“Thank you so much, Mr. Reyes Pérez. I need to ask you for one more thing. Could you please cover the cost of my sisters’ train fare?”
He studied me a moment, then unlocked a desk drawer with a key attached to his belt. He took out a few bills and, handing them to me, said, “I hope fortune smiles on you. Life is riddled with obstacles, but at least you three have each other. I’ll ask the cook to pack you some food for the journey, and we’ll get you some new clothes. You can’t show up in the capital in those rags.”
I left his office as light as a feather, though a host of other emotions were roiling around inside me. That horrible place had been our home for over three years. In Morelia, I’d fallen in love for the first time; I’d known friendship, betrayal, and fear; I’d become a man. Ana and Isabel had friends who were like sisters to them. A few of the teachers had poured themselves into helping us. President Cárdenas had been our mentor and protector. Now we’d be under the protection of the Republican government in exile, but we’d never forget what Mexico had done for us.
When I got to the dining hall that night, I realized that word of our leaving had gotten out. All my classmates stood and hugged me one after the other. It was dizzying to think that after so much suffering, after years of fear and uncertainty, we had become one big family. Tears flooded my eyes as the last boy embraced me. My sisters had received the same welcome when they walked into the cafeteria that evening. One of the students gave us a little souvenir he’d carved into a piece of bark.
Another student got up and said, “My friends and brothers and sisters of Morelia, today we’re saying goodbye to three of our own. We crossed earth and sea to get to this corner of the world. We were lonely and wretched, lost and scared, but we’ve gone through it all together. Most of the ones who arrived with us aren’t here anymore. Death snatched some of them too soon, almost at the start of their journey, while others have left in search of a better future. Those of us who are left keep waiting for news from our parents. We want to go back home, though some of us have learned that now our home is with our Morelia companions, both those who have stayed and those who have moved on.”
He hugged me, then I stood to share a few words. “It’s difficult to leave this place and all of you. You’re not alone. You’re part of one big family, but Isabel, Ana, and I must go look for our parents. It’s the only way for us to find true happiness one day. We’ve laughed, cried, and danced with you all. For a while, fate brought us together, and now we must go our separate ways. If life doesn’t bring us back together again, I want you all to know it’s been a gift to share this journey with you. There will always be a place in our hearts for each and every one of you. Viva Spain! Viva the Republic!”
Everyone shouted out the old chants no one dared say aloud in our country anymore. We had become the last remaining threads of a world that was dying out, consumed by the fire of its own desperation. We were what got washed up to shore after a shipwreck, the remains of an idea of a world that wanted humans to live in unity but that, instead, had devolved into splintered groups fighting one another, an idea that had hoped to build a new society from the ashes of the old but that had succumbed to its own contradictions. My parents were now the only part of that world that interested me, the only part I wanted to save, even as the rest burned up on the pyres of hatred and suffering.
Chapter 34
The Train to Germany
On the Road to Mauthausen
August 24, 1940
Not even three weeks after we boarded the train headed for Mexico City, our parents boarded a different train with an uncertain destination. After much negotiation between Franco’s and Hitler’s governments, the Spanish dictator had ordered his minister of foreign affairs to send some 927 Republicans captured by the Nazis in the Les Alliers refugee internment camp near Angoulême for forced labor. The train traveling slowly north was packed with families, men, women, children, and elders. Thirst left them breathless, the suffocating heat zapped their remaining strength, and the stench of defecation permeated everything. The few stops the train made were opportunities for scant rations of rancid, worm-infested food. The children were dehydrated, and the elderly barely stirred in the corners where the Nazis had thrown them a few days before.
When prisoners asked where they were being taken, the guards answered that they had to take a circuitous route back to Spain because of the bombings.
For most, a return to Spain spelled out near certain death. Executions at the hand of shooting squads after summary trials were the norm throughout the country. The conquerors’ thirst for vengeance seemed insatiable.
None of the passengers could have imagined how hell had spread over the face of the earth before universal indifference. The train traversed beautiful forests and fields restored after the fleeting war of the western front, while the Spanish Republicans inside wept for their distant lands. They dreamed of yellow fields of grain, the warm summer sun, the grapes ripening for harvest. Yet the gray sky of northern Europe revealed the true heart of darkness.
When they tried to escape to go west, my parents had been transferred from the camp at Rivesaltes to Les Alliers. Thus, they found themselves on that convoy and, after four horrific days of travel, reached a station none of the passengers recognized. It was Mauthausen, near Linz, in Austria.
When, with 927 Spanish Republicans on board, the train arrived at the station near the concentration camp, everyone was shaking. The Nazis threw the doors of the cars open and shouted their questions to children in German: “Wie alt? Wie alt?” No one yet understood why the soldiers wanted to know how old the children were.
The soldiers pulled the younger, healthier men out of the cars, along with boys over fourteen years old. My mother clung to my father. “No, please!” she screamed when a soldier grabbed my father’s arm. Dad turned his dazed, fevered face up to the soldier, and the German dropped him. They didn’t want invalids at the camp.
