Recreating a Family’s Lost Holocaust History, Step by Step

His legs were scratched and bloody, but Henri never complained. That’s all I was told about my father’s escape from the Germans over the Pyrenees Mountains some time in the second half of 1940. He was 5 years old, his sister, Cecile, was 3, and the day they walked out of their apartment in Paris’s 17th Arrondissement, my grandmother left pots of unfinished food on the stove lest any neighbors, nosy or Nazi, became dangerously curious.

They would reunite with my grandfather, who had already crossed the French border with Spain, and journey through Spain, Portugal and Cuba, eventually settling in the United States. As a child, I thought to ask nothing else of this epic voyage, my mind satisfied with an underexposed snapshot of this barely school-aged boy climbing over mountains to freedom, as if he were a lederhosen-wearing von Trapp just before “The Sound of Music” end credits rolled.

But as an adult, I have carried within me a mixture of shock and shame for failing to excavate the details. The justification to myself was simple and shortsighted: Why force my father and grandparents to relive a terrifying period in their lives? I leaned heavily into the emotional procrastination of “we’ll get to it at some point.” When my father died in 2003, any remaining secrets were buried in all senses of the word.

But after more than a year of pandemic lockdown, when solitude dredged up the deep regret of missed opportunities, I became consumed with my father’s journey and the idea of recreating it. Never mind that I had gone nearly four decades complacently reciting the same handful of details when recounting my family history, an especially embarrassing admission for a journalist who knew better than to settle for broad strokes. Last August, a year and a half after the world shut down, and 81 years after his mysterious mountain crossing, I started climbing — after figuring out where to climb.

A perilous journey

There’s a black-and-white photograph taken in 1935 of my father as a baby, precariously perched on his father’s shoulders. Taken outside, laundry lines fill in the background, and my grandfather’s massive smile appears spotlit by the Paris sun. In this one photo I see the Jewish experience in Paris in the mid 1930s, the relative comfort before impending doom.

By the time my father was born in 1934, the Jewish population in Paris had grown to about 200,000, most of whom, like my grandparents, were immigrants from Eastern Europe. Yes, there was anti-Semitism throughout the country (the Dreyfus Affair, when a Jewish soldier was wrongly convicted of treason, wasn’t that far in the past), but there was also a Jewish Socialist prime minister in Léon Blum. Even as Hitler amassed power to the east and Kristallnacht shattered any notion that Jews would be safe in Germany, many Jews in France felt safe enough.

But by June 1940, Hitler’s army had defeated France, and with the Franco-German Armistice, the country was divided into the German-controlled north and the Vichy-controlled south which, though independent, collaborated with the Nazis. The persecution came swiftly: In October that year, the military lay the groundwork of “Aryanization”: taking away Jewish businesses. The next year, six synagogues in Paris were bombed in one night. The Jews who stayed in France were ordered to wear a yellow star marked “Juif” by 1942, if they were not among the approximately 76,000 who were deported, primarily to the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

Others had begun traveling south, whether to hide in the Vichy-controlled region, presuming the French-led governing body would protect them, or to attempt to escape to Spain and Portugal, both of which remained neutral during the war. Entering Spain meant crossing somewhere along the 270-mile-long Pyrenees mountain range, which separates the two countries. My father and his family were among the lucky ones, an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 throughout World War II, to make it across. My grandparents’ parents and siblings who stayed behind in Europe were taken to concentration camps and tortured or murdered.

The French government recognized the best-known Pyrenees crossing, the “Chemin de la Liberté” or “Freedom Trail,” 50 years after the war ended, as an official path of escape during World War II. Several adventure travel companies in Europe now offer guided group trips across the route, often for those wanting to commemorate a relative’s journey. The hikes begin in Saint-Girons, France, in the Pyrenees foothills, about 50 miles south of Toulouse, and meander through forests, boulder fields and the occasional snowy mountain top to altitudes of 8,000 feet before crossing the border into Vielha, Spain.

