The Impostor Read online

  Truth and lies: it is true that Marco was imprisoned in Kiel gaol, that he spent some time in solitary confinement, and that he learned some German, possibly from a bilingual Bible, but it is not true that he had been a deportado—in fact he was a volunteer worker—or that he was sent to Kiel prison from Neumünster—in fact he was sent from Kiel itself, from the camp built for volunteer workers in Wattembeck by the Deutsche Werke Werft—or that he was in solitary confinement for eight months—in fact he was in solitary for barely five days. It is true that he was arrested based on accusations by two Spaniards named Jaume Poch and José Robledo (not Rebollo), but it is a lie that he was charged with conspiring against the Third Reich for organising a resistance movement in Neumünster concentration camp—in fact he was accused of high treason, but only for badmouthing the Nazis and praising the Soviets to his co-workers at the Deutsche Werke Werft; it is also a lie that he was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour—in fact he was acquitted of all charges levelled against him. It may be true that he met a Brazilian sailor named Lacerda or Lacerta or Lacerte da Silva. His account of his departure from Germany at the end of the war and his return to Spain is sheer fantasy: “I was issued with a safe-conduct pass to get back to France, where I was sent to a rest home. When I left there, in 1946, I once again joined the clandestine struggle in Spain.” The account by Pons Prades (or the account that Pons Prades attributes to Marco) concludes with a fireworks display of the special effects characteristic of Marco’s fictions: a sentimental Roman Candle, a psychological one and finally an epic flare; all blanks, obviously, all false. “One of the things that saved me while I was in solitary confinement in Kiel,” says Marco, “was listening to the cries of the gulls and the voices of the warders’ children playing in the courtyard outside. I told myself: while gulls still glide over the sea and children still play, all is not lost. Since I was young, the after effects of my time in the camp quickly disappeared. But one thing that marked me for many years, when I was out in the street and I would focus on the pace of someone walking in front of me, was that I felt compelled to fall into step. The other thing that saved me was immediately plunging back into the fray. The underground resistance in the confederate militia in Spain in the late 1940s was thrilling. But that is another story.”

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  Bassa’s account is longer and more detailed than that of Pons Prades; it is also, to a great degree, more clearly false, more lacking in truth. According to this account, Marco was not deported to Flossenbürg from France as claimed in the false account of Pons Prades, but to Kiel, where he was sentenced to forced labour in the city’s dockyards and where, without wasting a minute, he set up a clandestine information network and organised acts of sabotage (all of which is equally false). The differences between the two accounts of Marco’s time in Kiel are not substantive, but anecdotal: in Bassa’s version, for example, there is greater emphasis on Marco’s courage and dignity as he endured the interrogations of the Gestapo after his imprisonment, the fictitious eight months of solitary confinement in Pons Prades’ version become nine months, and the fictitious sentence of hard labour handed down by the military tribunal becomes a no-less-fictitious sentence of deportation to a concentration camp. It is here that fundamental differences between the two accounts emerge: while in Pons Prades’ version, Marco dispatched his time in Flossenbürg with a single oblique sentence, Bassa’s version runs to several pages, larded with sentimental heroic fantasies. Below, I have translated these pages from the Catalan, preserving the third person narration, with minimal changes, cuts and interruptions, beginning with the melodramatic scene when, one night in the dead of winter, in an unknown railway station, Marco is waiting for the train that is to take him to the concentration camp:

  “It was cold, very cold. He did not know what day it was. The nine months of solitary confinement had left him disoriented and he had lost all track of time. It must have been January or February, because it was not long since the Germans had celebrated New Year. Trembling and constipated, he felt alone, utterly alone. He was surrounded by dozens of people who, like him, were waiting for a train. But really he was alone. The train arrived and the soldiers forced them to climb into the wagons. As he was about to board, Enric realised that there was no room, but hardly had he made a move to descend than the soldiers brutally shoved him. He was pressed against two other prisoners, face to face, breath to breath, skin to skin…They were packed in like animals. The doors were closed and the train pulled away. Soon, the smell became unbearable. The stench of urine and the defecations of the weakest prisoners was so pervasive that many vomited. It was all pitifully repellent. And so it remained for the two days and two nights. It was a long journey of stops and starts. The train would come to a halt to allow military convoys to pass, and inside the wagons, everyone hoped that they had finally reached their destination and the doors would open. But no. The train would start up again and the torture continued.

