WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE PARIS - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, Monde Libertaire: Ideas and struggles: The Retirada as a legacy? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Between memory and oblivion ---- A cover, a black and white photo, a

heavy sky, a beach, a sea, and signs. We are on the beach of
Argelès-sur-Mer, an exhibition installed for the 80th anniversary of the
Retirada (February 2019). A photo by Jean-François Noël, photographer,
author, historian by training. They were thousands (500,000) to cross
the border during the winter of 1939 and to be herded under the
surveillance of Senegalese troops, in the freezing wind, lying on the
sand. The corpses were numerous in the early morning, those who had not
supported the suffering of the flight, the beginning of the exile. What
do we know of their history? The books are numerous but each life is a
story and deserves to be written. The Retirada as a legacy? published by
Éditions de l'Harmattan "immerses us in stories of life and images of a
past that neither time nor oblivion can erase. "Images in the present
where the past intrudes thanks to the photographer's eye and the
narrator's voice" as Veronica Estay Stange emphasizes in her preface.

The chapters alternate between pages of photographs and those where very
diverse memorial stories are intertwined. Should we pass on? Or on the
contrary, turn the page? And the descendants, what do they keep from
this heritage? The reader can understand the memory lapses, the effect
of the suffering, the humiliations suffered, followed by such a long
exile. The disappointed hopes, Franco kept in place because of the Cold
War. This unpacked suitcase hidden under the bed, it was necessary to
open it and anchor his life in France, raise the children there and see
the grandchildren grow up.

 From the Pyrenean passes to the camps

The French authorities did not welcome them with enthusiasm, they were
wary of these "undesirables", these Reds. Jean-François Noël introduces,
in his pages, poems like Le Tango d'Argelès, Le Cafard.

"We are the sad refugees who arrived from Spain
After having walked so much,
We crossed the border on foot, by road
With our kit.
Blankets, bales and suitcases, three cans of food
And a little humor;
That's all we saved after having fought so much
Against the fascist invader.

And, in the camp of Argelès-sur-Mer
They locked us up so as not to eat!
And to think that, three years ago, the whole of Spain
Was a happy, free and working nation."

Jean-François Noël takes us to the camps of Rivesaltes, Barcarès, Agde,
to the Collioure prison, Gurs. Some have almost disappeared, is France
ashamed of its past? Even as five-year-old children, the refugees
remember the brutality, the cold, the hunger. The author makes them talk
at length. The exactions of the fascists, the climb to the passes, you
retrace the route with them, the Perthus pass, the Coustouges pass, the
Manrella pass, the statues, the memorials, "the great rout" under the
contemptuous gaze of the French "forces of law and order". Go on these
paths to imagine what they experienced.

"A Spanish cloud"

Every testimony has its value. That of strangers like Isabelle who wants
to pass it on to her daughters. Others are burdened with a libertarian
heritage, such as the brothers Serge and Michel Utgé-Royo. Yet it is
also the silence and regret of the children for not knowing. They settle
everywhere in France: Cher, Vienne, Yonne, Paris. The graves are
memories like that of Machado in Collioure, others like Walter Benjamin
whose body will not be found have the right to a cenotaph. When Franco
died, mouths began to open, disunited families find themselves on this
land of Spain which also opens on mass graves, testimonies of the
thousands of those shot.

And to show that the fight against fascism is never over, let us
remember, on this day of August 24, "the Spanish Republican soldiers of
the Nueve, these Spaniards who liberated Paris on their armored vehicles
named Belchite, Teruel or Guadalajara" and the lyrics of the song Un
nuage espagnol by Serge Utgé-Royo:

"One day, we will have to cry out in silence
That a Spanish cloud liberated Paris."

* Jean-François Noël
La Retirada as a legacy?
Ed. L'Harmattan, 2024

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=7990
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