The Impostor Page 11
This was the case with Marco. Our man travelled to Germany with the primary aim of avoiding (or deferring) his military service, and the secondary goal of earning a living in a country that was winning the war. In theory, one of the fundamental conditions for being hired by a German company was having completed military service, or having been exempted from it; with Marco, for whatever reason, this didn’t apply, or he succeeded in duping the Spanish authorities once again: in all likelihood the authorities considered him politically sympathetic or harmless, while the German companies were likely impressed by his youth, his energy and above all his skills as a mechanic (metalworkers being among their priorities), because the fact is that on November 27, 1941, a two-year contract with the Deutsche Werke Werft tucked under his arm, Marco boarded a train at Estación Norte in Barcelona, to join the first convoy of workers and begin his German adventure.
* * *
—
Was that all? In the first two years after the Civil War was Marco merely a politically innocuous young man, an anarchist hastily converted to fascism (there is not a single piece of information nor a single witness statement to corroborate such a conjecture)? Was he simply one of the vast majority of the defeated who accepted without protest the barbarous, abject, claustrophobic life imposed by the victors? Or was there a part of him that did not conform? Did he harbour, deep inside, some vestige of anti-fascist consciousness, some residual spirit of resistance or civic courage? Did Marco have any contact with anti-Franco groups after all? Could he have done so despite living a normal life, or the semblance of a normal life? Can I leave him something? Can I leave him the U.J.A.? Did Marco belong to the U.J.A. or have any contact with it?
The history of the U.J.A. is extraordinary. It is a tiny episode that remained buried in the mass grave of resistance to Franco for sixty years until 1997 when it was exhumed by two young local historians, Juanjo Gallardo and José María Martínez; even today, the story is little known. In late January 1939, with two months to go before the end of the Civil War, but some days after Barcelona fell into Franco’s hands, a group of Catalan boys decided they would not accept defeat. Some had fought with the Republican army, many were militant members of Juventudes Libertarias, all were very young: the eldest was twenty-three, the youngest, fifteen, but most were seventeen or eighteen; they came from all walks of life: day labourers, glassworkers, farmhands, accountants, tailors, electricians, railway workers, grocery boys, bakers, shop assistants and even three schoolboys. The nucleus of the U.J.A. was based in Santa Coloma de Gramanet but the organisation later spread to Sant Andrià del Besós and had ambitions to expand to other suburbs of Barcelona, and to Barcelona itself. The word “organisation” may be an overstatement: though it did have a basic structure, with geographical divisions and section leaders, in reality the U.J.A. was just a gang of boys who met in their parents’ houses and who, during its brief existence, with derisory means and dauntless courage, authored, printed and distributed pamphlets calling for revolution, struck a blow against a garrison of Italian fascists, planned acts of sabotage against infrastructure and robbed infamous supporters of Franco, redistributing the money to help anti-Franco families in dire financial straits. The U.J.A., however, was short lived: it ended on May 30, 1939, scarcely three months after it began. This was the day of the raid (during which, according to the summary later released to members, “a typewriter, five pistols, three rifles, a grenade and various munitions were seized”), and on January 2 of the following year, a military tribunal tried the twenty-one members of the organisation and a further seven people; with the exception of three, who had not yet turned seventeen and were referred to the juvenile courts, all of the others were convicted: five were sentenced to death (though only one was actually executed), eight to life imprisonment, two to twenty years in prison, four to fifteen years and two to six years. And so, while everyone—willingly or unwillingly—was saying Yes, there were people who said No, people who did not comply, who did not surrender, who did not meekly endure the opprobrium, the indecency and the humiliation that was the lot of the defeated. They were a tiny minority, but it existed. For almost six decades their names were forgotten, so it does not seem out of place to remember them here. Honour to the brave: Pedro Gómez Segado, Miquel Colás Tamborero, Julia Romera Yáñez, Joaquín Miguel Montes, Juan Ballesteros Román, Julio Meroño Martínez, Joaquim Campeny Pueyo, Manuel Campeny Pueyo, Fernando Villanueva, Manuel Abad Lara, Vicente Abad Lara, José González Catalán, Bernabé García Valero, Jesús Cárceles Tomás, Antonio Beltrán Gómez, Enric Vilella Trepat, Ernesto Sánchez Montes, Andreu Prats Mallarín, Antonio Asensio Forza, Miquel Planas Mateo and Antonio Fernández Vallet.