  “When, inside the wagons, they heard the noise of the train coming to a complete stop and the engine being shut off, Enric peered through a crack in the slats and saw the name of the station: Flossenbürg. The doors were opened, allowing the icy air to rush into the wagons, which triggered much jostling. Everyone wanted to breathe fresh air, and elbowed those around them for a breath of this long-awaited purity. Pushed by their fellow travellers, the prisoners closest to the doors tumbled out and many were trampled. It was grotesque. Screams and whimpers. Moans and curses. They were like a herd of wild beasts set loose, a human tide surging forward until, suddenly, the course of the tide was reversed: the SS officers on the platform began to bludgeon those who had fallen, while dogs attacked anything that moved. Immediately, people scrambled to climb back into the wagons. The jostling between those trying to get out and those trying to get back in prompted more falls. And the SS were everywhere. Punches, kicks, whips, bites.

  “Raus! Raus! Aufrichten! Aufrichten scheibe dür! [Out! Out! On your feet! On your feet…!]

  “Raus! Raus! Im reihe! Im reihe! [Out! Out! Line up! Line up!]—roared one of the SS officers while the dogs barked as though they were rabid. Many people died right there, because they were so weak that, with four blows, the SS officers finished them off. Terrified, Enric began to march, in groups of five, in the direction indicated by the SS. Everything was covered in snow and, enfeebled by the darkness of the wagons, the prisoners’ eyes found it difficult to adjust and focus on their surroundings. It was a relief that the sun had set because, if it had not, the glare would have been blinding.

  “When they reached the concentration camp, they were forced to remove all their clothing before entering the cold showers. They were pushed inside by SS officers, whose thirst for violence seemed insatiable. Some of those who had travelled in the wagon were brutally beaten simply because they did not understand German.

  “Achtung! Da links! Da links! [Attention! Left turn! Left turn!]

  “Orders were constantly barked and anyone who did not understand was hit with a rifle butt which, according to the soldier’s humour, could be followed by a rain of blows. Some were fatally wounded in these absurd beatings. Enric immediately realised that, if he was to survive, he had to be careful to stay as far as possible from the SS officers and instantly obey every order. A moment of inattention could cost you your life. This was when he understood that this was his fate. His punishment was Flossenbürg.”

  It is a classic scene: the arrival of prisoners at the concentration camps. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of survivors’ stories; they have been tirelessly re-created on film and in literature too. Marco reinvented the scene no less tirelessly in his conferences, his articles and his interviews. On January 27, 2005, for example, on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet troops, during a solemn ceremony at which, for the first time, the Spanish parliament paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and the almost nine thousand Spani
sh Republicans deported to the Nazi camps, Marco gave the following account: “When we reached the concentration camps in those hideous cattle trucks, we were stripped of our clothes and all our belongings were taken, not simply out of greed, but to leave us utterly naked, powerless: wedding rings, bracelets, photographs. Alone, helpless, left with nothing. Nothing that might remind you of the outside world, nothing that might remind you of the tenderness of a loved one, that might help you to go on living in the hope that you might feel it again. We were ordinary people, like you, but they stripped us, set their dogs on us, dazzled us with their searchlights, screamed at us in German Links-Rechts! [Left-Right!]. We could not understand anything, and failing to understand an order could cost you your life.”

