He was only two years old when the Gestapo first knocked on the door of his house in Vienna. Peter Perez, Pepi, son of a Sephardic father and a Catholic mother, spent his childhood fleeing Nazism and locked up in several concentration camps in France. He was almost deported to Mauthausen three times. He miraculously survived an illness caused by hunger and the harsh conditions of confinement.
Now, he has returned to one of those places to film the documentary Pepi Fandango, directed by Lucija Stojevic, which was screened at the Malaga Festival. At 87 years old, Pepi has come to the capital of Malaga to present the film. In a long talk with La Vanguardia, he remembers the horror that he suffered in his childhood. He can’t stop the tears from falling.
What was your family like?
My father was a Sephardic Jew, from Bulgaria, and my mother was Catholic, from a Viennese family. I was born in Vienna in 1936. My father and his brother had a fleet of taxis and we lived well. We were a big family with my brother, seven years older than me, and my great-grandmother, who was called Dueña, who was born in Turkey, but she spoke neither German nor Turkish nor Bulgarian, only Ladino. It was a mix of cultures, but it worked well because there was a lot of love.
In 1938 the Nazis annexed Austria to Germany…
Yes. It all started at that moment. One day a Viennese policeman with a swastika on his arm knocked on our door. He was looking for my father and my uncle. They weren’t at home. My mother located them as best she could because there was no telephone and told them that they had to leave because the Gestapo was going to arrest them that night. They went to the airport and caught the first plane out of the city. They didn’t have a passport, but at that time it wasn’t needed yet. You just had to pay. The money was the passport.
Where did they go?
They arrived in Amsterdam, but the Dutch police told them they had to return to Vienna. They knew that returning would be the death of them. Luckily, there was a very rich Sephardic community there. So my father looked in the guide for Spanish surnames and found a Calderón. He called him and he appeared in half an hour at the airport in a Rolls Royce and with money. He paid for them to travel to Paris. My father and my brother were saved thanks to him.
Your mother, your brother and you remained in Vienna. How were things going there?
My brother traveled to Paris to join my father with an organization that helped young Jews escape Nazism. That’s where the fear started. He didn’t understand Yiddish and the other kids didn’t know German or Ladino. But he managed to reach his destination.
So you and your mother were left alone?
Yes. There was nothing left at home. The Nazis had taken everything, but they still came every day to torment my mother and demanded more money from her. One day the caretaker of our property, Sergio, came up and told my mother: “Whore of a Jew, give me the money.” He pointed a gun at me, a Mauser. I was a baby of only two years.
Did they leave Austria?
My maternal grandfather insisted to my mother that we had to leave, but it wasn’t easy. My family invented that I suffered from a respiratory illness and that I had to live near the sea. They had a friend in France who wrote a letter to invite us to her house. It was all a lie, but it was the only escape. Then there were more problems. My mother, a Catholic for many generations, had a passport, but I, being Jewish, could not be on that document. So they made me a special pass, with a big J for Jew stamped on it. The official who did it to me was surprised: “This child, so blonde, with blue eyes, so pretty: he can’t be Jewish.”
Where did they arrive?
It was a long train ride full of checkpoints, but we arrived in Paris and met up with the rest of the family. That was at the end of 1939. We lived together for a while on the outskirts of the city, but the French also began to bother us because there was a lot of racism and anti-Semitism in France.
And in June 1940 the Nazis occupied France…
They arrested my father and took him to the Roland Garros stadium. My mother fled to Orleans. She walked with my brother hand in hand and with me in arms. It was a march of thousands of people. German aircraft flew overhead. They were shooting. Suddenly a Senegalese man on horseback jumped on us and covered us with his body. He saved our lives. And it was strange because the Germans released leaflets, which my mother had read in German and French, warning of the danger of the African soldiers whom they accused of being rapists. It’s one of my first visual memories: that huge man who had saved us, bleeding everywhere.
Where did they arrive?
It was a trip to nowhere. Very dangerous. The waters were contaminated. There was no food. The fires surrounded us. We returned to Paris, but the Nazis had already entered our house. I was devastated. My father was not there. We started walking again. We walked, took trains, horses, cars we headed to Toulouse. And along the way a miracle occurred: we met my father again, who had already passed through several fields.
Did they also lock you up in a field?
Yes. In several fields and finally in Rivesaltes. On the stamps they called it a “housing camp”, but it was a concentration camp, with barbed wire, with spikes, with armed guards… At first we were together, but for a short time. They separated families because this prevented people from fleeing. I was left alone. He was five.
What was life like in Rivesaltes?
It was a huge place. There were Jews, but also many Spanish republicans, French politicians opposed to the Vichy regime, gypsies… all those who were considered undesirable. Islands were created inside the countryside in which people gathered and from which they could not leave. Suddenly, in one of those subcamps, they began to concentrate the Jews. They put them on the train to take them to Auschwitz or Mauthausen.
Did you get on that train?
We went up three times. With the car closed with nails. As if we were cattle. We knew it was the end. They had brought the whole family together, because that way they calmed people down and it was easier. My mother had three brothers in the German army, on the Russian front. She said it, she showed her papers. And three times we managed to get off the train of hell, the train of death.
Did they continue in the field until the war ended?
No. France needs miners. My father didn’t know anything about mining, but he lied and they moved us to La Caunette, a mining town in France about 120 kilometers from the camp. There were many Spaniards there, republican exiles. I was on the verge of death. There was a Spanish doctor, Jesús Rivera, who examined me and said, “This child will die.” I understood it because he had learned Spanish in the countryside. I survived, another miracle.
What did they do after the war?
We were in the mine until 1948. Then we returned to Vienna, because my mother wanted to reunite with her family. But it wasn’t a good idea. Nazism had not completely disappeared. My father enrolled me in school, but they didn’t want to give me a place because he was Jewish. There was a French school where they admitted people of all kinds. I went there and was the best student.
After all that suffering, has he had a good life?
Yes. I studied technical physics and I have dedicated myself to computing. I have a family, two children.
What do you think now when you see what is happening in Gaza?
I see human suffering, especially that of children, mothers and the elderly. The suffering is the same that we suffer, neither more nor less: hunger, thirst, diseases… Religious fanaticism cannot work. In the name of God the Inquisition was held and we had to leave our beloved Spain. Things have not changed. Religion should not be a system of government. I am not a political man, but I only see one solution: create two states that can live together like Switzerland and Austria.