Was Marco one of those clandestine adolescent heroes? Did Marco belong to the U.J.A.? For many years, he claimed he did: insistently; he claimed as much to me, with the same insistence, and in fact this was one of the details of his past we argued about most heatedly during our encounters, and which it took me the most effort to clarify. It hardly needs saying that, knowing the normal life or the semblance of a normal life that Marco was leading during the brief existence of the U.J.A., his incomparable talent for lying, his passion for appropriating the heroic past of others, at first I did not believe a word; moreover, as I investigated, the evidence that he hadn’t been a member of the U.J.A. became more conclusive. Why then did I come to think that Marco may have belonged to the U.J.A., or may have had some contact with the U.J.A.? There are two reasons: the first is that, almost twenty years before Juanjo Gallardo and José María Martínez unearthed the history of this precocious little anti-Franco group, Marco had already recounted his time with them, and indeed described it in some detail, in the first, brief account of his life published by Pons Prades in 1978; the second is Antonio Fernández Vallet. According to Marco, he had been a friend since childhood, a volunteer, like him, on the Segre front during the war, and his sponsor at the U.J.A.; meanwhile, according to the summary records of the trial, Vallet had been a member of the U.J.A., had held the role of Secretary for Propaganda and had been sentenced to fifteen years in gaol for it. Could Marco have told the story of Fernández Vallet and the U.J.A. at a time when no-one knew them or everyone had forgotten them, without being a member of the U.J.A.? Or was his membership in the U.J.A. the little truth Marco used to shore up the lies of his early post-war period—the little epic poem with which he tried to colour the pedestrian prose of his life—just as his time on the Segre front was the little truth he had used to shore up his lies about the war?
It was a tempting theory. However, the evidence suggesting that Marco was not a member of the U.J.A. gradually came to seem more solid, more conclusive. His name doesn’t appear in the trial records of the military tribunal, this despite the fact that members of the U.J.A. had been interrogated and tortured with savage brutality—in one case, fatally—and it seems improbable that, in such circumstances, young men of seventeen or eighteen, to say nothing of boys of fifteen, would have held their tongue. Furthermore, none of the surviving members of the U.J.A. ever mentioned Marco in any of their numerous oral and written statements, whether in interviews or more or less fictionalised accounts, and none of them ever stated that the U.J.A., despite its initial intentions, ever extended beyond Santa Coloma and Sant Andreu, nor did the young historians who uncovered its history, who are prepared to stake their reputations on that fact that all of the members of the U.J.A. were arrested and tried by the military tribunal. All of this is common sense, especially when one considers that the U.J.A. was broken up while still at an embryonic stage and, with little infrastructure, scant means and few members, couldn’t even dream of setting up a cell or a sector in the capital. Faced with this evidence, I tackled Marco repeatedly during our meetings, attempted to show him that his story didn’t fit the available facts and implored him over and over, with the usual arguments, to tell me the truth (the most common argument, which also proved the most effective: if he didn’t tell me the truth, Benito Ber
mejo would eventually find out). Until finally one morning in September 2013, while we were having coffee on a little square in Collblanc, having spent the morning in a vain search for Bartolomé Martínez, his first apprentice mechanic, Marco gave in: in a tortuous and convoluted manner he finally admitted, almost as though it didn’t matter, as though he weren’t admitting it, that he had not been a member of the U.J.A.