  It was all a lie, of course. Marco had not experienced what he said he had experienced, but by 2005, he had been the president of the Amical de Mauthausen for two years and was the only survivor to speak in Parliament that day. The photographs of the event are unequivocal: Marco’s speech was greeted by astonished silence, many of those present were profoundly moved, including children and grandchildren of camp survivors; some people wept.

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  “The first barracks to which he was assigned was number eighteen”—Bassa’s account continues, or Marco’s account as rendered in Bassa’s prose—“and having spent three days in quarantine, he was sent to the quarries, the harshest work detail in the camp. No-one survived there for more than six months, so there was a constant rotation of labourers. Many prisoners collapsed from exhaustion and were summarily shot by the soldiers. And since no-one was allowed to pick them up or bury them, they had to load the bodies onto the hopper wagons leaving the quarry. As they reached the rim of the quarry, the SS officers separated those wagons destined for the granite silos from those headed for the furnaces. It was here that Enric understood Hitler’s ultimate objective: to create a superior race by making those who were excluded inferior. The Nazis wanted to create a subspecies, a race of slaves forever condemned to submit to the Aryans. He could see it clearly, because they were succeeding: all the prisoners suffered from a profound, crippling depression that led them to suicide or to apathy, which resulted in their summary execution. Enric had never seen anything like it: shattered people willingly choosing death because they were weary of dying every day when they awoke. Surrounded by desolation and anguish, he focused his energies on his conscience as a political prisoner, a resistance fighter. If he accepted the role of victim, he would be carried off by despair like so many other prisoners.

  “After three months working in the quarries, he received orders to join the group devoted to repairing the fuselage of aeroplanes. The Gestapo reports detailing his skills as a mechanic earned him this transfer. His kapo was a German named Anton. Screaming and beatings were commonplace, but Anton took no pleasure in them. In fact, his was a special group and required careful handling. Moreover, his transfer coincided with first warnings from the infirmary, highlighting the disproportionate mortality at Flossenbürg. The crematorium could not deal with them all, and productivity was much lower than orders from Berlin would have desired. The immediate result was that the SS officers relented a little on the absurd executions, killing only those they considered rebellious or malingering. Even so, the bodies hanging in the courtyard continued to provide the backdrop to the daily routine. They were not taken down until the purple flush of the first days had turned greenish.”

  Hanging bodies. Another classic trope of Nazi horror Marco liked to exploit in his fantasies. In an article published in June 2005 in El País, for example, he gave the following account: “In our last Christmas in the camp, in 1944, we requested permission to put up a Christmas tree, and on December 24, they hanged four Polish men from the illuminated tree.” That’s it.

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  “Pietr, a bitter, brutal Latvian,” continues Bassa, or Marco as voiced by Bassa, “was the kapo in Enric’s barracks. He always carried a club and he loved to administer punishment beatings, twenty-five strokes to the first person who gave him the slightest excuse. And no-one stood up for anyone. There were almost two hundred men in a barracks designed for fifty, but Enric felt very alone. There was no-one from Catalonia, and everyone was fighting to survive. He did not give up and managed to strike up conversations with a Frenchman, some Czechs, brave men who shared his spirit of resistance. It was impossible to count on the Russians, since they were exterminated in their hundreds as soon as they arrived in the camp. The Poles were gruff, abrasive loners and the Jews suffered more or less the same fate as the Russians: they did not last long.

  “Gradually, he managed to convince the Czechs and the French to help him collect small snippets from the newspapers they found when working with commandos outside the camp. The objective was to gather what little information they could about the war and maintain contact with the world outside the camp. And the network set to work. The next step consisted of stealing small quantities of coal in order to extend the hours during which they could fuel the barrack stoves, and at this point they began to connect with prisoners who worked as secretaries in the transfer offices. In this manner some of their own were able to avoid being sent to the final infirmary (where prisoners were executed by being injected with petrol), by arranging for documents to be mislaid or names changed. They were risking their lives, but by this point the SS were not interested in such details. They were so convinced that the prisoners were inferior that they believed it impossible that any of them should be intelligent. Consequently, ‘political’ surveillance was somewhat relaxed.

