Return to Canfranc: October 31 -- November 2, 2014
It all started with an email in December 2013 from Victor Fairen
who introduced himself as the grandson of Albert Le Lay, the
chief French Customs officer at Canfranc on the FrenchSpanish border and a member of the French Resistance.
Searching for testimonies of Jews who fled France through
Canfranc during World War II, he had come across my book,
Shattered Crystals that contained a brief account of our
crossing there.
Now 73 years after my first time in Canfranc, I was flying to
Spain at the invitation of the organizers of a weekend program
of remembrance, “Historic Days at Canfranc.”
My flight from London on October 31st was to Santander in
Spain. Walking out of the airport, I expected one individual
holding a placard with my name. Instead as I walked through
the glass door into warm, summer sunshine, four people on the
opposite side of a low railing were motioning and waiving
excitedly.
Chief in the welcoming party was Jose Antonio Blanco, director
of the documentary, “King of Canfranc.” With Jose were his
cameraman, Pablo, filming my arrival, their still photographer
Amaya, and slightly back but most important for me Dominique
Bouillet, my translator for the weekend, who turned out to be
not a Spaniard but a 54-year-old American, born in Los
Angeles, who left the U.S. age 15 and has since lived in France
and Spain.
Our destination of Canfranc was more than 400 kilometers
away, tickets to the nearer airport at Zaragosa, apparently not
having being available. Jose drove as I sat in the back with
Dominique, and Pablo and still photographer Amaya followed in
a separate car. During the five-hour drive, for the first of what
was to be many times during my weekend in Spain, I related
the story of how our family escaped from Nazi Germany to
France and how I came to be one of a small group of children
who crossed the Franco-Spanish border on the way to Lisbon
and New York in the summer of 1941.
Canfranc station in the Pyrenees
Canfranc is a border train station deep in the Pyrenees, pretty
much in the middle of nowhere. Yet, when it was opened in
1928 Canfranc was the second biggest railroad station in
Europe. Today only a local train from nearby Zaragosa calls
there. A derailment on the French side in 1970 destroyed a
railway bridge and France decided not to rebuild it. Today on
the French side of the border there is nothing except the station
and on the Spanish side Canfranc has a permanent population
of under 1,000.
The reason there was need for a large station, in fact a station
at all, was that the width of the tracks, the gauge, in the two
countries was different, thus requiring passengers to change
trains and freight to be transferred between railroad cars at the
French-Spanish border.
During World War II the station was under regular surveillance
by the Gestapo. Documents discovered only in the year 2000
showed that the pro-fascist Franco government was supplying
Germany with important materials, especially tungsten
essential in steel and armament production. They show that
Franco forced Germany to make payments in gold, gold
presumably stolen from Jews.
Front of the huge Canfranc Station
The terminal building is 240 meters [more than two football
fields] long. It has 300 windows and 156 doors. Albert LeLay,
lived in one of a number of apartments that were part of the
station complex. As chief customs officer he moved freely
between French and Spanish trains and mingled with persons
travelling between the two countries. This role enabled him to
pass secret messages and documents between the French
Resistance and Allied embassies and anti-Nazi spies in Spain.
In his role as a leader in the Resistance he was aware when
Jewish travelers were in danger and would regularly save them
from arrest by hiding them in his apartment in the station, in
other secure places in the huge station or in the village.
We did not reach Canfranc until 9:30 in the evening. During
dinner at a restaurant Jose presented me with the next day’s
busy schedule of talks, interviews and filming. The day was to
start with an interview by Victor Fairen at 9:30 the next morning
to take place at Casa Marieta, the guest house where we would
be staying. And would it be alright if Jose filmed the interview?
Victor Fairen is a professional engineer who earned a PhD in
the U.S. and speaks perfect English. Like all of the subsequent
interviewers, his main interest was in my Canfranc crossing in
1941.
With my mother and two sisters I had left Germany in June
1939, joining our father to Paris. He had fled Germany after he
was released from Buchenwald on the basis of a forged visa for
France my mother had secured. At the outbreak of World War
II after the French arrested my father as a German national, my
sisters and I were admitted to the OSE home outside of Paris
run by an organization looking after Jewish children displaced
by the war. With the fall of Paris we were evacuated to a new
OSE home near Limoges in Central France.