What, then, is the truth? Did Marco have some connection with the U.J.A.? Or was it a complete fabrication? This is what I have now pieced together, or what I now imagine happened: Marco did know Fernández Vallet: they had been childhood friends in La Trinidad, they shared the same political ideals, they had met on the front lines or on the way to the front. Just after the war in Catalonia, when Fernández Vallet was involved in setting up the U.J.A., the two friends met again, perhaps in La Trinidad (but not, despite what Marco says, at his grandmother’s funeral: according to the Barcelona public records, Marco’s paternal grandmother, whose name was Isabel Casas, passed away on May 15, 1940, almost a year before the U.J.A. came into existence). Fernández Vallet talked to Marco about the U.J.A., probably showed him a leaflet; perhaps he suggested Marco join the group and Marco refused out of fear, out of caution or a mixture of both, or perhaps Fernández Vallet never made the suggestion and Marco had no need to refuse. What is certain is that this must have been all there was to it. Marco went back to his in-laws’ house, to his wife, his child, his job in Felip Homs’ workshop, to his normal life or his semblance of a normal life, and didn’t think about the U.J.A. again until, days or weeks later, he chanced to hear that its members had been arrested. As for Fernández Vallet, in this version, he didn’t refuse to give up Marco’s name when he was interrogated, adding this act of bravery to his bravery in setting up the U.J.A.: Marco wasn’t a member of the U.J.A., and therefore no-one could give him up. Whatever the case, years later, in the early 1950s, Marco knew that Fernández Vallet had been released from prison. At the time, Marco himself was going through a rough patch. It didn’t occur to him that his old friend from la Trinidad might need his help; on the contrary, although he didn’t dare meet up with him, for fear of being seen with a communist recently released from gaol, he sent someone to ask Fernández Vallet whether he could give Marco money. The request made no sense: Fernández Vallet was a pariah, he was ill and lacked resources; it was he who needed a hand. I don’t know whether anyone gave it to him, but he and Marco never met again, and the former leader of the U.J.A. died shortly afterwards. And when, in the late 1970s, Marco began to fashion for himself a past as a resistance fighter, he appropriated this episode and cast himself as a fictional militant in the U.J.A., its fictional brains and the leader of its fictional Barcelona cell.
This is the truth. This is what happened, or what I assume or imagine happened. Marco did not belong to the minority, but to the majority. He could have said No, but he said Yes; he surrendered, he resigned himself, he gave up, he accepted the barbarous, abject, claustrophobic life imposed by the victors. He wasn’t proud of it, or at least as of a certain date he wasn’t proud of it, nor is he proud of it now, and that is why he lied. Marco is not a symbol of exceptional decency and honour in defeat, but of everyday indecency and degradation. He is an ordinary man. This is no reason to reproach him, obviously, except that he attempted to pass himself off as a hero. He was not. No-one is obliged to be a hero. This is why heroes are heroes: this is why they are a tiny minority. The glory goes to Fernández Vallet and his comrades.
12
And so we come to Germany. We come to the smouldering heart of Marco’s deception: I don’t know whether it is his worst (or his best), but it is the lie that made him famous, the one that led to his unmasking. From the moment he first began fashioning a fictitious past for himself as an anti-fascist resistance fighter and a victim of the Nazi camps, Marco told the fabricated story of his deportation on countless occasions, in countless different versions and with countless different anecdotes, details and hues; it would be absurd, and probably impossible, to attempt to summarise all of them, but neither absurd nor impossible to recount the two on which Marco’s deception was based, those from which the sham of his time as a prisoner in Flossenbürg blossomed like a tree.
