Sara Brenneis on Her New Book

“The Memory of Spaniards in Concentration

Camps Has Essentially Been Shut Out”
By Sebastiaan Faber

Few people know that the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen was built
by Spanish Republicans who were also its first inmates. This past May, Sara J. Brenneis,
an associate professor of Spanish at Amherst College, published Spaniards in Mauthausen
(Toronto), which discusses how the Spaniards’ camp experience has been narrated since
1940. This fall also saw the publication of the English translation of The Impostor, in which
bestselling Spanish novelist Javier Cercas investigates the life of Enric Marco, a Catalan
activist who for years falsely claimed to have passed through a Nazi concentration camp.
An essay by Brenneis on Cercas’s controversial book was published this fall in the Journal of
Spanish Cultural Studies. A good moment for an interview.

“The historical memory movement is very much alive in Spain.”

Y ou show that the story of the Spaniards in Mauthausen was long
hidden from public view. Would you say your own book is part,
or symptom, of the changed way we—and Spaniards—look at the
relationship between the Spanish Civil
War and World War II?
SJB: Absolutely. In the book I look
into how 10,000 Spaniards who fought
for the Republic during the Spanish
Civil War—or supported the Republic,
because some of the deportees weren’t
on the front lines—would only a few
years later end up in Nazi concentration
camps. After their experiences during
the Civil War, they were committed
anti-fascists in exile in France. As World
War II escalated, they were captured by
the Germans, who asked Franco what
to do with them. The deportees’ politi-
cal involvement and Franco’s disinterest
in protecting them in any way doomed
them to the camps. I think seeing the
Spanish Civil War and World War II as
one continuous international conflict is
a perspective that still isn’t particularly
understood, but these Spanish deport-
ees to the camps are the embodiment of
that continuity.
Why have previous narratives of the Spanish experience in Nazi
camps been marginalized or forgotten when the evidence has long
been available?
SJB: I was surprised as I researched this book at how many
articles, books and films about this chapter of Spanish his-
tory are available—but you have to know where to look for
them. There’s more out there about
the Spaniards in Nazi camps now than
in any other time in Spain’s history.
But that doesn’t mean it’s gotten any
easier to look back at the past and say:
yes, Spain was active in World War II;
Franco and Hitler collaborated; Span-
iards were killed in Nazi concentration
camps—and what more can we learn
about what happened and the victims?
Plus, the Spanish government hasn’t
gotten involved in any meaningful way
in recognizing or acknowledging its
role, which really sidelines the whole
matter both inside and outside of the
country.
Your work straddles Spanish Civil War
Studies and Holocaust studies. Are their
major differences between those two
fields—in academia or more broadly—in
how they approach historical memory?
SJB: The central questions are largely
the same: what happened, and how
have we as a society remembered not only the events but also
the individuals who were involved? And once the generation
of people who actually lived through it have died, how do suc-
cessive generations remember—and how do we assure that the

Sara Brenneis. Photo Maria Stenzel.