In 1941 the U.S. issued a limited visa for just a few hundred
Jewish children trapped in French concentration camps. At that
time, the French Resistance was unable to smuggle children
out of the camps, and the visas were given to the OSE. My
older sister Ruth and I were part of the 2nd group and left the
OSE home at the end of June 1941.
During my interview with Victor, in an hour-long talk to an
audience of 100 people as part of the “Historic Days” program
in Canfranc’s school auditorium and in subsequent TV and
press interviews I described the long dangerous journey to
Canfranc and into Spain.
In truth I had no actual memory of making the border crossing,
a fact that I stressed repeatedly to the various Spanish officials
who had invited me to come. It did not matter, they said. What
counted was that I was someone who had actually escaped the
Nazis and made the border crossing during those dangerous
times all those years ago.
My older sister Ruth did remember, so I shared her memories
of the journey. Back in 1941 we travelled first to Marseilles, but
instead of boarding a ship there, we went by train to Toulouse.
In normal times the next part of the trip to Pau, near the border,
would take only several hours but our train was plagued with
delays. We spent a night on benches in a railroad station and
another night in Pau where we slept two to a bed.
There was one more unexpected stop in France at Oloron.
Waiting on the station platform were prisoners from the nearby
concentration camp of Gurs who were mothers, fathers, aunts
and uncles of some of the children. The children were not
permitted off the trains, so they leaned out the windows
desperately trying to touch them and tossed the bread they had
saved from their breakfast to their loved ones. Less than a
quarter of an hour after arrival the train pulled out of Oloron.
At the border Ruth said all the passengers had to disembark
and walk across to Canfranc. “We were held up for several
hours before we could board the Spanish trains,” she
remembered. On the Spanish cars the wooden seats were hard
and uncomfortable, and there were not enough of them, so the
boys climbed up on to the luggage racks and slept there. The
compensation, Ruth said, was the Pyrenees. She had never
seen anything so beautiful, and even in the summer, “there was
snow on some of the mountains.”
Partially renovated station
After my talk and the interviews with French and Spanish TV
and the local press, l was taken to the station. I walked along
the single track that ran in front of the long terminal building.
Much of the Spanish half of the building has been restored to
its former opulent art-deco glory. To reach France, we walked
down flights of marble steps, then along a dark passageway
and up stairs to the French side of the station which remains
derelict.
Back in Canfranc I was shown a monument erected just last
summer as a tribute to freedom for the oppressed and to
human dignity. Importantly for a place without a Jewish
presence on one side of the 4-sided monument is carved the
single word, “Shalom.” I ran my fingers over the letters, and the
unremembered event in my life when I was a 10-year-old girl in
Canfranc at last became real to me.
There was one more remarkable event during this remarkable
weekend in Spain. When I mentioned as part of my family’s
wartime history that my parents had been inmates in Gurs in
1943, Jose asked if I would like to visit the camp. “Oh yes,
please,” I said, hardly able to contain my excitement. The
camp is about an hour’s drive through a 9-kilometer-long tunnel
and then along the stunningly beautiful Pyrenees mountains to
the foothills where Gurs is located. It was built in 1939 before
the outbreak of World War II by the French for people who had
fought against Franco in Spain’s civil war; it also became a
refuge for Gypsies.
I walk along the single train track leading to Gurs
A long railroad track leads runs from the public highway to the
camp. The grounds are well maintained. I was amazed at the
huge size of the camp. Today it contains a single reconstructed
barracks, much shorter and narrower than the barracks in
Auschwitz. There is also a cemetery with more than 1,000
identical grave stones paid for and maintained by German cities
that deported thousands of Jews to Gurs in 1940, many of
whom died there.
The reconstructed barracks
Being in the camp, walking on grounds where my mother and
father had spent part of the war and endured the horrors of the
Holocaust was for me an unexpected opportunity to honor their
courage and resourcefulness in their successful fight to survive
Hitler and Nazism. I felt I had completed a pilgrimage.
Eve R. Kugler
November 2014