I have already mentioned them on several occasions, because they contain the essence of Marco’s German lie. Both are fake biographies of Marco, the most extensive published about him; they appear in two of only a small handful of books—at least at the time they were published—on the subject of Spanish prisoners of the Nazi camps; both include various fabricated biographies of camp members: the first, published in 1978, the work of a prolific libertarian writer and contemporary of Marco named Pons Prades, was written in Spanish and entitled The Kommandant’s Pigs (the book was written in collaboration with a communist survivor of the camps, Maríano Constante); the second, published in 2002, the work of a young Catalan reporter named Jordi Bassa, is written in Catalan and entitled A Memoir of Hell (this book was a collaboration with a young photographer, Jordi Ribó). The two biographies are similar: both begin with the heroic and dishonest version of Marco’s Civil War adventures and his departure from Spain, and both, to shore up a lie, mix lies with truth, but the two also differ, and not simply in specific details. Pons Prades’ biography is narrated by Marco and was published when our man had not yet been to Flossenbürg and knew very little about the Nazi camps and when many Spanish survivors of the camps were still alive, and so Marco lies tactfully and concisely; on the other hand, Bassa’s biography, written in the third person, was published when there were few Spanish survivors of the Nazi camps and when Marco, who by now was a member of the Amical de Mauthausen, had visited Flossenbürg, and had read up on concentration camps in general and on Flossenbürg in particular, believed that there were no remaining survivors of Flossenbürg, and so he lies liberally and easily.
“I spent very little time in Flossenbürg,” Marco prudently begins his lie in Pons Prades’ text, “and since I was transferred from one place to another and was kept in solitary confinement, I could not make contact with anyone.” As the story gradually moves away from Flossenbürg, he throws caution to the wind, or almost, and here begins the epic, the local colour, the discreet heroic attributions and even a certain degree of patriotism, this last being a rare quality in Marco: “I was finally able to breathe a little,” Marco continues, “in the satellite camp of Neumünster, near Hamburg, where we suffered terrible air raids by the British, dropping phosphorous bombs, in which hundreds of thousands of Germans died. Since no-one really knew whether these bombs had a delayed effect, we, the prisoners of the various camps around the port, were the first people to be sent in to dig through the rubble and pile human remains onto trucks. It was here I met another Spaniard, he was from Andalucía. We were the only Spanish prisoners in Neumünster, but we simply joined an international resistance organisation set up by the French and the Latvians, in which there were also Belgians, Poles, Italians and Germans (those imprisoned during the early days of the Nazi regime, in 1933, ’34 and ’35). The Poles were the youngest, since their older compatriots had been so badly beaten that they resigned themselves to death with startling apathy. This is something I never observed among the Spanish. Well, in general, because some of them also succumbed to despair.”
Up to this point in Marco’s story (or Marco’s story as reproduced or re-created by Pons Prades), the lie is made up entirely of lies; from this point on, there are also truths: “Just when I thought they would not bother me any more, the Gestapo came one day and took me to the prison in Kiel, and that was when the trouble started again. I believed—and I really mean this—that my hour had come. I spent eight months in complete isolation and learned German thanks to the light—which burned twenty-four hours a day—and a bilingual Protestant Bible in Latin and German. It was in Kiel that we found out the Franco regime had sent several groups of Falangists and Requetés—Carlist militiamen—to Nazi Germany who agre
ed to go into prisons and concentration camps to act as informants. During one of the first interrogations the Gestapo subjected me to in Kiel, two such Spaniards appeared and openly accused me of being one of the leaders of the resistance movement in Neumünster. One was a Catalan, the other was from Valladolid. The name of the first man was—is, because he is still alive and living in Martorell—Jaume Poch, he was from Ponts, Lérida; the other was called José Rebollo. The first was a Requeté, the second a Falangist. Because of their testimony I was brought before a military tribunal charged with conspiring against the Third Reich. Next to me was a Brazilian, a merchant seaman named Lacerda da Silva, who had been arrested in Hamburg when Brazil declared war on Germany. He was a cheerful lad. I was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, a sentence I only partly served since, in May 1945, Canadians from the North American army liberated Kiel and I regained my freedom.”