Jesús García Martínez was born in another century, in another world, on October 30, 1918 in Baza (Granada). Until recently, he used to go to see his friends by bicycle. Little is a different concept when you are 104 years old and every day is a conquest, a challenge to statistics. The last living international brigade member emigrated with his family to France before he started talking, still a baby. “I am a titi parisien”, he jokes, referring to one of those rebellious boys from the French capital that Victor Hugo portrayed in the Gavroche de The Miserables. Although he speaks Spanish, most of the interview is in French. He doesn’t hear well. “She resists the sonotone,” explains his 74-year-old son Robert. He is flirtatious. He walks without a cane. Before chatting with EL PAÍS last Monday, he climbed five steps up a staircase to the stage of the Collioure cultural center, where the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez, presented him with a diploma in recognition of his sacrifice in defense of the democratic values. The entire assembly hall gave him a standing ovation. At the end of the ceremony for the official day of exile, the public queued up to take a photo with him. They had to get him out of there in a hurry, like to the stars after a concert, so that he could tell what he had to do to change the world, to survive the century that discovered fascism.
—At the age of 18 he decided to join the International Brigades. Why did he do it? Did he feel Spanish? Did he think he was defending the country from him or something bigger?
—I felt Spanish because I am Spanish. Even if you speak French, even if you have studied in French schools. I joined the International Brigades to defend the Spanish Republic and to combat fascism.
France contributed almost 9,000 brigade members to an army of 35,000 volunteers, including 700 women, who, coming from 55 countries, came to the rescue of a legitimate government after Franco’s coup d’état in 1936. He was her best friend, neighbor of the neighborhood, who encouraged Jesus to fight. They had known each other since they were children and Jesus constantly repeated his name: “Antonio died by my side, in the battle of the Ebro. He was the same age as me, 18 years old.” “The war…”, he sighs.
The training course to go to the front lasted “eight days” in Albacete, the brigade headquarters. There, explains Jesús, they placed themselves under the orders of André Marty, a French communist leader. Upon arrival, they promised a solemn declaration that said: “I am a volunteer because I deeply admire the courage and heroism of the Spanish people in the fight against international fascism; because my usual enemies are the same as those of the Spanish people. Because if fascism wins in Spain, tomorrow it will win in my country and my home will be devastated. Because I am a worker, a laborer, a peasant who prefers to die on my feet than to live on my knees. I am here because I am a volunteer and I will give, if necessary, every last drop of my blood to save the freedom of Spain, the freedom of the world…”.
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With those eight days of training, they were sent to war. Jesús joined the XIV Brigade, made up mainly of French and Belgians. Although some had military experience, most of the members of this volunteer army had never held a weapon. They were peasants, miners, students, lawyers, writers, politicians… Jesús had learned the trade as a mechanic and made a living delivering newspapers on a bicycle. “In Albacete they taught us to shoot. The fact that? Well, there was a bit of everything, ”he recalls. “They did us a task because no country wanted to help with that,” he explains, referring to his inferiority in terms of conditions compared to Franco’s forces.
In the first week of the Civil War, as history professor Enrique Moradiellos recalls, both the Republican government and Franco asked the European powers for help because in Spain there were not enough means to sustain the conflict. The legitimate government turned first to France; the rebels, to Italy and Germany. The French authorities rejected the request of the Republic and promoted, with the firm support of the British, the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain, which entailed an arms and ammunition embargo for both sides in all European countries. But Hitler and Mussolini provided Franco with decisive arms and financial support—nearly 80,000 Italian soldiers and some 19,000 German soldiers would take part in almost every battle on the national side—and the Republicans received only intermittent Soviet supplies “unable to counter in quantity or quality to those sent regularly by the powers of the Italian-German axis to Franco”, as Moradiellos explains in the book The spanish civil warcoordinated by Julián Casanova and Paul Preston.
In the summer of 1938, Jesús participated in the Battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest of the Civil War, in which 6,500 men from the national side and almost 15,000 from the republican side died. “We crossed the river, we arrived at a town called Gandesa and the Germans and Italians bombed us,” recalls the brigade member. Preston recounts in The Spanish Holocaust that “500 guns fired more than 13,500 shells a day for four months,” the time it took Franco—with the help of Germans and Italians—to recapture the ground the Republic had conquered in a week. “In one of those German bombings, my best friend, Antonio, died,” explains Jesús. “When I returned to Paris, I went to tell his parents what had happened, but I was not able. I only told them that I had lost sight of him. They thought he had disappeared. I saw many corpses, covered in blood, in that battle…”.
He was also seriously wounded by the artillery of the Condor legion in the battle of the Ebro. Robert asks the journalist to touch his father’s left arm. When palpating, under the jersey, he can only see the bone. “A little more and I also stay there. I lost all the muscle. Boxing is over,” laments Jesús, who, before joining the International Brigades, had participated in fights in various championships. “I had already been wounded again, in the battle of Teruel. I guess that and my age show that I am a strong man.”
Passionflower’s kiss
After the bombing, he was evacuated to a hospital in Barcelona. Already recovered, on November 1, 1938 he participated in the farewell parade of the International Brigades, where Dolores Ibárruri, the passion flower, delivered an emotional speech of gratitude: “Political reasons, reasons of State, the health of that same cause for which you offered your blood with unlimited generosity make some of you return to your homelands, others to forced emigration. You can walk away proud. You are the story, you are the legend, you are the heroic example of solidarity and the universality of democracy in the face of the vile and accommodating spirit of those who interpret democratic principles looking towards safes or industrial actions that they want to save from all risk”. Jesus came to talk to her. “He approached, I explained that he came from France, that my friend had died. He congratulated us, said that he was very proud of us, thanked us for having fought for the Spanish Republic and he gave me a kiss, ”she recalls. “La Pasionaria kissed me”, she repeats with a smile from ear to ear.
Jesus also boasts of having met, at a dance —his other great passion— Jean Gabin, a famous French actor who would enlist in the navy to fight in World War II and who had romances with Ginger Rogers and Marlene Dietrich.
Returning to France, he joined the Resistance. Later, he had to flee to Spain after confronting a Nazi collaborator in Paris. In Barcelona he went to work on a construction site. “The foreman was a Republican and he covered me when he did missions in France, to see me with the maquis,” he recounts. In 1943, he met the love of his life, Fernanda, Andalusian like him. “She sold tobacco on the street, I didn’t smoke…”. The crush lasted eight decades and the couple had four children: Jesús, Carmen, Robert and Jean-Pierre. The last few years, she was very sick and stopped talking. Jesus, says Robert, cared for her tirelessly until the end. It’s hard for her father to talk about it. He has paid for his challenge to statistics in farewells and funerals: no one around her has turned 104 years old.
When Carmen was 24 months old, on the same road to Le Perthus along which thousands of Spaniards had fled from Francoism after losing the war, Jesús and his family returned to France to settle permanently in Toulouse. “Every day I did 25 kilometers one way and another 25 kilometers back by bike to go to work in Grenade”, recalls the brigade member, who was employed as a marble mason. “And that without any muscle in one arm,” he emphasizes, as if it were possible to detract from any of the things he has recounted. His friend Henri Farreny, 77, president of the association of former guerrillas in France and the French Forces of the Interior, bids farewell to the brigade member with a long hug. He knows that every minute with Jesus, the last witness of so many pages of history, is a treasure.
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