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)