The History Girls

From Spanish Horror Into French Hell

Maggie Brookes

When one story ends, another begins. My novel Acts of Love and War finishes in 1939 as my protagonists leave war-torn Spain and cross into France. They have experienced the horrors of the brutal civil war, but also helped to save the lives of hundreds and thousands of children by joining the small band of humanitarian aid workers.

It is thought that by November 1938 there were more than a million refugees in Catalonia, escaping General Franco's army. They toiled up into the Pyrenees, often on foot, ill shod and not clothed warmly enough for winter in the mountains, knowing that Franco's fascists executed Republican sympathisers without mercy. The long column of fleeing refugees was strafed by Italian and Spanish planes. Thousands of people began to congregate in border towns like Puigcerda, and the relief organisations ran mobile canteens to feed them.

But reaching the French border was only the beginning of further trials to come. To begin with the French had closed the border, and no Spaniards were allowed to leave the country. The French government feared that the Spanish 'Reds' would spread communism into France, and didn't want to anger Franco's powerful fascist allies Hitler and Mussolini. However the Spanish - French border in the Pyrenees crosses open fields and rivers, and local people were able to direct refugees to un-manned crossing points. To the locals it was all Catalonia.

The refugees had been starving for months or even years, because the farmlands of Spain were in Franco's hands, and the only food was being supplied by foreign governments and charities. They hoped that when they crossed into France where food was plentiful, they would be treated with kindness, expecting a country of liberté, égalité, fraternité which respected human rights. A few were taken in by French Catalans, but for the majority, a new terror was beginning.

On January 26 Barcelona fell to General Franco, and on the 28th the French government opened the border, but only to women and children, splitting families. It is difficult to imagine the misery of these starving people crossing the border to escape bitter reprisals, and discovering that families could legally be torn apart. Women, children, the elderly and the infirm were sent to accommodation centres, not knowing when or if they would see their menfolk again. They were dispersed to nearly two thousand barracks, factories, fortresses and prisons, scattered all over France.

At every crossing point on the border, civilian refugees and soldiers were pushing to be let into France. Then, on February 5th, the French government opened the border but designated all Spanish asylum seekers as 'undesirables'. This label meant that they could be imprisoned without trial. The massive influx of half a million people into France which followed has been named La Retirada (Spanish for Retreat).

About 100,000 men were herded towards a so called 'internment camp' on the beach at Argeles-sur-Mer, and about 60,000 to Saint-Cyprien. No preparation had been made for them, except to enclose a section of treeless beach with barbed wire.

 This was early February and it was bitterly cold. There was no shelter, no means to build fires and the drinking water was salty. They dug holes in the sand to sleep in, though three feet down they hit water. For weeks there were no latrines. A similar internment camp soon followed at Le Bacares. It was a place of unspeakable squalor. Hundreds fell ill, or died of pneumonia, dysentery, typhoid or of gangrene in untended wounds. An estimated 15,000 died of dysentery and related diseases in the beach camps.

Quaker aid worker Dr Audrey Russell, said at the time, 'I have seen such awful things that I have no feeling left. There has never been anything so horrible as this since the Middle Ages. The French authorities refused all help at the beginning. They turned away the Swiss Red Cross vans that had come to save the wounded. They seized the Spanish ambulances, mobile operating theatre and hospital instruments and would not let them be used. And we were not allowed to help.'

As well as being imprisoned behind barbed wire, the prisoners were guarded by a special branch of the gendarmerie and Senegalese troops.  The photojournalist Robert Capa said 'for sport many mounted and armed French guards beat up dying men … One night in February seventeen died of exposure and were buried where they lay.' 

Prisoners who retaliated were perceived to be 'troublemakers' and sent to a punishment camp at Collioure.

Over the next weeks, the prisoners made shelters for themselves out of blankets, rags, bits of tent, corrugated iron, or by burrowing into the sand. One group of fishermen from Santander stole along the shore at night, gathered reeds and built a hut tall enough to stand up in. Seventeen men lived there. The French immediately installed guards to stop any other people gathering reeds.

 Just outside the main camp at Argeles-Sur-Mer two hundred women with a hundred and sixty children were living in le Arenes, a former bullring. Their husbands were in the camp and they had threatened to kill themselves if they were not allowed to be near them. The French had given in but said the women must all have their heads shaved or go to prison. The head shaving commenced but many women were crying so much that in the end the guards didn't have the hear to continue.

Inside the beach camps, the authorities set up huts they called hospitals, but there wasn't enough room in them for all the sick and wounded. The prisoners who were well enough tried to maintain their morale by forming choirs, playing sports, running adult classes and creating works of art.

In the spring of 1939 the beach camps were emptied out. The French authorities tried to recruit the prisoners to the Foreign Legion, but those who didn't want to go were moved to 'concentration camps' spread over the South of France where they were to be joined after the German occupation (from May 1940) by other 'undesirables' including Jews.

The camp of Gurs was a vast sea of huts on a flat plain a little north of the Pyrenees. In the winter it was a sea of mud, in the summer, parched and dry. There were many Basques in this camp, a large contingent of airmen, and a number of International Brigaders. They faced a future of slave labour in Nazi occupied France.

However, many Spaniards escaped and joined the French resistance and in 1944, they took part in the liberation of a number of French regions. The first armoured vehicle to enter Paris in August 1944 was driven by Spanish Republicans.

At the end of the second world war, around 150,000 Spaniards stayed in France. Others went to Mexico. They would have been killed by Franco's regime if they'd tried to return to their homes. Spain was not safe again for them until 1975 when Franco died.

Grateful thanks to P-O Life. Life in the Pyrénées-Orientales, for photographs 1, 2 and 4.