On a sunny, crisp October morning in 1941, Jordi Pujol, 11, set out on a trek with his uncle, Narcis Pujol, and a friend. The two men, who had braved the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and made it out of prison, were eager to stretch their limbs and climb up to Tagamanent, a tiny hamlet in Catalonia that they had once visited. When they hiked to the mountaintop, they found the old stone church destroyed, the farms around it abandoned and wrecked. "It is going to take years to rebuild all of that," Pujol remembers one of the men lamenting as they sat amid the rubble in disbelief. "I never...