December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 9
 “Only a very small percentage of the population has a clear picture of the role the
Spanish government and Spaniards played in World War II.”
memory lives on to educate the next generation
about our shared past? But what’s absolutely
true is that so much more work has been done
on Holocaust memory than on memories of
the Spanish Civil War—there have been many
efforts by individuals, governments, cultural
institutions to document what happened in the
Holocaust, and it’s still ongoing. The Span-
ish Civil War has been investigated to a much
lesser extent, though that has changed in the
last 15 years or so. But the memory of Span-
iards in the concentration camps—and Spain’s
involvement in World War II—has essentially
been shut out of both of these fields, Span-
ish Civil War Studies and Holocaust studies,
which is in part why those memories are virtu-
ally unknown.
Your book came out three months before the U.S.
edition of Javier Cercas’s The Impostor: A True Story, about some-
one who falsely claimed to have been imprisoned in a German
concentration camp. How does Cercas’s book compare to the many
other accounts of the Spanish experience in the Holocaust you’ve
studied?
SJB: Well, the main difference is that Cercas’s book isn’t true—
that is, the central story in The Impostor is about Enric Marco,
who wasn’t actually in a Nazi concentration camp. And in that
sense Cercas sensationalizes what are already incredible, life-
and-death accounts of men and women who were deported to
the camps. The books and memoirs I look at for Spaniards in
Mauthausen are such immediate, personal accounts. They’re
detailed, often painful, always moving stories of people who
lived through unspeakable violence, who saw and experienced
things that just seem impossible. But the difference is that
their stories actually happened.
In a recently published article about Cercas’s book, you state that it
is a “misplaced glorification of a false survivor.” Why misplaced?
SJB: Because there are thousands of stories of Mauthausen
survivors, Ravensbrück survivors, Buchenwald survivors that
have never been told. It’s a shame—given the fact that Spain as
a whole is largely ignorant of this history—that Cercas picked
someone who invented his background to be the subject
of this book. But my point in the article I wrote about The
Impostor isn’t just that I wish Cercas had written about an
actual Spanish victim of the Nazis, it’s also that Cercas paints
Enric Marco as a hero, a modern-day Don Quijote. I find that
characterization to be unfortunate, to say the least.
How do you think The Impostor will be read in the United States,
where the collective memory of the Holocaust is markedly different
than Spain’s?
SJB: I suspect that more critical readers—those who have
actually studied the Holocaust—may see it for what it is: the
story of a false survivor. But for most people, the Holocaust is
constantly reinvented in books and movies—I’m thinking of
Sarah’s Key or The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. These stories
10 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018
are fictionalized, there are many aspects of
them that are simply made up, but they are
how larger audiences actually learn about the
Holocaust. I suspect that Cercas’s book will
land among these more popular portrayals
of World War II and the Holocaust in the
United States, though if we’re lucky, it may
pique readers’ interests to find an account of
an actual Spanish concentration camp survi-
vor or to learn more about the history behind
Marco’s falsification.
In your essay, you also express skepticism about
Cercas’s claim that Spain’s historical memory
movement is “dead.” What would you say are its
major signs of life?
SJB: I’ll tell you what brings home this feel-
ing that the historical memory movement is very much alive in
Spain: the busloads of Spanish high school students who travel
from Barcelona to Austria to take part in the commemoration
ceremonies at the Mauthausen Memorial every May. Survivor
groups like the Amical de Mauthausen and Triangle Blau,
among others, organize these educational pilgrimages so that
students without any personal connection to the camp can see
for themselves where their countrymen and women were im-
prisoned and died. They learn the history in such an immediate
way. Cercas ignores these grassroots organizations and move-
ments in Spain to preserve the memories of Spain’s traumatic
past, which are the lynchpins to Spain’s historical memory
movement, in my opinion.
Studies have shown, you write, “that Spain rates last among Euro-
pean nations in terms of its population’s knowledge of the Holo-
caust.” What factors help explain this, you think?
SJB: Well, despite the extracurricular activities of the Amical de
Mauthausen and other groups, students in Spanish high schools
are simply not taught about the role their country played in
World War II and the Holocaust. They may read Anne Frank,
but how incredible would it be if they read something more rel-
evant to them, like Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s K.L. Reich, a novel
about the author’s experiences in Mauthausen, or Montserrat
Roig’s oral history of Catalans in Nazi camps? These are home-
grown materials that focus on what the Holocaust was and how
Spain was involved—but they’re not part of the curriculum in
Spanish schools. And certainly the fact that the Spanish govern-
ment has never weighed in is another factor. I’ll be interested to
see if Spain’s understanding of the Holocaust shifts at all as the
story of the Spaniards in Mauthausen becomes better known—
a new big-budget film, El fotógrafo de Mauthausen, comes
out in Spain in October. It tells the story of Francesc Boix, a
Catalan prisoner in Mauthausen I talk about in the book. Boix,
who worked in the camp photo lab and brought photographic
evidence of Mauthausen to the Nuremburg Trials, is becom-
ing something of a folk hero in Spain. But for now, only a very
small percentage of the population has a clear picture of what
the Holocaust was and the role the Spanish government and
Spaniards played in World War II.
As the author of an important nonfiction—academic—book
about the way the experience of Spanish deportees to Mauthau-
sen has been represented in Spanish culture over the past seven
decades, what do you feel about Cercas’s playful blurring of the
line between fiction and nonfiction? It’s become his signature
move.
SJB: I’ll be honest. As a reader, I’ve enjoyed Cercas’s books—
he knows how to build tension around these “real stories,”
as he calls them. But as a scholar of the Spanish deportation
to Mauthausen, I’m much more conflicted about the way
Cercas plays with fiction and history in his novels. Whatever
sense of responsibility he feels—and I know he feels some,
because he has written more earnest pieces about the Span-
iards in Nazi camps elsewhere—flies out the window in the