Each and every description of the trip warned of the physical challenges, steep inclines and up to nine hours of hiking for four days. An online description of one tour included a difficulty dial ominously turned all the way to red. When I contacted Anne Arran, a former British Competition Climbing Team champion, now the owner of Freedom Trail Treks, she warned me over Zoom that the long days and arduous ascents would be extremely difficult for someone who had spent the last 15 months barely hitting four digits on her step counter. I signed on and endured hours every day for the next month double-masked on my gym’s stair-climbing machine. Besides, I continually reminded myself, my father did this trip when he was 5.

Until, I found out, he didn’t.

Unspoken pasts

The phenomenon of refugees burying their traumatic past is not unique to my family. As Elie Wiesel once said of Holocaust survivors, “Only those who were there will ever know, and those who were there can never tell.” Repressing pain for self-preservation can never be faulted. And yet, silence is an unfortunate ally to the perpetrators of violence.

In the absence of conversation, family lore hardened into indisputable truth. It went something like this: Sometime in the late 1930s, my grandfather Josef Szajbowicz was told to leave his family in Paris and report to a work camp for potential troublemakers, which in the years immediately preceding World War II in France usually meant Socialists, Communist-sympathizers and immigrant Jews. (My grandfather was three for three.) He escaped and climbed over the Pyrenees to safety in Spain. Once there, he arranged for a “passeur,” or guide, to escort his wife (my grandmother), Sadie, my father and my aunt from Paris over the same mountain route until the family could be reunited in Spain. Together they traveled to Portugal where they boarded a ship to Cuba.

In the weeks leading up to my own trip, I interrogated my mother and siblings, in case one of us had forgotten to share even the tiniest of details. I tracked down my Aunt Cecile’s widower, Kurt Rosen, who confirmed what I knew: “Joe and Sadie would never say anything.” He died a couple of months after that phone call. My last hope for family intel was my father’s only living cousin, Sylvia Kirschner.

Her own parents survived Auschwitz. They married after her father’s first wife was murdered there, as was her mother’s first husband and daughter.

“I know so little. I’m so ashamed to say that,” Ms. Kirschner told me over Zoom from her New Jersey beach club in July. Asking questions, she said, “just wasn’t the thing to do. We knew it would bring tears, so we let it go. We didn’t want to hurt them. My mother always used to say in Yiddish, ‘I hope my suffering will never happen to my children and their children because we paid the price for you.’ It was heavy thing, as a kid.”

One afternoon while I was in the midst of researching, my sister texted that she remembered cleaning out our father’s office after he died and finding two letters written by my grandfather after he left Paris, but before he had escaped France. They were in an unmarked box along with a checkbook from the now-defunct Chemical Bank and my grandfather’s membership card to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Dated May 12 and May 22, 1940, the month France surrendered to Germany, the letters were written in Yiddish to my grandmother, father and aunt. The first letter was sent from Balan, France, just outside Lyon, and the second from a French town that an uncle, who translated the letters years ago, spelled in English as “Barkares.”

I have since had the letters translated by Beatrice Lang, a Ph.D. and Yiddish lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. In the first letter my grandfather wrote, “I see that Mother is quite nervous … just like everyone.” He tells his children about a little yellow canary that told him how well the children go to sleep with a kiss for their mother. In the next paragraph he writes, “Each day come crazy Hitler’s war planes.”

In the second letter, he addressed his children as if he were on a glorious vacation. “And would you beautiful children want to travel to the sea? Here where I am is such a splendid sea. From a distance we see the silver waves throw themselves and run noisily and quickly to the shore.” But in another part, he told my grandmother, “It would be a good thing to go.” He added, “Probably we will leave here at the end of the week but it is not yet certain.”

The sobering message about escape meant for my grandmother sent shivers down my spine. I had to find this French town near the sea.

