Enric Marco was one of the most famous men in Spain. As President of the “Amical de Mauthausen”, an association of Spanish survivors of the Nazi camps, he spoke eloquently about the evils of Fascism.
In a speech given to the Spanish Parliament in 2005 his account of his experiences in a concentration camp had the children of deportees in the gallery in tears. This wasn’t all.
He had fought on the Republican side in the Civil War, been persecuted by the Franco regime and then, as Secretary-general of the CNT (the Anarchist trade union) been influential in the transition of Spain from dictatorship to democracy. Quite a life! What a hero!
But
then came exposure; he was unmasked. He had never been in a
concentration camp, though he had been in Germany during the war as a
volunteer worker. His anti-Fascist credentials were soon questioned.
If he had lied about the concentration camp, why should he be
believed about anything? Yes, he had been a magnificent and
compelling speaker about the horrors of Nazi Germany and Franco’s
Spain, but he was still an impostor, mocked and reviled.
Anyone
who has read Javier Cercas’ novels – especially Soldiers of
Salamis and Outlaws – will recognise that Marco’s is a story made
for him. These books explored the unreliability of memory and
personal testimony and of what may have been generally accepted as
historical truth.
Nevertheless, he was reluctant to write about
Marco, despite the urging of friends, among them the great Peruvian
novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He had met Marco and found him even in
his nineties to be unstoppably loquacious and fertile in denial,
self-justification, and self-pity.
Happily
he went ahead. The book is written as a”novel without fiction,”
with Cercas’ own feelings and reflections always to the fore. This
was the method of his remarkable account of the failed military coup
of 1981, Anatomy of a Moment. It worked then; it works now.
Cercas
has immersed himself in the archives, talked with historians and
journalists who have covered the Marco story, interviewed his
acquaintances, friends, former admirers, and spent hours, days, weeks
listening to the old man – well over 90 by now – and trying to
make sense of his life.
In some of his memories or claims, those
relating to the Civil War, there would appear to have been an element
of truth amidst exaggerations and even impossible assertions. There
were puzzles not easy to resolve.
Why for instance did he have a
civil servant’s pension? Was this, as some said, because he had
perhaps been a police informer in at least the early Franco years? Or
was there some other not discreditable explanation?
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Original review on: http://www.scotsman.com
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