“Yes, damn it. I don’t know how to tell you… All this is harassment and demolition,” responds Eduard Fernández, in the role of Enric Marco Batlle (1921–2022), during a scene of Frame (Jon Garaño and Aitor Arregi, 2024). It’s a tense moment. He said that he had been in the Kiel prison, and that the Nazis had later taken him to the Flossenbürg campin Germany. The story had gaps. The Franco regime never claimed the Spanish deportees; the few who survived the Holocaust. The most common thing, in fact, was for them to start a new life in exile. Benito Bermejo He dived in those lagoons; did enough research to doubt. Enric Marco’s biography was full of lies; “many, taken directly from movies“.
Benito Bermejo He is a historian and has multiple studies on Spanish deportees in Nazi camps. The professor also found certain inaccuracies in Enric Marco’s story. There were things that didn’t add up, starting because the deportee had never existed: He posed as one of the Flossenburg survivors. The thing doesn’t end here. He stretched the gum so much that he became president of the Friendly Association from Mauthausenparticipated in public tributes and gave talks about his suffering – fictional – as a prisoner in schools and institutes. “The boys really like the way I talk“, he goes so far as to say at one point in the film. The historian who removed his mask remembers with Public how he uncovered his story and talks about the past, present and future of Memory in Spain.
Many people have learned about Enric Marco’s story by seeing it on the big screen. When did you meet her?
TO Enric Marco I met him in Barcelona, during the events for the tenth anniversary of the death of the writer Montserrat Roig. I had gone expressly for the event. When he finished, I saw a man who was collecting books on a table. I saw him young and asked him if he was the son of a deportee. It was he who told me that he had been in Flossenburg, but he didn’t give me any reason to ask him much more. Time passed and a teacher told me his name; It just coincided with his time as president of Amical. There I started to connect the dots.
Then they had a meal for former deportees in Mauthausen; They and their families were there… I coincided with the secretary of Amical, Rosa Toran, and with Enric Marco himself. That was the second time I saw him, we ate at the same tableI thought it would be an extraordinary occasion to chat a little. I told him, in fact, that I was very interested in knowing his story, because I had no contact with any other Spaniard who had been in Flossenburg. He responded violently and told me no, that I should find another topic to investigate.. Furthermore, he showed me a photo of himself with his back full of bruises when leaving a police station, during the Transition. It was all very incoherent, a very fragmented story, and I thought that something could go wrong.
The lie lasted for many years, until 2005. What did he gain from all this?
At first, he gained notoriety, a certain pedigree. He was a character about whom almost nothing was known; Having passed through a concentration camp gave him a minimum of respectability. It helped him present himself as an old militant with a lot of weight; Honestly, I don’t see any other reason. And we cannot overlook an important detail: the date on which he joined the Amical, which coincides with the turn of the century. Enric Marco waited for the right circumstances to ariseI mean, at that time there were very few survivors of the Holocaust and those who remained were broken. I have been discussing this topic with many people and the conclusion is that He was a guy who wanted focus.
The other deportees with whom he spoke did not know Enric Marco, what did they tell him when he asked about him?
The deportees told me that they did not know him; and those who did, were quite angry. I warned them, of course. [bromea]. A friend who had met him admitted to me that it drained like oil; there was no way to know anything about his past. This is not the only example. Florian, a CNT activist from Toulouse, told me that he had suspicions since the 70s. Enric Marco had been general secretary of the CNT between 1978 and 1979. To his colleagues he seemed like a strange character; They came to think that he could be an infiltrator.
When do you decide to unmask him?
The fact that he closed an interview was quite strange to me. And then, two things came together, right in 2005. The first, that I found evidence that Enric Marco had been in Germany, but as a volunteer; He had gone to work under an agreement to find labor that Franco and Hitler had signed. The second, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero visited Mauthausen for the first time. Never before has a President of the Government of Spain taken such a clear position with the victims of fascism. A Spaniard was scheduled to speak at the event. I knew who that Spaniard was going to be, it was clear: Enric Marco. The deception had to be stopped, the consequences would have been bloody, so I sent the information I had to the Presidency of the Government.
And in the end Zapatero was there, in Mauthausen. What weighs more: the lies or the contributions of this imposter, if there were any?
Enric Marco boasted of having given a voice to those who had no voice, but I know that it silenced a lot of peopledeportees who had experienced firsthand the horror of the concentration camps. The contributions were very dubious, weren’t they? The thing is that they consisted of presenting themselves as something that had not been, in supplanting those who had been there. [en Flossenburg y Mauthausen]… Enric Marco invented a testimony based on fake sourcesused what he saw in the movies to construct his story. The worst thing is that he blurted out all this and sneaked in, what a shame [bromea].
Was there more like Enric Marco?
Antonio Pastor Martínez. He was less active, because he had no intention of representing anyone, but he also claimed to have been in Nazi concentration camps. This character took what he had seen in the cinema in a way…he said that he had been a musician and that he had played the saxophone in several extermination camps. The story was unspeakable, too picturesque, and many people have confused it now [a raíz de la película] with that of Enric Marco. Antonio Pastor died just when we published his case in an academic journal and he never knew that we had discovered it.
These stories are somewhat reminiscent of the problem of infiltrated police… To what extent does the contamination of social movements go?
I’m not familiar with the world of sewers, but who knows… It’s complex, look, We probably don’t even know the whole truth about Enric Marco yet.so imagine…
The PP and Vox have declared war, “cultural war”, they say, on Memory. What would they say about Enric Marco if they had had to live with his scandal?
Well, I don’t know what to tell you, I suppose that any detail of this type would have been bait for the approaches of the right and the extreme right. The case of Enric Marco, however, was not so catastrophic either.; At least, if we look at it with perspective. It is a story that did not discredit any initiative related to the recovery of Memory, it has not become a throwing weapon. People have understood what the thing is about and If this story caught on, it is because the deportees did not exist.had not been recognized in any way.
In Mauthausen there were 8,700 Spaniards imprisoned, how many were able to return home and why was so little said about them?
Few, 200 or something more. It is important to remember that the Franco dictatorship never claimed them; those who returned are a minority and they are not prominent characters at all, they have not had their recognition.
You are a secondary school teacher, at a time when young people are increasingly more positioned and less informed. How is the dictatorship addressed in schools?
One of my teachers once told me that when he studied, history ended with the Spanish empire; There was nothing after the Civil War. The scenario has changed, but not much. These issues occupy a small part of the agenda and usually fall in the last topics; sometimes we don’t even arrive, and other times, it is not the most favorable time to address them. The dictatorship is not a very present thing in high school books.
Is it difficult to talk about Memory in the classrooms?
I don’t think it’s difficult, but We have little time to talk about Historical Memory and everything depends in any case on the good will of the teachers.
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