interest of a thrilling story in The Impostor. But I also think
the only way to counteract Cercas’s imprecision is to make
sure we continue to tell the true history behind these impor-
tant historical moments—the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish
deportation, the transition to democracy—because we share
that responsibility as scholars, writers and filmmakers. Fiction
writers dance between fiction and nonfiction—it makes for
a good read—but historians and cultural critics should feel
more of an urgency to stick to the truth. Of course, a good
story is a good story—whether it’s invented or real. Cercas
knows that.
Cercas, in his book, extols the work of academic historians and
criticizes the way the witnesses, activists, and the media have
“killed” actual memory by sentimentalizing and commercial-
izing it. (“[T]he memory industry proved lethal to memory,” he
writes in a passage you cite.) As an academic, where do you stand
on the relation between the authority of scholars’ accounts and
the value of other accounts?
SJB: I really think all of these accounts have value. Ideally,
scholars give us a clear sense of the history and the context
of the events. But other, more personal accounts give us a
sense of how the topics we’re interested in as scholars are
perceived in the real world, for lack of a better term. This is
why I included so many different kinds of texts in Spaniards
in Mauthausen: because the way people remember the past
is colored by fiction, nonfiction, films, memoirs, even social
media. When we look at these different materials alongside
one another, it’s important to sort the invention from what
we can corroborate as truthful, but those more commercial
accounts can lend nuance to what might otherwise be a dry
reporting of the facts. So, when I look a popular novel or a
Twitter account that deals with the Spaniards in Mauthausen
alongside a more academic text about the topic, I’m getting
two sides of the story that often complement each other. This
is how history comes to life, how it grabs people’s attention,
and we can’t simply discount these popular works because
they might not be wholly accurate. I’d hope that once some-
one gets interested in a topic like the Spaniards in Mauthau-
sen from one source, they’d seek out another book or film
to learn more. Eventually, perhaps they’ll land on a more
academic source, but not at the expense of reading these rich
and fascinating survivor stories.
Sebastiaan Faber teaches at Oberlin College.
Paris and Barcelona
remember the IB
The 80th anniversary of the “Despedida” of 1938 was
the occasion to remember the International Brigades in
both Paris and Barcelona with two different international
conferences. Both initiatives brought together an impressive
list of scholars who presented cutting-edge research on a
wide range of subjects.
The Paris conference, “Solidarias 2018,” took place on October 24-26 and
focused on the role of foreign women in the Spanish Civil War. Organized
by three French universities and the Amicale des Combattants en Espagne
Républicaine (ACER), it included three full days of conference papers
and two documentaries. Over 48 participants came together from eight
countries, mainly from France and Spain, but also Belgium, the United States,
Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Holland and Germany. The venue for the first two
days of the conference was a homage to the IB in its own right as it was on
the same plot of land at 4 Avenue Mathurin Moreau where all volunteers
passed through on their way to Spain between 1936 and 1938. ALBA was
well represented in the conference by two board members, Josie Yurek and
Bob Coale, the latter presenting a paper on Fredericka Martin, whose rich
collection is one of the backbone collections of the Lincoln archives. The
success of ALBA was evident at several points in the procedures when scholars
from different countries repeatedly made references to the holdings in the
Tamiment Library—proving, if need be, that the project the veterans set up
decades ago has effectively become a center of study for researchers around
the globe. Two of the keys to this success are ALBA’s lively website and the
Tamiment’s online holdings catalogue.
A second international conference took place in Barcelona on Friday
October 26. “History and Memory of the International Brigades, an East-West
perspective” was sponsored by the European Observatory on Memories of the
University of Barcelona. There, fourteen participants from six countries spoke
on the memory of volunteers from the United States, the former Yugoslavia,
the Netherlands, and Poland, as well as initiatives for preserving the IB legacy
developed around Spain. The keynote speaker was the French historian Rémi
Skoutelsky, whose provocative paper disproved those who compare the IB in
Spain to the wave of young Islamist fundamentalists who have headed to Syria
in alarming numbers, over 1,000 from France alone, to fight for ISIS. Another
groundbreaking study was presented by Rocío Velasco de Castro, from the
Universidad de Extremadura, whose intensive study of Muslim volunteers in the
IB attempts to fill a void created due to difficult access to source material and
a certain reluctance to accept that not all Arabic-speaking combatants were
fighting for Franco. As it turns out, several of them volunteered from the US and
served with the Lincolns,. The one-day conference was filled to standing-room-
only capacity, proving that the subject sparks great interest in Spain today.
In addition to academic conferences, on Sunday October 28, the precise 80th
anniversary of the Despedida, the City of Barcelona held its official homage
to the IB at the Barcelona monument to the Lincoln Brigade in the district of
Horta-Guinardó. The Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, opened the event
with a moving tribute to all IB volunteers. Following her were other official
representatives from Catalonia and Madrid, as well as delegations from the
Amigos of Madrid and those of Catalonia, including Lluís Martín Bielsa, the
president of the Catalonian Amigos, who 80 years before as a young Guardia
de Asalto had been on guard during the Despedida parade in Barcelona. Two
official IB associations were also invited to speak. ALBA was again represented
by Bob Coale while Claire Rol-Tanguy, daughter of Henri Rol-Tanguy—former
commissar of the 14th IB and commander of the French resistance during
the liberation of Paris in 1944—spoke on behalf of the ACER. The well-known
Catalan actor Lluís Homar read three Hemingway poems on war and the
iconic troubadour Paco Ibáñez closed the ceremony with his rendition of
the anti-Franco poem by Rafael Alberti “A galopar.” Afterwards, numerous
organizations and government institutions payed tribute by laying flowers at
the foot of the Lincoln Brigade monument.
December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 11