The scene in the train cars was merciless. Mothers clung to their sons in the midst of screaming and blows; boys wailed and kicked as soldiers hoisted them into the air. Adult males got out on their own, pushed by soldiers holding loaded guns.
Nearly half the men got off the cars, while the rest of the passengers shrunk back in a huddle, putting distance between themselves and the station. Everyone intuited that death waited at this stop and that there would be no return from this dark region of Austria.
The car doors slammed shut as abruptly as they had opened. Those few dramatic moments had exhausted everyone. A long silence ensued, interrupted only by the sobbing of wives and mothers. After keeping their loved ones alive throughout the war in Spain and the trials in France, now they had lost them forever.
My mother stuck her head out one of the windows, and an old man wearing a green Alpine hat said in French, “Poor dears, you’ll never see your men again.”
My mother turned back to my father, who seemed at the brink of death. She wept bitterly. At least he was still by her side.
The train began to move again, and four more days passed as they crossed Germany and France. Despite the cars being less crowded now, pain and desperation were emblazoned on the faces of those who would become premature widows, of the mothers whose sons had been ripped out of their arms, and of the young girls whose childhood had now disappeared too soon.
The arrival in Perpignan was not joyous. As soon as they crossed the Pyrenees, the passengers would end up in Spanish concentration camps or jails. No refuge existed for Spanish Republicans. Fascism had stolen first their Republic and then their country and now demanded the only thing they had left: their lives.
Part 4
To the Motherland
Chapter 35
A Ship to the Homeland
Mexico City
November 25, 1940
Our trip to the capital was exciting. My sisters and I thought that, after three years in Mexico, nothing could surprise us, but Mexico City managed to impress us with its beautiful a
venues, luxurious buildings, and imposing statues of freedom fighters and revolutionary heroes. It actually felt like several cities in one: the colonial capital built over the ruins of a great Aztec city, the elegant nineteenth-century capital city, and the modern city that seemed to gobble up everything in sight. Millions of people circled throughout the frenetic place every day: landless peasants coming from every corner of the country, immigrants from all over the world, employees of the countless federal bureaus, and the people who actually lived there and made up the heart of the capital’s inhabitants.
My sisters and I loved it. We had grown up in Madrid and were used to the hustle and bustle, the noise of cars, and the crowds moving every which way. Mexico City made Madrid look like a quaint little neighborhood. The streets that shot out in straight lines, the wide avenues covered in trees, and the exquisite houses of the city’s important personages dazzled us.
The shelter we were to stay in was on Alfonso Herrera Street in the San Rafael neighborhood. It was run by a Spanish couple, Alfonso Sánchez Vázquez and his wife, who welcomed us warmly. The rest of the students staying there were boys, but the Sánchezes had made a special exception for us and were allowing Isabel, Ana, and me to share a room. Isabel and I would go to school at the Luis Vives School, created especially for the children of Spanish exiles. Rubén Landa, a good but strict teacher, was the director. Mrs. Sánchez, who was also a teacher, would teach Ana at the house since she wasn’t old enough for high school.
Our friend Lisa made a home on the outskirts of the city and had to take two different buses to get downtown, where she worked in a restaurant. We usually saw her on Sundays. She would tell us about her week as we walked through the Zócalo and admired the Palacio Nacional and the huge cathedral. Late in the afternoon she would go back to our house with us before returning to the unsightly room she had managed to rent west of the city.
That crisp afternoon in November, the air coming in from the mountains chilled us to the bone. The weather reminded us of autumn and spring days in Madrid.
“Are you going to talk to the ambassador from the Republic tomorrow?” Lisa asked. She was scared that any day now we would jump on a boat and sail away forever to Spain.
Isabel nodded. “We need to know if they’ve found anything out about our parents.” By now, Isabel was a pretty young woman who looked so much like our mother. Every time I looked at her, I thought of Mom.
“I get it. Your relationship with your parents is different from mine with my parents. It’s not that I don’t love them, but I don’t mind being far away from them. I think the time comes when people just have to make their own lives.”
“At least you know your parents are okay. Ours are lost somewhere in France where the Nazis are in control, or maybe in Spain, where the regime hunts down anyone who fought for the Republic,” I said. I knew I was being unfair to Lisa. Her life hadn’t been easy, nor had life for her family. Poor, landless farmhands had many more mouths to feed than they could ever hope to provide for. Lisa’s situation was a lot like that of the laborers of Andalusia and Extremadura.
She shrugged off my tone. “Well, I hope you find them.”
It wasn’t our first time going to the embassy to ask about our parents, but this time we had a little reason to hope. The director of the school, Rubén Landa, had said that in recent weeks there had been news of the Nazis sending a train of Spanish refugees back to Spain from France.
Lisa stopped in front of our house. Despite being a bit run-down, the ramshackle place was the closest thing we’d had to a home since we’d arrived in Mexico.
