The first time that María Egea Muñoz de Zafra set foot in Spain again, 18 years had passed since she left it. She returned to meet her family, her uncles and her cousins, whom she did not remember because at only five years old, this woman, who is now 90, left the port of Alicante with her parents and her brother towards exile in the famous british freighter Stanbrook. They left behind their native Cartagena, their lives, their desires and their loved people. And they did it because their family’s socialist and republican militancy put them in danger of what was coming: the relentless and violent Francoist repression.
There were only four days left until the end of the Civil War, when on the afternoon of March 28, 1939 the Stanbrook It became the last ship to transport Spanish Republicans out of the country before the rebellious troops entered the port. The feat of its captain, the Welshman Archibald Dickson, who instead of loading the oranges and saffron that he was going to look for – the ship was dedicated to trading goods with the Republic – decided to take on board all the civilians he could, in total, 2,645 adults and children fleeing the advance of the Francoists.
Among them was María Egea, who made a fleeting visit to Madrid this week from Paris, where she has lived since 1996, to receive from the Government a declaration of reparation that recognizes her history and that of her family as victims of Franco’s regime. With his brother Pedro and his parents Mateo Egea, who was a PSOE councilor in Catagena, and María Josefa Muñoz, also a socialist, they made the 22-hour journey to the Algerian city of Oran, completely overcrowded in the 70 meters long and ten meters wide. cover width. “There was no room for a pin,” says María Egea, who had passenger number 2,388. He acknowledges that his memories “are diffuse” due to his young age, but at home he later heard countless times what it was like.
“It was real chaos, there was a lot of rush and tumult, I was holding my mother’s hand and I think my father entered before us. Alicante was the last point we could go to, it is difficult to imagine what that escape was like.” He Stanbrook It would thus become a symbol of the republican defeat, of the fear and despair that devastated those who knew that their future in Spain would be marked by persecution. The fall of Catalonia, the decomposition of the republican resistance and the taking of Madrid made Franco’s victory imminent and for days rumors had been circulating that English, Russian and French ships were going to take them out of the country, so the port quickly became a hive of people.
Those who stayed
Several thousand people crowded the docks and arrived in successive floods, leaving everything behind and hoping to save their lives. Many other ships had previously left the Spanish coast, but only the Maritimewhich was able to embark very few people, and the Stanbrook They left Alicante. In the end, only a small part of all those who longed for it boarded the freighter and thousands of people were left on the ground in anguish and panic. Many were captured by the rebel troops and transferred to concentration camps such as Albatera or Los Almendros.
“Everyone was trying to get on board, but most couldn’t. There were people who preferred to jump into the water and commit suicide because they did not want the nationals to catch them,” says María Egea. His family was lucky and managed to get on the entire ship. He believes that this could have been influenced by the fact that his uncles were Julia Álvarez Resalo and Amancio Muñoz de Zafra, who had been socialist deputies of the Popular Front. He died in the war due to an illness and she continued to play an active role in the war, during which she was appointed civil governor of Ciudad Real, becoming the first Spanish woman to hold such a position.
The trip on board, explains María Egea, was “very hard.” They sailed throughout the night with the lights off and in complete darkness to avoid being hit by Franco’s aircraft and ships, trying to maintain the stability of the ship with extreme difficulty due to the weight of so many people. According to the woman, they still suffered bombings during the voyage, but “the captain’s maneuvers managed to keep the ship afloat,” she says. Thus they arrived on African land, in Oran, then a French colony.
The Algerian journey
There a second journey would begin for María Egea and her family and for the vast majority of protagonists of this mass exile. He Stanbrook He did not have permission to moor at the dock and disembark and, while Archibal Dickson negotiated with the Oran authorities, those on board were forced to stay on the overcrowded freighter. A few days later, the women and children were able to leave, but the men were forced to stay a few weeks until Oran authorized their disembarkation for health reasons, explains the woman, who remembers that they were treated “as if we carried a deadly virus.”
Once on land, his family was separated. She, her sister and her mother were transferred to the civil prison in Oran and the young men like her father to a forced labor camp in Relizane and later to others in the south of the country. It was the fate of many Spanish exiles, who after fleeing from Franco had to face confinement in harsh conditions until the camps were liberated in 1943 by the US army. Among the jobs that Mateo had to carry out was the construction of the trans-Saharan railway, an ambitious project that sought to connect the Mediterranean with the Atlantic through the Sahara desert and that was never completed.
Meanwhile, in the civil prison of Oran, women and children organized themselves as best they could. “As the weeks went by we began to be able to go out, although always under surveillance, and my mother found a job sewing. A year later we were released and she started working as a janitor. We lived in a room measuring 2 by 2.5 meters and we started living there, going to school…,” María recalls. This was the path that some of the Spanish exiles took, others would join the ranks of the French Foreign Legion to fight in World War II. Among them, the members of La Nueve, the Spanish unit that liberated Paris.
The Muñoz de Zafra family would end up meeting and living in different parts of Algeria while their father, who had worked on the railway in Spain, was assigned to different stations. That’s how they lived, together, until their parents decided to emigrate to Paris in 1975. She lived in Algiers, where she worked teaching Spanish and French until her retirement, when she also moved to Paris. “My father always told us things about Spain, he was very patriotic and gave us that love for the country that I carry in my heart,” he says even though he never lived there again.
Now, at 90 years old and recognized by the Spanish State as a victim of exile, she looks back and sees a lot of suffering and also gratitude. In his memory and in his body is still present the childhood feeling “of humiliation” that he experienced when arriving in Algeria “because no one wanted the redit was as if we were monsters or criminals”, but there is also gratitude and “an eternal debt” to the captain of the Stanbrook, Archibald Dickson, whose name he has never forgotten. Neither to her nor to any of the passengers. His figure, in fact, has been rescued from oblivion in recent years and in the port of Alicante his bust, which has been vandalized on several occasions, commemorates his feat. “All of us who embarked owe our lives to him,” says María Egea.
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