During breakfast there were no jokes at the table of Joan Tarragó’s family (Lleida, 1914 – France, 1979). It was not like that at the rest of the meals, where joy appeared, sometimes in the form of a couplet that bothered the French neighbors. The breakfasts were sad. It took many years for his son, Llibert (Brive-la-Gaillarde, France, 1947) to understand why: “My father had nightmares every day for 28 years.” What could the awakenings be like for a man marked by four years of horror, evil and death in the Mauthausen extermination camp? “There was silence,” recalls the journalist, who is now publishing a book in which he rescues his father’s memories and explains what it was like to grow up alongside a figure of eternal anti-fascist resistance. Experiences rescued and told with a common maxim: escape from the box of oblivion.
Llibert Tarragó takes some photos through the streets of central Madrid before returning to France, where he has lived with his family since his father went into exile there. As he walks, he makes it clear that he is not too convinced by the term (historical) memory; he prefers history without further ado. It is not that he does not value the importance of the first, but, he explains, it is about “feelings”, while the other focuses on “seeking the truth.” Precisely for this reason he just published Stendhal in Mauthausen (editorial The free monkey), the book that brings together his father’s memories in the Nazi death camp and his own experiences and analysis as the son of an exiled republican. “I would never have thought that human beings had such great resistance,” Joan wrote.
The story of Joan Tarragó begins in a similar way to that of the majority of the protagonists of Stolpersteine - the plaques that pay tribute to the Spanish prisoners in the Nazi camps. First, he began to be interested in military politics. He participated in the Spanish Civil War and lived, among others, the battle of Belchite; Later he was sent to a concentration camp in France and, from there, he joined the ranks of the French Army to fight against fascism.
The French state sent them to the front line, and soon, in 1940, they were taken by German soldiers. The Franco regime had stripped them of their Spanish nationality, so they would enter the different fields marked with a blue triangle. The symbol of the stateless. Joan ended up in Mauthausen along with thousands of other Spaniards and soon became part of the underground resistance, an organization to steal food, information and even books to create a library. Although the greatest resistance to fascist cruelty, perhaps, was the solidarity of those people who were trying to survive.
In the countryside, a man alone could not do anything. We survive thanks to the strength of the collective, animated by an ideal
Joan Tarragó
When talking about horrors of the past, the wounds that never heal run through families for generations, often generating a crushing silence, extraordinarily heavy because of the reality it hides. That is why so much importance is given to silences, for everything they tell even without saying anything. In the case of the Tarragó family, one cannot speak of silences. “When you are from exile, from the crowd, you don’t have 200-meter flats in Barcelona’s Eixample,” explains Llibert in conversation with this newspaper. “We had a room for the four of us, without heating. You heard everything. “They could now silence whatever they wanted, which was not going to be possible.”
Added to the small space was the relevance and respect that led Joan to receive many visits after returning from Mauthausen. Visitors who spoke, who asked, who openly shared experiences similar to theirs. “I found out about everything, about horrible things that they talked about among themselves.”
The writer rescues one of those experiences. “One day I entered his office and ‘stole’ photographs of the countryside. He was about 6 years old,” he explains. The images showed mass graves, corpses piled up and white with lime. “There there were screams from my mother to my father, screams of horror at what I had seen. I have gone through that scene since then, he was hurt and my mother was angry.”
The information was always there, but Llibert indicates that his father never explained to him what really happened to him, until one day he saw Joan’s wounds caused by the bites of one of the camp guards’ dogs. “That impacted me a lot, I saw a sick father and he explained it to me.”
This is part of how silence is disorganized. Everything is hidden there but falsely hidden
Llibert Tarragó
“I was afraid to go back to childhood”
In general, there was joy in Llibert’s childhood, despite the creeping darkness. In his town, he explains, they were not the only family of deportees. “We lived in an environment of reconstruction,” surrounded by teachers who admired the Spanish republicans. There was happiness, “but with the shadow of the past, which was always there.”
Through them, the deportees who visited his father, he began to get closer to Spain. “As a child I heard people talk about Franco as a bad person, just like the tricorn hat of the Civil Guard. When I came for the first time at the age of 12 to my mother’s town, the whole town was at the station, and when I saw the tricorn hats I started crying and I didn’t want to get off the train,” he explains.
I am surely French, probably Catalan and certainly—because I am a politician—a Spanish Republican.
Llibert Tarragó
When he was 20, his father asked Llibert to write his memoirs. He was already a journalist then but “he was more with the Beatles than with this” and, furthermore, he had to build himself. “I didn’t say no, but I didn’t do it. “I didn’t feel prepared,” he says, with an American coffee in front of him. “That was a way to escape,” he admits. Although that didn’t take away the respect he had for him, “a respect for a man you can’t touch.” “I couldn’t touch what I had experienced or him physically, I had to be very careful, I feared he would die at every moment.”
