The Impostor
Page 26
We have come to the sixth response. This relates to the aforementioned sacralisation of the Holocaust, or simply the sacralisation of the witnesses. In “I am Enric Marco,” I argued that in our time the witness is afforded such inordinate respect that none dare question his authority, and the spineless capitulation in the face of this intellectual blackmail facilitated Marco’s deceit. The article was published in El País in December 2009; exactly a year later, in December 2010, when I thought I had definitively given up on the idea of writing about Marco and was in the middle of writing a book that had nothing to do with him, I published another article in the same newspaper, one entitled “The Blackmail of the Witness,” and there is little doubt that I was thinking about Marco when I wrote it. It reads: “It never fails: in any discussion about recent history, every time there is a discrepancy between the historian’s version and that of the witness, some witness pulls out the unassailable argument: ‘What would you know about it? You weren’t there!’ The person who was there—the witness—possesses the truth; the one who comes later—the historian—has only fragments, echoes and shadows of the truth. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, puts it thus: for him, any survivor of the Nazi concentration camps ‘has more to say than all historians combined about what happened’ because ‘Only those who were there know what it was; the others will never know.’ ” This, to my mind, isn’t an argument, it is the blackmail of the witness.
I found the quote by Wiesel in a much-needed plea in favour of history published by Santós Julia in the magazine Claves (No. 207). Much-needed, because memory is threatening to replace history in an era saturated with memory. This is bad news. Memory and history are notionally opposites: memory is individual, partial and subjective; history is collective and aspires to be comprehensive and objective. Memory and history are also complementary: history gives sense to memory; memory is a tool, an ingredient, a part of history. But memory is not history. Elie Wiesel has a point, but he’s only half right: the survivors of the camps are the only ones who know the truth, the unimaginable horror of that diabolical experience, but that does not mean that they understand the experience; in fact, preoccupied with their own struggle for survival, they may be in the worst possible position to understand it. In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes, “he who plays a part in a historic event never understands its significance.” In Book Eleven of the novel, Pierre Bezukhov goes to fight at the Battle of Borodino; he sets off in search of the glories he has read about in books, but finds only utter chaos, or, as Isaiah Berlin puts it, “only the ordinary confusion of individual human beings haphazardly attending to this or that human want […] a succession of ‘accidents’ whose origins and consequences are, by and large, untraceable and unpredictable.” Thirty years before War and Peace, Stendhal described a similar scene: in the first pages of The Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrizio del Dongo, a fervent admirer of Napoleon, takes part in the battle of Waterloo, but, like Bezukhov at Borodino, he understands nothing, or understands only that war is utter chaos and not “that noble and universal uplifting of souls athirst for glory which he had imagined it to be from Napoleon’s proclamations!” The testimonies of Bezukhov and del Dongo contain a profound truth: that for those caught up in it, war is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the truth of Bezukhov and del Dongo is not the whole truth; it is precisely because he didn’t fight at Borodino or at Waterloo that the historian can silence the sound, appease the fury, situate Borodino and Waterloo within the context of the Napoleonic wars, and the Napoleonic wars within the context of nineteenth-century history, or history more generally, and in doing so, give the tale meaning. Unless he or she is particularly ingenuous (or particularly arrogant), the historian doesn’t claim to attain absolute truth, which is the sum of an infinite number of fractional truths, and consequently unattainable; but unless he or she is particularly irresponsible (or particularly lazy), the historian knows that he or she has a duty to come as close as possible to this perfect truth, and a greater chance of doing so than anyone else.
A historian is not a judge, but the ways in which they work are similar; like the judge, the historian studies documents, corroborates evidence, connects facts, questions witnesses; like the judge, the historian pronounces a verdict. The verdict isn’t definitive—it can be appealed, revised, refuted—but it is a verdict. It is issued by the judge, or the historian, not the witness. Witnesses aren’t always right; their truth depends on memory, and memory is fragile and often self-serving. We don’t always remember accurately, we aren’t always capable of distinguishing memory from imagination, we don’t necessarily remember what happened, but instead what we previously remembered as having happened, or what other witnesses have said happened, or simply what it suits us to remember. Obviously, witnesses aren’t to blame for this (or not always): after all, they alone can answer to their memories; the historian, on the other hand, must answer to the truth. And being answerable to the truth, the historian cannot tolerate the blackmail of the witness; when necessary, he or she should have the courage to reject the witness’s claim to truth. In an era of memory, history should belong to historians.