“See you next Sunday?” she asked, her voice tinged with sadness. She kept expecting to show up in the Zócalo one day and not see us.
“Yes, of course, we won’t leave without saying goodbye,” I answered.
“Don’t forget how I’d love to go to Spain with you three. You’re closer to me than my own family.”
Ana squeezed her tight in a hug, and Isabel kissed her cheek. I gave her my biggest smile as I opened the gate and she walked away. My sisters and I went in the little yard and stayed by the front door talking.
“Oh, it makes me sad,” Isabel said.
“Lisa is so sweet,” Ana added.
“But she can’t come with us. Spain isn’t exactly safe right now.”
Isabel cocked her head at me. “Do you think it’s a good place for us to go? We’re the children of fugitive reds. I don’t expect they’ll receive us with open arms. Plus, people who’ve just come from Spain recently talk about how everyone’s starving to death in the streets and that winter last year was just miserable. Hundreds of people died from the cold, and tuberculosis has spread like the plague. What if there is nothing for us at home? In Mexico, if we finish two years at a vocational school, we can get jobs in an office or at a bank. You could even keep studying at a university. You’re good enough to get a scholarship from the government.”
My sister was right. Life was easier in Mexico, but sometimes we have to choose between happiness and survival. My conscience would never let me be if I didn’t make the effort to find our parents. I shrugged and shook my head wearily. “Well, at the least, I need to go look for them. But you two can stay here.”
“No, we promised them we’d stay together,” Ana said, frowning. The mere thought of each of us going our own way was unbearable to us.
We went inside, and Mrs. Sánchez called us to supper. There were about twelve students that night. We knew two from Morelia, and the others had come from Spain more recently.
As we sat around the table, Dr. Alfonso told us the news from the war in Europe and the situation in Spain. “It seems the Germans are trying to invade Greece, though what’s even more interesting to me is the possibility of Spain entering the war.”
“But the Spanish people can’t make it through another war!” Juan, one of the other residents, interjected. He had lost his parents in the massive flight of civilians from Valencia to Alicante in the final days of the civil war. He was another of our companions who was now all alone in the world.
“If our country goes to war and Germany loses, the Allies would invade the peninsula,” the professor said.
His wife shook her head with a tsk. “Those are false hopes. The British are the only ones holding out. The French have sold themselves to the Germans, and the rest are already under their power.”
“But, my love, there’s still Russia.”
“Are you forgetting that the Soviet Union made an agreement with Germany to divide up Poland? If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: Communism and fascism are two sides of the same coin.” Then commenced a political debate between the two.
Meanwhile, Juan leaned over to me and whispered, “I know you’re hoping to go look for your parents. There’s a boat departing to Spain next week.”
“Thanks, but we still haven’t made up our minds. What can two teenagers and a girl do to find their parents somewhere in France or Spain?”
“I know. I know, but I swear that if my parents were alive, I’d cross heaven and earth to look for them.”
Dr. Alfonso took a sip of wine and looked at all the students. “I heard that on Friday a group of students got into a fight with the gachupines.”
“They started it,” said Peter, another of our housemates. “Those fascists are always looking for trouble.”
The gachupines were the children of Spaniard fascists or descendants of the Spanish monarchy living in Mexico. Their school was almost right across the street from ours. Each day when we got out of school, we would exchange insults—which sometimes devolved into fistfights. The Francoist Spaniards would denounce us to the authorities and pressure the Mexican government to deport us to Spain.
“Well, let that be the last time. The fascists may be savage brutes, but we are the authentic representatives of the legitimate government of the Republic.”
We all hung our heads, though we knew that the fights would recommence the very next day.
We couldn’t let ourselves be humiliated by the sons of cowards who hadn’t fought in the war but who now strutted around like die-hard patriots.
“You’re going to the embassy first thing tomorrow morning?” Dr. Alfonso said, looking toward me and my sisters.
“Yes.” I nodded. “They might know something about our parents.”
“Let us hope so, my son. Hopefully good news.”
After supper, we got ready for bed. Ana and Isabel brushed their teeth, then got into one of the beds while I curled up in the other.
“What do you think they’ll say tomorrow?” Ana asked. She was nervous about the possibility of news and couldn’t sleep.
“I have no idea. We can only hope for good news.”
The next day, we didn’t need any help waking up. My sisters jumped out of bed and were ready in ten minutes. We ate a quick breakfast, then walked to the embassy, going up to the floor that served as the main office. The line of people waiting to be seen that day stretched out to the street, but we were the first called since we had an appointment.
The ambassador received us kindly in his office, which was packed with boxes and files. The whole place had a hasty, makeshift air about it, and no one had near enough resources for the hundreds of Republican refugees streaming into the city every day.
José María Argüelles had a quixotic look. It was easy to picture him wearing a helmet and armor and swinging a spear at the giant windmills. That was, essentially, what he was doing: trying to squeeze enough hope out of severely limited resources for the thousands and thousands of Spaniards who had arrived in Mexico.
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