It wasn’t difficult: Barcares (in the town of Le Barcares) was a French internment camp, operating from 1939 to 1943, which held leftist soldiers who’d fought for the losing side of the Spanish Civil War and illegally crossed into France to escape General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. It was, indeed, right along the Mediterranean Sea, not far from the southeastern city of Perpignan. But it was nearly 100 miles from the celebrated Freedom Trail that I was planning to climb in a matter of weeks. I felt like Indiana Jones when he realized in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” that the Nazis were missing key pieces of information in their search for the Ark of the Covenant. “They’re digging in the wrong place!”

A new direction

Unexamined history lies in wait for someone to shine a light on it. When France named only one “official” escape route over the Pyrenees, they left in the shadows what I would soon learn to be many more “chemins.” I needed a different kind of mountain guide to understand why the map and my family history seemed so at odds, and reached out to Josep Calvet, a Spanish historian who grew up in a small town in the Pyrenees and has written several books about the mountain crossings. As he explained to me over a cross-continental Zoom (withtranslating help from my fluent-in-Spanish ex-boyfriend), the Chemin de la Liberté was just one of many paths along the 270-mile-long mountain range. (The historian Peter Black of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the number at 125 to 200.) My grandfather would never have crossed the Chemin de la Liberté in 1940, Dr. Calvet continued, and not just because it was way too far from Barcares. At that point in the war, there would have been no reason to incur the risks of a more treacherous route.

The Chemin de la Liberté only became a popular — if harrowing and dangerous — route in 1942. During the preceding two years, the Vichy government gradually implemented antisemitic laws like Le Statut des Juifs (The Status Law of Jews), barring Jewish people from roles in French society. The more restrictive life became, the more clandestine and perilous the escapes. Early on, the Pyrenees were less patrolled than they would soon be, and therefore, lower and easier paths, some along the Mediterranean coast, were used. But by late 1942, anyone trying to escape had to climb higher and higher to evade the Nazis, who were by then controlling the region, and had brought in Austrian alpine skiers and tracking dogs to find escapees.

Unlike my family, some refugees felt comfortable sharing their stories, and Holocaust museums around the world have documented these accounts. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the written and video testimonials include that of one survivor named Michel Margosis, who wrote how his mother spent the equivalent of $40,000 to pay for a guide to take his family across the mountains. Another refugee, Sarah Engelhard, gave video testimony to the Montreal Holocaust Museum about her 1942 crossing and recalled how her guide said, “If you can keep up, you keep up. If you don’t, you’re left behind. It’s the law of the animal.”

I spent hours reading, listening and watching these and other stories, each revealing its own unique horror, and longed to hear the particular details from my own relatives. Who guided them and were there others who escaped with them? What shoes did they wear and what plants bloodied my father’s legs? And, of course, what exactly was their route?

Dr. Calvet was confident that in 1940 my grandfather, and subsequently my father, would have been able to take a comparatively easy route over the lower Pyrenees along the Mediterranean coast. Before our call ended, he asked why my grandfather had been in Barcares. I told him what I’d always been told, that he was in an internment camp. The historian was skeptical.

He sent me an email several weeks later. “Your grandfather was part of a regiment of foreign volunteers (mostly Polish) that trained in Barcares,” the email read. “He enlisted in the Foreign Legion (French army unit) doing military training. He was not a prisoner.” Dr. Calvet attached a scan of a typed ledger page with names and birth dates. There it was, under line 5403: Josef Szajbowicz, a name that would turn into José in Cuba and Joe in the United States.

It started to feel like a thousand puzzle pieces had been poured onto a table, without any promise that, with work and patience, a clear picture would emerge. Why would my grandfather join the Foreign Legion and then leave? Did his family know? I contacted Holocaust scholars who might know something I couldn’t. Peter Black, of the Holocaust Museum, told me, “My guess would be he was looking for any option to get out and the Foreign Legion was one option. He could fight on from the colonies in French Central Africa or Morocco. And then an opportunity came up to go across the border.”