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The seventh and last response: in our era of memory, when, more even than memory, what triumphs in Spain is the industry of memory, people wanted to listen to the lies the champion of memory had to tell. Once again, Marco was on the side of the majority.
3
Marco first approached the Amical de Mauthausen after one of his early visits to Flossenbürg. At the time, the Amical had its headquarters in an attic room at 312 calle Aragón, in the district of Ensanche. Marco introduced himself as a former deportado eager to work with the association; I don’t know to whom he spoke that first day, but it seems clear that no-one was particularly interested and he got the impression they were giving him the runaround. Some time later, Marco visited again, with no better results. Our man was then vice-president of FaPaC, and some weeks or months after his second frustrating visit to the attic office on calle Aragón, one of his colleagues at FaPaC told him that a member of the Amical had been asking about him and wanted to meet him. The colleague was Frédéric Lloret, a biology teacher; the person from the Amical was Rosa Torán, a history teacher who was, or would soon be, a member of the board of Amical. She is also an important character in this story.
Marco and Torán met at a lunch organised by Lloret, during which Torán talked to Marco about Amical, told him that her uncle had died in Mauthausen and that she had only recently begun to get involved in the organisation and take an interest in the Deportation. Marco talked to her at length about his experience as a prisoner in Flossenbürg, told her he had given talks on the subject at various schools and gave her a photocopy of a letter he had just sent to an Italian friend from Flossenbürg. The letter was genuine: the friend was Gianfranco Mariconti, whom Marco had just met while attending his first reunion of former prisoners at the camp. Five years later, shortly before the scandal broke, Torán published the letter in a book titled The Nazi Concentration Camps: Words Against Forgetting. Marco begins the letter to his (genuine) new friend and (fictitious) former fellow prisoner with a description of the difference between the camp as he had known it—or had not known it—and how it looked now: “It’s not easy to recognise the camp as it is today. There is just enough left to avoid mistaking it for a park or the gardens of the industrial estate that nowadays covers a large part of the old foundations of the barracks.” Towards the end of the letter he writes that, at the age of seventy-eight, his anger and hatred should have burned out, but implies that this is not the case, and concludes with one of the slogans that he would endlessly repeat during his years at Amical, duly emphasised using capital letters: “Forgive, YES; forget, NO.”
At his next visit to the Amical everything changed, though this was not thanks to Rosa Torán but to Josep Zamora, who was secretary general of the organisation at the time. Za
mora wasn’t a deportee, he was the son of a deportee, but he had fought in the Civil War and later in the French Resistance, and had been a member of the Amical since the Eighties. The Amical de Mauthausen literally lived off the past—here the past wasn’t the past but the present or an aspect of the present—so, although Marco and Zamora didn’t know each other, they began exchanging stories from their past, discovered they had fought with the same unit during the war (26th Division, the former Durruti Column) and hit it off. Marco immediately applied to be a member of Amical. To validate his admission, over the following days he provided written answers to the questionnaire; his answers are an almost perfect mixture of truth and lies: he gave his date of birth as April 14, 1921, the symbolic date of the proclamation of the Segunda República, rather than April 12, 1921, his actual birthdate; he declared that he had been a prisoner in Kiel gaol, which was true, and in Flossenbürg concentration camp, which was false; he declared that his prison number was 623-23, which may well have been true, though I haven’t been able to confirm it, and that his camp number was 6448, which was false (the number itself was real: he usurped it from Enric Moner); he declared that he had been admitted to Kiel prison on March 6, 1942, which was true, and to Flossenbürg on December 18, 1942, which was false; he also declared that he had been released on April 23, 1945, which was of course false (though it was also symbolic, in its way, being the date of the liberation of Flossenbürg). One of the last questions on the form related to the reason or reasons for which he had been brought to trial; Marco gave one true (“High Treason”) and one false (“Conspiracy against the Third Reich”). At the bottom of the questionnaire, the prospective member had to list the documents or photocopies of documents attached as evidence of his status as a deportado; Marco wrote: “Court Martial ruling, certificate prison entry, document from KL Flossenbürg.”