  “This is not something that Enric merely thought, it is something he suffered personally. One day, while he was playing chess with another prisoner, an SS officer wanted to challenge him. Obviously, Marco agreed, but within a few moves he had already captured the officer’s queen and checkmate was imminent. The officer flew into a rage and dashed the pieces to the ground and rolled up his sleeves. He wanted to arm wrestle. And obviously, he won. Not simply because Enric made no real effort, knowing that his life was at stake, but also because an SS officer was ten times stronger than any starving, emaciated prisoner. The situation did not escalate, but the conclusion Enric drew from this episode was that the German soldiers were convinced of their superiority and, when anyone or anything upset their plans, they resorted to violence in order to assert their supremacy. Enric saw violence as a last resort, while they saw it as the ultimate proof of their power. They would always win.”

  Not always. Sometimes Marco’s incredible courage and audacity not only frustrated the plans of the SS but, since they were no match for the heroic dignity of the Spanish prisoner, succeeded in defeating them. The story about the chess game is merely one example; it is also one of the greatest hits in Marco’s repertoire. The version given by Bassa is relatively restrained; the one broadcast on Catalan public television in 2004 is more elaborate (and rather different). It combined an oral account by Marco, moved almost to the point of tears by his invented memories, while offering a dramatic re-creation of the memorable (and memorably false) episode: the static footage of Marco against a black background was intercut with a travelling shot of a chessboard, the sombre chess pieces framed against the desolate background of a Nazi camp or a setting designed to mimic a Nazi camp, accompanied by a poignant, emotion-laden soundtrack. “That day,” Marco says in the report, “I was not so much playing chess with a friend, as teaching him to play, when I saw a shadow fall across the chessboard. I looked up and saw an SS officer, who kicked my comrade off his stool, pounded his fist on the table and ordered me to carry on playing. He wanted to best me, to prove once more that he was better than we were, better than I was; after all, who was I? A pathetic wretch, worse still, a Spaniard, a Latino, a Dago. And I played that game. And then I realised that, if I had to play the SS officer, I had to beat him and accept the consequences. And one by one I began capturing his pieces, he was no ma
tch for me. Then, at the end, I deliberately left him with only his king. I checkmated him, knocked over his king, though I was well aware what this might cost me. But this was the moment chosen for me, this was my moment, there was no way anyone could take it from me, and I believed that, whatever happened, I was once again a human being. That day, I reclaimed my dignity. I won the battle of Stalingrad.”

  Nor was this the only one, of course: in his heroic struggles against the Nazis—who invariably crumpled, crushed by his fearlessness and his generosity of spirit—he won many more battles. Here is one last example, also from a television report, before I return to Bassa’s story. It is taken from a programme broadcast on the Galician version of the History Channel; the set-up is less mawkish than the chess match, the background music less saccharine and Marco’s words are illustrated with images of genuine prisoners in genuine Nazi camps, but the protagonist’s performance is just as overblown (the gravelly voice, the solemn, noble gestures, the eyes moist with emotion), the moral of the tale just as didactic and self-aggrandising and, needless to say, the story just as false. “How did I come to save my life,” Marco asks himself as he begins his story, “when someone else, someone perhaps with less reason to lose his or have it taken from him (if reason exists to justify taking another’s life), could not? What really happened on the day an exemplary punishment was ordered because several lads from my barracks who worked outside the camp had been missing for a few hours? What happened when the SS officer came to select one man out of twenty-five to be executed and when, overcome by fear, I saw him approach and knew he was coming for me? When he came to me, he stopped, raised his forefinger and pointed. He did not say a word. All I know is that I raised my head and gave him the most appealing look I have ever given anyone. All I know is that he went on staring at me seriously; his lips barely moved, but he said: Der Spanier anderer Tag. The Spaniard another day. And he left.”