Aliza Luft, a sociology professor with University of California, Los Angeles, whose research examines the violence against Jews during the Holocaust, raised even more questions. “It was pretty rare for people to cross that early on,” she said. “Your grandfather had to have had remarkable foresight and have had the knowledge of the paths and also the networks, which were largely run by Spanish exiles.”

The puzzle pieces started forming a picture. My grandfather’s younger brother, Szolim, had left Paris years earlier to fight alongside the socialists in the Spanish Civil War. His death during the war was announced in the Polish publication Wolna Młodzież. Could my great-uncle have introduced his brother to the network that saved my family?

Elated with that relatively small aha moment, I wondered if my father had sought out any of these details once he was old enough to understand what he had endured. Perhaps, like his cousin Sylvia, he was also conditioned to not ask, even though, or maybe because, many of his relatives had inner forearms branded with concentration camp numbers. So many others he never got to meet.

Butterflies on the trail

“That’s it?” I almost shouted.

I was still jet lagged from my flight from New York when I met up with Ms. Arran and her trekking company partner, Richard Prime, at the Perpignan train station in France, so I wasn’t sure if I’d heard them correctly. As Ms. Arran explained, the updated path, south of Barcares and along the Mediterranean, would take only two days and about 22 miles. We would be leaving in the morning from the town of Collioure for six to eight hours of hiking each day, camping along the way, and cross the border in Portbou, Spain. Unlike the Chemin de la Liberté, these lower Pyrenees would take us to an altitude of only about 3,200 feet. It felt almost wrong that I wouldn’t need to suffer more.

That afternoon, we drove to what remains of Barcares, now an abandoned, overgrown field full of unclaimed internment camp artifacts. I walked along the straight rows of what looked like the cement foundations of barracks and picked up a bullet casing and one of many rusted twists of barbed wire. Across the road was a large metal archway memorializing the Spanish Republicans once interned there, and farther out, the same silver waves my grandfather described in his letter. A man in a barely-there bikini ran down the beach with a rainbow kite trying to catch the wind. You could have easily driven past the scene without a second thought.

The following morning, I took the first step of the actual climb. The first hour or so, Ms. Arran and I shared the path with children, grandparents and every age in between who were taking a popular hike to the 13th-century fortress of Fort Saint-Elme. But as the day-trippers made their way down, Ms. Arran and I continued our climb and barely saw another soul until we arrived in Spain.

As the climb got steeper up to Puig de Sallfort, a flat mountain top, Ms. Arran told me stories about previous treks she’d led along the Chemin de la Liberté where out-of-shape hikers had to be rescued. This “walk,” as she called it, much to my huffing and puffing dismay, was so much easier, lower, shorter.

We flung ourselves down the afternoon’s final mountain meters to the Refugi Coll de Banyuls, a first-come-first-serve “refuge” that offered only a roof over our heads and wooden slats on which to lay sleeping bags. We were greeted by Mr. Prime, who had arrived with beer and bags of dehydrated Indian-spiced chicken and rice. (The refuge can also be reached by dirt road.) I did some downward dogs on Ms. Arran’s insistence so my muscles wouldn’t cramp up overnight and drifted off to sleep to the sounds of mice scurrying nearby.

The next morning I came across a nearby plaque memorializing the Spanish soldiers who had escaped over these mountains to France, with a map detailing different paths taken, written in French, Spanish, Catalan and English. A few yards away lay a large stone with words engraved in French, a “tribute to the thousands of Republican men, women, and children … who had to go into exile after three years of war against Francoism,” according to one translation. “They were the precursors of the antifascist struggle in Europe.”

That last sentence was the only mention of any further continental fascism. While there was plenty of information to be had about those seeking refuge in France, there was none about those fleeing the dangers within the country’s borders. The very same mountain trails that had been crossed from south to north in 1939 were taken north to south just one year later. Different dictators, different directions.