This is what Marco said he was appending, but this wasn’t what he actually appended, or not exactly. He attached a document from the prosecutor detailing his trial in Kiel from which it was clear that he had been arrested and had spent several months in prison, but he didn’t attach the judge’s ruling, which proved that he had been found not guilty and released. He attached the photocopy of the Flossenbürg camp register bearing the handwritten name Enric Moner which could have been read as Enric Marco (or so Marco hoped), the same photocopy with which, in the archives of Flossenbürg Memorial, he’d tried to get Johannes Ibel to certify that he had been a prisoner in the camp. And he attached another document. It was dated June 25, 1999, and, especially to anyone who knew no German, it looked like an official certificate attesting that Marco had been a prisoner in Flossenbürg concentration camp, because it consisted of a list of thirty-two names of citizens of fourteen countries, among them Marco’s, and a second page stapled to it bearing the seal of the Flossenbürg information office (in case there might be any doubt, at the bottom of the page, Marco himself wrote “Survivor located”); the truth is that the document merely certified that he had attended the reunions for former prisoners at the memorial site, and it hadn’t been issued by Flossenbürg information office, but by an organisation within the Bavarian Ministry for Education. As such, none of the documents Marco provided as proof of his time at Flossenbürg camp proved that he had been a prisoner there. So, either no-one at the Amical de Mauthausen could read German, or no-one actually read the documents, or whoever read them found them convincing, or didn’t find them convincing but didn’t want to be a wet blanket or go around poking people in the eye and capitulated to the prestige or the subornment or the blackmail of the witness, dared not say No and opted to say nothing. If this last hypothesis is correct—and it isn’t impossible—it’s likely that whoever allowed Marco in did not immediately regret their actions.
Because, when he joined the Amical de Mauthausen, Marco seemed to be precisely the man Spanish deportados needed, just as twenty-five years earlier, when he joined the C.N.T., he had seemed to be precisely the man Spanish anarchists needed. And just as with the C.N.T. and with FaPaC, Marco joined the Amical at a moment of crisis. The organisation had been founded in 1962 with the support of the Amicale association in France, and until 1978 it remained illegal. Its chief purpose was facilitating contact between deportados and their families, providing information, legal assistance and, later, financial aid; by 1999, however, this model seemed to have run its course, because the last survivors were beginning to pass away, or were so old that they were no longer in a position to manage the association, meaning that it had to be completely restructured to avoid dying with them. The restructuring had already begun by the time Marco arrived, although everyone acknowledges that he did more than anyone else to consolidate the change. He was charming, tireless and extremely generous with his time—indeed he began to invest all his time in the association. The most important thing, however, was that despite being a deportado he had the youth and energy that the survivors at the Amical were lacking. Furthermore, he wasn’t as sparing in his words as they were, or as most of them were, nor as reluctant to talk about his experience in the camps; on the contrary, he was delighted to do it, and knew how to do it, or at least knew how to dazzle people with his vivid stories. As a result, when he spoke publicly, Marco was much more convincing than the real survivors of the camps, the proof being that when he did talks with them, he outshone them, he became the man who moved and thrilled audiences, the focus of any conference. The reality is that, wherever he was, Marco couldn’t bear not being the centre of attention. On November 15, 2002, a plenary session of the Catalan parliament paid tribute to Republicans exiled after the Civil War; representatives of all parties addressed the session, but none of the fourteen Republicans chose to speak, except for Marco, who appeared as a survivor of the Nazi camps and who, at the end, as the chamber echoed with cheers and applause, made his own contribution, with a roar that made the headlines of every newspaper the following day: “¡Viva la República!”