Joan Tarragó wanted to publish his experiences from a “political sense”, to make history and memory, something that “was integrated into his mind as a fighter.” That is, the Republican wanted to make known not what you happened to him, individually, but what passed, although at that time it was difficult to put together all the parts of the story.
I didn’t talk to him frankly [con Joan]I saw many things but I never talked to him about all this. It is not a frustration because I know why, because dialogue about this is impossible. Because it is talking about death
Llibert Tarragó
Finally Llibert agreed. “Why did this change occur?” In 1979 Joan Tarragó died from multiple illnesses brought on by years in the extermination camp, which caused him to age prematurely. “There is a phrase that struck me as a child and made me uncomfortable. When he returned from the doctor he always said that he had told him that his body was 15 years older than his age.” That day there was an official funeral, very different from that of his mother, a year later and in which he was able to give a speech. “I thought that my father’s memory had been ‘stolen’ from me and that I had to do something” after other people paid tribute to his father.
And that “something” would come in the 2000s, when a friend of his father told him that he was going to return to the field.
“I called a cameraman and went there without saying anything to anyone. When I arrived I saw people crying and saying ‘the son of Tarragó’, it was very emotional. A total impact,” he says. During his visit he saw “hell in a very clear space,” but what impacted him most was the fact that he read his father’s memoirs for the first time before going. “Why didn’t you read them before?” “Because it scared me, for sure. I was afraid to go back to childhood. “It was very hard, more than one can think.”
And in that reading he discovered that his father had had “28 years of nightmares every night.” “Reading that phrase, breakfasts as a child came to mind. I thought my father was happy, he made jokes and my mother sang all day annoying the neighbors. There I discovered that the breakfasts were sad. There was never even a breakfast with jokes, when there were jokes at other meals. There was silence. I realized this fifty years later. They are the effects of nightmares. How do you want a man who lived with nightmares all night to wake up happy?
“That period of my life left a deep mark on my brain,” said the Spanish exile.
I was afraid to go back to childhood. It was very hard, more than one can think.
Llibert Tarragó
He also noticed another detail during the meals: at the end there was always the same gesture, that of collecting the breadcrumbs in silence. “When you realize [todo] This, decades later, if you put it all together, either you get a bomb or you do what I have done, study.” “I didn’t want to fall into pain, I wanted to do science. “I didn’t want my feelings to take me away from the story.”
“Reading is living”
“Is it necessary to say that reading and living are synonymous?” Llibert writes in the novel when he says that his father, along with other members of the resistance in the countryside, organized a clandestine library in barracks 13. How can we think about reading? when the only thing around was death?
“They carried within them the ideas of the Second Republic, apart from the anti-fascist struggle they had this field of values, including education, the fight against illiteracy, that is why I was curious about art or literature,” explains Llibert. That is why it is important to know where these deportees come from: “Their trajectory does not begin when they enter the field, but before.”
Upon arriving in Mauthausen, there were those who put a book among their belongings. And that’s how, through a chain of volunteers, they joined dozens of them. At first people were not in the mood to read, explains Joan Tarragó in the book. But then reading was a way to mentally escape: “Since they were great literary works, while we read we forgot the hell that surrounded us,” said socialist activist Pierre Binielli.
“I say we send books to Gaza. Maybe a book can save a person who is under the bombs, to escape even for a minute or half an hour, it gives you strength. “Reading gives you strength,” concludes Llibert.
Finally, when the camp was liberated and he was able to leave in 1945, Joan Tarragó would never be the same. In words echoed by others like him, it’s not like they were survivors. They were “revivers.” Because, in effect, they had been born, despite being already adults.
“Have you found peace after publishing this book?” Llibert Tarragó has a clear answer. “No. I am not at peace. I meet my father again and that is going towards peace, but also a traumatic peace, not going to mass. There was no conflict between us, but rather a variety of silence. I did not speak with him frankly, I saw many things but I never talked to him about all this. It is not a frustration because I know why, because dialogue about this is impossible. Because it is talking about death,” he explains. This reunion cannot “leave you completely at peace” but, he acknowledges, “it is the path to a certain peace.”
And what gives Llibert Tarragó peace after having known what his family had to go through? “Having written this and another secret book for my grandchildren, so that they know who their grandfather and grandmother were. It gives me peace to transmit all this to the children,” he says, concluding with a phrase that he includes in all his talks and interviews: “The present is the past of the future.”
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