father fall silent and my mother tear up at this seemingly insignificant finding to my 12-year-old self.

It's only now that I realize, while Grandpa would have been undoubtedly happy to see a plaque commemorating him and the people he was close with at 2 Odeongasse, the real memorial for these events was the more intangible joy and happiness so present now in the neighborhood which used to house, for Grandpa Fred, so much fear, hatred, and the corruption of innocence.

In the end, I feel that these intangible memories of experiencing Grandpa Fred's steps in a way that exterminates all these angry feelings from his childhood, are what the whole journey should be about. We weren't finding any tribute for Grandpa Fred, and chances are we weren't going to. The real reason we wanted--we had--to do this, was to learn about the Holocaust, of course, but also to feel at peace with these simple, symbolic occurrences which could mean nothing. Or could mean everything we wanted them to.

Free, Free, Free

The adventure with my Grandfather began in that fourth grade classroom, learning his story and getting a taste of everything he went through. Of course, the story had holes--which I maybe hadn't been aware of from the get-go (as a fourth grader, how critical am I really going to be of such a miraculous adventure?). The basic story, though, needs to be outlined before I delve into the journey my family and I began only after hearing about it.

The story as I imagined it in fourth grade from hearing the retelling on Grandpa's video represents such a major difference from the understanding I have of it now, at age 16. The difference comes from history classes I've taken, but also from the information we've uncovered since the vague and simple VHS. It will help to have an outline of Grandpa Fred's life before I start to reveal the depths of his saga, but with each new post about something my family and I did to uncover a little more of the mystery, I will include the paragraph of my fourth grade biography which relates to what we were looking to fill in the gaps of.

My Grandpa, Zigfried Kanfer, was born in Vienna Austria in 1925 to Anna and Oscar Kanfer, a shop owner of a small business which closed shortly after Ziggy's 12th birthday because of loss of rights for Jews in Austria. They were hidden by a non-Jew neighbor during Kristallnacht, but were soon sent to a variety of camps across Europe. Escape after close call after escape led eventually to a flee of the Kanfer family through the Spanish mountains onto a boat which would lead them to America. Grandpa's diary, which he kept starting at this young age 12, was written in German, French, Spanish, and then English, as he travelled across the world and was forced to learn these new languages in order to keep his family safe (or, relatively safe). The riveting words of this diary were found by my Grandma Ruby who handed it over to her children, my dad and his sister, in 2003 after my Grandpa had already died. The stories were tear-jerking when they had been translated by a multitude of people they worked to find. The one line everyone knows by heart, though, are the last three words of the book. Upon arriving in America, Zigfried, who worked to lose his accent, change his name, and then fight for America in World War II, scribbled in a handwriting that you could feel excitement eminating from, "Free, Free, Free."

Grandpa went on to become a professor of psychology known for his work on self-management and behavior change. People who knew him described him as not changing his attitude whether he was speaking with a renowned scholar or a janitor of his building, even as successful as he was becoming. He returned with his family to Vienna, Austria to teach and was offered the key to the city for his work, but turned it down because what they did to him and his family, he said, he couldn't forgive.

I have only seen the diary once or twice. It's such an old book, falling apart, delicate, and so valuable that I'm sure it's hard to trust me with it. I can't be surprised, however, at the character my Grandpa had in writing this record. I don't remember him enough, but I have begun to know him through the recent discoveries. All I need, though, is the memory of age three or four, while all the adults sat and talked about everything but me at holidays, Grandpa Fred always pulled out the same puzzle, invited me to join him, and spent hours until we finished it together. Whatever more important work was going on at the time, Grandpa Fred could always find the time for me.

Curiosity Strikes

I was in Ms. Henson's fourth grade class, studying everything from melting ice cube science to oceanography to archeology. Sometime in November, we reached a biography unit. What was a biography? A description of a person, a life story, a life story of someone else, an academic paper on some type of accomplishment? In order to learn more about our own definitions, we were assigned to choose anyone we knew that was able to schedule an interview with us to work on telling a story and letting us write a biography of their lives. For this reason, Ms. Henson told us the person had to be alive and easily contacted over phone/email/in person. I thought about this for a while. I guess I could call my voice instructor...she'd probably have some good stories about her schooling. Or my mom's mom, considering the fact that I didn't know enough about her life as it was, especially for being her only granddaughter. There were always my parents, but, bo-ring! After long deliberation, I felt like the only thing to do was ask Ms. Henson for an exception.

By far, the one most interesting person with the single most miraculous story I'd ever heard was my grandfather, who had passed away years before. I hadn't ever heard his story through his words--just passed from my dad with some exaggerations and underestimations here and there. I knew this would be a good story to tell--the one of him escaping from the Holocaust, into America, the land of the free.

When I was born a couple years after my older cousin Sarah, my parents and her's decided that it would be important to get a video recording of my Grandpa Fred, talking about his experiences during the Holocaust, from start to finish. It was like a visual history, made to help us, the youth, understand and remember the things he and so many others went through during the 1940s. Though our education was the driving factor behind the desire for this video, I also think my dad and his sister, Aunt Ruthie, wanted to hear the story for themselves. Grandpa never talked about it. He was an American now, he was proud of it, and he didn't want to burden his children as they were growing up with the horrors of what he had been through at their age and younger. The whole family sat down and, with me as a one-year-old crying in the background, began to film the history in a couple-hour period.

I watched the video for the first time in fourth grade after Ms. Henson approved my idea for using it as a sort of "interview." Lying in the dark on the floor of my parents' bedroom, I teared up and wondered how something as insignificant as a computer screen could induce such emotion. My dad came in and watched with me during parts of the video, and I remember wondering how even he, such a strong figure in my life, could get so emotional over this. The only more emotional event was the first time I'd ever seen Dad cry, on the morning of Grandpa's death in 2001.

I took notes on the video, and I wrote my paper. It was simple, didn't take much time, and I got an A. It came naturally to me, giving the stories of my Grandfather's life and adding some reflection here and there. I thought it was simple at least. Next time that I visited Grandma Ruby in the nursing home, my mom made me bring the paper to show her. I complained and said it wouldn't mean anything, embarrassed to give my fourth grade writing piece (which even I, still as a fourth grader, knew was primitive) to someone who knew much more about essays. That changed when I watched Grandma tear up over the biography, and follow by hanging it on her bedroom wall until the day that she passed away there.

It was then that I realized how my writing could affect people, and how my Grandpa Fred's story should be documented for the entire world to learn from. I didn't realize, back then, the holes in the video leaving out information we'd need to really understand his journey. I'm still figuring it out, with my family, as we travelled around Europe this summer trying to retrace his steps and fill in the blanks. It's a work in progress, but is already helping me learn so much about the overall picture of the Holocaust and WWII in Nazi Germany, but also about my ancestors, their families, my Grandfather, and even the lives of my Dad and Aunt.

Even without conclusion, the embarkment on this journey we are about to begin is bringing my family closer already.