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It took Marco only a few short months to prove that he could play an important role in revitalising the Amical de Mauthausen. The year 2001 was the tenth anniversary of the death of Montserrat Roig, a writer with strong ties to the organisation since, in 1977, she’d written the first book about Catalan prisoners of the Nazi camps. The board decided to honour her with a series of events, including an homage at the Palau de la Música. For Amical, this was an ambitious project, especially given its parlous finances and the frailty of many of its leaders; this perhaps explains why, in April of that year, a number of younger directors were co-opted to the board, among them Marco, who was appointed secretary for international relations. His dynamism and his tireless dedication did much to contribute to the success of the events, as did the close ties he’d cultivated with the political leaders in the Catalan parliament during his time as vice-president of FaPaC. These ties explain why, two months before the homage to Montserrat Roig, the Catalan government honoured Marco with the Creu de Sant Jordi, its highest civilian decoration, for a lifetime of generous and selfless commitment, even in adversity, to safeguarding the dignity and welfare of the country: not only for “his loyalty to the libertarian tradition of the Catalan workers’ movement, as evidenced by a long career as an activist culminating in his time as secretary general of the Catalan chapter of the C.N.T.,” according to the official citation extolling his virtues, or for “his constant striving for the betterment of public education,” but also for his struggle against the Franco regime and against the Nazis, “which led to his arrest by the Gestapo and his internment in a concentration camp.” This was the greatest moment in Marco’s life to date, marking the public consecration in Catalonia of the character he had created. Can it really be a surprise, then, if many members of the Amical saw Marco as a blessing sent from heaven to lift them out of decades of poverty with his prestige as a civic hero and his miraculous youthfulness?
While he reinforced his power at Amical, Marco continued to put
the finishing touches on his character. It must have been about this time that he told his story to a young journalist named Jordi Bassa, who was preparing a book about Catalan prisoners of the Nazi camps; he had done this with Pons Prades twenty-five years earlier, but Jordi Bassa’s book, published the following year as A Memoir of Hell, was unlike that of Pons Prades, at least as far as Marco was concerned. By the time he spoke to Bassa, our man had already visited Flossenbürg and had conscientiously researched and created—or was creating—his character as a survivor of the Deportation, and so, rather than glossing over his time in Flossenbürg as he’d done with Pons Prades, now he spoke about it at length, describing the camps, inventing anecdotes and stories, evoking mood and atmosphere, giving details, dates, places and characters; in short he fashioned a much more convincing story than the one he’d told to Pons Prades, like a novelist who, with time and effort, has learned his craft, expanded his sources and thoroughly mastered them.
During this period, Marco made a visit to Flossenbürg with his wife and a group of colleagues from Amical, among them Rosa Torán. There were seven or eight of them, and they made the trip by minibus. When they arrived at the camp, Marco was greeted by the staff at the memorial site, including the director, Jörg Skriebeleit, as just another former prisoner; he took part in a tribute paid by young people to the former prisoners who, of course, also treated him as one of their own. Before or after the ceremony, Marco and his companions from the Amical laid flowers on the stone commemorating the Spaniards who had died in Flossenbürg and visited the site while our man recalled his time there: my barracks were just here, the camp kitchen was there and over there the mess hall, inspection took place every morning here on the Appellplatz, over there I was beaten, over there they murdered what’s-his-name. Rosa Torán remembers three things about the trip. The first is that, at a certain point, Marco and his wife headed off to the village because they were apparently meeting with Gianfranco Mariconti, Marco’s fake camp comrade and real friend, and they returned early from the meeting: according to Marco’s wife, who had met Gianfranco on previous occasions, the Italian didn’t show up. The second thing Torán remembers is that, out of curiosity, while visiting the Memorial archives, she asked to see Marco’s admission slip. She doesn’t remember exactly who she asked, but she remembers that the person in question explained the difficulties of finding documentary evidence for the presence of all the prisoners in the camp, mentioned the database that Johannes Ibel was working on and told her that, when the camp was liberated, the Americans had taken away all the documentation on site which was now stored at the National Archives in Washington, where for some time they’d been drawing up alphabetical lists of the names that appeared in the camp registers and were sending them via microfiche; she told Torán that, so far, the lists had only gotten as far as the letter F or possibly G, but certainly not as far as M for Marco, so it was impossible to know whether Marco’s name was on the list or not; the person also told Torán that there was no guarantee Marco’s name would appear, since it was likely that not all prisoners were on the list. Torán doesn’t remember Marco or anyone else showing her the photocopied page of the register bearing the name Enric Moner which Marco had vainly tried to convince Johannes Ibel was his alias, his name in the resistance, a name that might have been mistaken for Marco, or which Marco hoped might be mistaken for his, which was why he had attached the photocopied page to his application for membership to the Amical de Mauthausen. The third thing Torán remembers about the trip was the first to occur and was the most important, or seems to me the most important: during the drive to Flossenbürg, she heard Marco’s wife confessing, “Every time we come to Flossenbürg, I suffer, because Enric doesn’t sleep for days before the trip.”