“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” With these words – today written at the entrance to block 4 of the Auschwitz camp – the philosopher and poet of Spanish origin George Santayana warned the world after the Second World War that whoever leaves the past behind does not learn from it. The phrase, not without controversy – there are many who question it -, however, acquires all its value when visiting some of the most relevant scenarios of our recent history through the lands of Roussillon, in Northern Catalonia.
In this region of the department of the Pyrenees-Orientales that borders the Empordà, half a million Spaniards landed in 1939 – its population was close to 250,000 inhabitants at that time – who were fleeing Franco’s repression at the end of the Civil War. Exhausted and hungry, they crossed the French border to survive, but what they found on the other side – the treatment they received from the French authorities -, far from offering them a better life, became a true hell.
For decades, the towns that welcomed them lived oblivious to their past, due to shame or ignorance. It was not until 1999 that the City Council of Argelers, a coastal town located just over half an hour by car from La Jonquera and Portbou, began a meticulous work of documentation, recognition, research and recovery of the memory of the Retreat and the Argelers field. Today, the initiative keeps the memory of barbarism alive.
In summer, the beach of Argelers, a town with less than ten thousand inhabitants, is frequented by thousands of tourists who take advantage of the sun and bathe in the placid waters of the Mediterranean without suspecting that the same sand, more than 80 years ago, He occupied a huge concentration camp. Until the end of 1942, men, women and children imprisoned between the wire fences and the sea lived in deplorable conditions, without any protection from the wind – in this area a strong north wind blows – and from the cold, without the slightest hygiene and with hardly any food.
Between February and July 1939 alone, 15,000 people died from diseases and dysentery, including many children. The memory of all the people who passed through there remains alive thanks to the Campo de Argelers Memorial – the exile memorial museum.
Opened in 2014, and today located in the center of the town – Avenida de la Liberación, 26 -, the facilities offer a very interesting interpretation of exile and the Retreat that has brought hundreds of stories to light. Visually, the museum strikes a chord with the visitor with the chronological narration of the evolution of the war and the evolution of the concentration camp from its opening, in 1939, to its dismantling, in 1942, due to the fear of the landing of the allies.
The museum is not the only space in the town that remembers the Republicans. A monolith has been installed on Boulevard del Mar – where the entrance to the field was located – and a plaque in the Marende car park – which marks the northern limit -, and the Spanish cemetery has been prepared. Located on Avenida de la Retirada 1939, the facility has a special memory for the children who lost their lives there.
The Argelers facilities are not the only ones that remember exile. 40 minutes from this town – about 40 kilometers to the north – the Rivesaltes Memorial is a tribute not only to the anti-Francoists imprisoned in the area, but has been erected as a tribute to all the concentration camps in the world. It occupies the old Rivesaltes camp, operational from 1938 to 1970, which makes it a witness to the darkest years of the 20th century.
Built in an inhospitable location – the worst in Roussillon due to its hurricane-force wind, hardly any vegetation and extremely hot in summer – with the aim of serving as a military training center, it ended up becoming a gigantic internment camp. Its 600 hectares – an area similar to a thousand football fields – welcomed Spaniards from the Argelers countryside from January 1941 until 1943.
The conditions were not better, they did not have the minimum hygienic requirements, they also suffered hunger, cold, and epidemics did not wait long. Jews, gypsies and “undesirable” foreigners also passed through the facilities, after the promulgation in 1939 of a decree law that allowed the internment of any individual considered dangerous for national defense or public safety. After the Second World War, it was the destination for collaborationists, prisoners of war, and later for civilians from the Algerian war and foreigners in an irregular situation.
The Rivesaltes Memorial has, in short, an exceptional symbolic dimension; It is a place for reflection created in 2015 as the first general space for evocation and reference of the human drama that France experienced during much of the 20th century. To do this, he recovered a small part of the field, Island F, where some of the old buildings in poor condition were still standing, and built a partially buried ocher concrete monolith.
Both spaces, the exterior tour – free – and the permanent exhibition room installed in the monolith, offer guidelines to understand history. Through documents, objects and audiovisual testimonies of people who passed through Rivesaltes, it also encourages reflection on forcibly displaced people in the 21st century.
The visit to the department of the Pyrénées-Orientales would not be complete if it did not include the Swiss maternity hospital of Elna, a facility through which hundreds of pregnant women from camps such as Argelers, Saint-Cyprien and Rivesaltes passed between 1939 and 1944. There, in Château d’en Bardou, an elegant art nouveau building, Elisabeth Eidenbenz, a young woman of barely 24 years old, with no experience as a midwife, saved around 600 babies of Republican exiles and Jewish mothers from almost certain death.
Visiting this town of medieval origin is a must, despite the fact that, currently, the upper floors of the tower remain closed to the public due to structural problems caused by the drought, waiting for work to begin that will last between a year and a year and a half. Until then, some of the content on display has been moved to the garden. Jean Louis, the guide, passionately explains the context in which motherhood worked and its evolution during the five years in which he served.
One of the most emotional moments of the visit takes place during the viewing of an audiovisual projection in which Elisabeth Eidenbenz explains her experience at the front of motherhood. Elna is, in short, a lesson in kindness in the midst of barbarism and the best finishing touch to end this unique tour of Roussillon.