Our second day’s hike, from Coll de Banyuls up to Coll de Rumpissa, was so steep that Ms. Arran walked in front of me and Mr. Prime behind. We climbed past wild boar droppings until the well-marked trail gradually disappeared and we had to use our hiking poles to whack aside thorny branches. The long, pointy spines tore my pants and dug bloody stripes into my skin. Desperate to feel as if I’d uncovered some truth, I convinced myself these were the same wild plants that scratched and bloodied my father’s legs. The magical thinking didn’t stop there.

After my father died of brain cancer in September 2003, a bright orange butterfly had flown over the hearse carrying his body from my childhood home. Other than a few suburban cul-de-sac streetlamps, it was dark — not the usual conditions for a diurnal insect. In my broken state weeks after his death, I talked to a medium who told me that the butterfly was somehow my father and he would always appear to me in that form. Throughout my time in the Pyrenees, butterflies of all colors — orange, golden, brown, blue — floated and flitted in front of me as if they were cheering me on. A cynic would not be wrong in pointing out that 200 species of butterflies and 28 types of day-flying moths have been documented in those mountains.

It might have all gone another way

Our final destination in France was the mountaintop overlooking the Mediterranean village of Banyuls-sur-Mer, where we were to find a plaque memorializing Jewish passeur Lisa Fittko and the German-Jewish philosopher Water Benjamin, one of many refugees she guided over the Pyrenees in 1940 and 1941. In her memoir, “Escape Through the Pyrenees,” Ms. Fittko described that the route she would take over and over had views of “the incredibly blue sea and the mountain chain, on its slopes green vineyards with a hint of gold between them.”

As the story goes, Walter Benjamin famously insisted on carrying a suitcase that he said was worth more than his life. In September 1940 he crossed the border to Portbou, precisely where I was headed, and a day later, he was found dead in his hotel room. (The suitcase was never found.) Historians believe he overdosed on morphine pills after finding out that Nazi-sympathizing Spaniards were going to send him back to France.

My grandfather and subsequently my father likely crossed around the same time. One different turn, the wrong train car, the wrong person’s attention, and my father would not have made it through Spain, to Portugal and ultimately to Cuba. After six years in Havana, the family came to the United States on the SS Florida. The family name changed to Shaw, and my father went from Henri to Henry. As a 14-year-old, he was placed in second grade to learn English and eventually earned an M.B.A. and Ph.D., and became an early whistle blower about climate change. It all might have gone another way.

When Ms. Arran and I reached that final peak of the trek, the memorial to Ms. Fittko and Mr. Benjamin, the only acknowledgment along my route of the Jews who fled France, was gone. In its spot was only a rusty metal base. At one point, the memorial displayed a map of her exact route that saved generations to come, and marked a vantage point where France seamlessly blends into Spain. She might have been erased from the path completely were it not for a graffiteur with a blue marker who scrawled her name on a “Ruta Walter Benjamin” directional sign. (Why the path was named for him and not her is covered in your local Intro to Women’s Studies course.)

We worked our way down the mountain, until the trail abruptly turned into a paved road. Large blue signs marked where France ended and Spain began. In between them stood a memorial built to honor the 70th anniversary of Spanish Republicans who crossed into France. Crossing the border in silence, I was in Portbou. With a small pebbled beach and a handful of outdoor restaurants offering similar takes on sangria and patatas bravas, it’s a town not quite picturesque enough to be a tourist destination.

I’ll never know for sure what my father saw when he first crossed into Spain. But I hope it looked like safety.

Before meeting up with Ms. Arran and Mr. Prime for celebratory cava that night, I went for a quick swim. Children took gleeful cannonball jumps off an old wooden dock and Spanish pop music blared from a boisterous group sprawled out on their towels. In the sea I floated on my back with closed eyes, the warm salt water stinging my scratched and bloody legs.

Jessica Shaw is a journalist and the host of “The Pop Culture Spotlight,” a daily audio show about entertainment on SiriusXM.

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