Stolperstein for Bonaventura Casal Farràs

The Stolperstein for Bonaventura Casal Farràs is a small brass-topped stone set into the pavement in front of Ca l’Aern, his family home in La Margineda. Installed on 6 May 2025, it recalls a man born in 1911 who was arrested in France in 1943, deported through Compiègne to Buchenwald and registered there as prisoner 40,493. Casal survived the camp’s liberation but died from diphtheria on 10 June 1945, after being taken to a hospital in Bavaria. The marker is an outdoor memorial at a residential historic house, not a museum or a place where visitors can enter the family home. Its short inscription links a specific household in La Margineda to the history of Nazi deportation.

The stone’s placement is part of its meaning. A Stolperstein, literally a “stumbling stone,” places an individual name and fate at the pavement outside a former home. Rather than gathering everyone into a single monument, each brass surface asks passers-by to pause over one person’s life. At Ca l’Aern, the marker brings the history of a wartime deportee back to the place from which his family and neighbours would have known him. The stone lies low in the pavement, so it is easy to overlook if you walk quickly or search only at eye level. Slow down before the house and read the inscription without blocking the path.

Casal’s wartime story began with an attempt to help another family. According to an account given by his son Jean-Claude at the memorial’s installation, Bonaventura worked in Béziers and sometimes returned to La Margineda. In March 1943, a French acquaintance asked him to help the acquaintance’s son avoid compulsory labour service. They travelled towards the Pyrenees and joined an Andorran guide who was to help them cross the border. The guide went ahead to check whether the crossing was safe, returned to say it was not, and the group went back. German forces captured them at Les Cabanes. The guide escaped; Casal and the others were taken into custody.

The route through the camp system is better documented than the first prison where Casal was held. A local historical report says that it is uncertain whether he was interned at Foix or Toulouse. By January 1944 he was at Compiègne, the transit camp from which he was deported to Buchenwald. There he received prisoner number 40,493 and worked officially as a gardener. He survived about a year and a half in the camp, which was liberated in April 1945. After liberation he was taken to a hospital in Landshut, Bavaria, to recover before repatriation to France; he died there from diphtheria. This distinction matters: the stone commemorates a deportee who survived liberation but did not live to return home, rather than a person recorded as murdered inside Buchenwald.

The inscription names Bonaventura Casal Farràs and Ca l’Aern, gives 1911 as his birth year and records arrest in 1943, internment at Compiègne, deportation to Buchenwald, liberation and death on 10 June 1945. The visible wording is necessarily abbreviated. It cannot convey the uncertainty over his first prison, the attempted border crossing, his work in the camp or the family correspondence he managed to send. A short preparation before arriving can help make sense of the concise text; local history work by Roser Porta and Jorge Cebrián and reporting from the installation ceremony provide fuller context.

Ca l’Aern stands in La Margineda, a settlement south of Andorra la Vella near the route towards Sant Julià de Lòria. The area is not a purpose-built memorial park. The stone is flush with the street surface beside a historic family house, with ordinary residential and road activity around it. Visitors should approach on foot from a safe public pavement, avoid stepping onto private property and never stop in the carriageway to photograph the marker. If traffic, street works or parked vehicles prevent a considerate visit, return at a quieter time rather than entering a restricted area. There is no ticket, visitor desk, indoor exhibition or separate memorial opening schedule.

Allow a few minutes to find and read the marker. The surrounding neighbourhood and nearby Pont de la Margineda can be included in a longer walk, but they are separate places with their own histories. The bridge is a prominent medieval crossing over the Valira, whereas the Stolperstein belongs to the intimate domestic scale of a doorstep memorial. Do not describe the stone as being at the bridge or as a general marker for the whole La Margineda community. Its exact association is with Ca l’Aern and Bonaventura Casal.

Because this is a residential memorial, a quiet and restrained visit is appropriate. Read the brass surface without touching, polishing or placing objects on it, and give residents room to use the entrance and pavement. Photography from the public way is possible if it does not obstruct anyone, but the location should not be treated as a backdrop. The purpose of the stone is to restore a name and a place to a history that once reduced a person to a camp number. Seeing number 40,493 alongside the house name makes the distance between family life and the machinery of deportation tangible without requiring a large monument or visitor building.

The Stolperstein forms part of a wider Andorran effort to identify and commemorate residents deported to Nazi concentration camps. Other stones in the project commemorate different people at their own homes, and their stories should not be collapsed into one generic account. Casal’s route through Compiègne and Buchenwald, his liberation and his death from illness after the war are specific to him. A visit is brief, but it connects La Margineda with a history that crossed borders and continued after the camp gates opened. Treat the marker as both a historical source with carefully limited wording and a place of remembrance tied to a real family home.