Fleeing Hitler

Paquita Sitzer said that the only thing she remembers of the night in October 1942 after hours and hours of crossing the Pyrenees on foot to escape the Nazis and find freedom, was that it was very cold. This and windows. “I remember I opened a window with both hands because they were wooden shutters, something I had never seen before.” Now, when she opens shutters, she thinks of that.

Sitzer has been in Barcelona for the premiere of the documentary Perseguits i Salvats (Persecuted and Saved), which recounts the odyssey of the approximately 10,000 Jewish refugees who between 1939 and in 1944 fled the Holocaust and the French collaborationists across the Pyrenees. The film, with the story of the protagonists and their descendants, premiered on Thursday at MACBA and today at 10pm will be shown on the xarxa.cat network as well as El Punt Avui TV.

Paquita was five when she, her parents and brother crossed the Pyrenees fleeing the Nazis with a woman from Latvia and one other person. She cannot remember. She can remember only a few things, or things her parents later told her, such as being stopped by a Guardia Civil in Madrid who did not know what to do with them and in the confusion, giving them time to escape. Or perhaps her father bribed him. She is not sure.

Many were arrested here and ended up back in concentration camps, but they were able to get to Barcelona, and then on to Vigo and from there they travelled by ship to Venezuela. “I remember almost nothing of the trip, but they were almost all refugees. When they arrived in Venezuela they said they were Orthodox, as Jews were not welcome.

Originally from Poland, her parents escaped the Nazis there and went to France. At first things went well but once the Nazis invaded, her father was sent to a concentration camp but escaped. The family fled.

In Venezuela Sitzer met her future husband, a Jew also, from Argentina, and then settled and raised a family of her own in the US. In freedom.