Francisco Garcia was 18 years old when he crossed the Spanish-French border at Pratsde-Mollo with the routed Republican army in February 1939. He had been wounded in the hand and thigh at the Battle of Lerida, and carried a three-month-old baby boy, the son of a Spanish Republican officer, in a suitcase. Garcia made the long march with the baby's mother and his own fiancee.
But at the border, French gendarmes separated him from the women and child. "They kicked me in the ribs," he says standing on the beach at Argeles at the exact place where he was imprisoned. "The gendarmes took everything I had. They put us in a truck and brought us here, like animals." Garcia kneels in the sand to trace the outlines of the camp with his finger. It had barbed wire on three sides and was guarded by Moroccan and Senegalese troops enrolled in the French army. The sea on the fourth side.
"Here there was nothing. Nothing," the old man says, still burning with anger. "We drank salt water, and the sea was also our toilet so we got dysentery. We dug holes in the sand and slept together, four or five men in a hole, to keep from freezing. They'd give us one piece of bread for 25 people."
They call themselves Les Olvidados, the forgotten ones. It's as if France cannot or dare not recognise the suffering it inflicted on Spanish Republican refugees between 1939 and 1941, when half a million men, women and children passed through the concentration camps of the Roussillon region. Now the survivors, hundreds of whom gathered here at Argeles last week to commemorate the 60th anniversary of La Retirada, the retreat from Franco's fascist forces, have received a small measure of recognition.
Because the gendarmes confiscated most of the refugees' identity papers, no accurate record was kept of their deaths, but historians believe at least 5,000 perished on the Roussillon beaches. About 30,000 of the prisoners already suffered from war wounds that became gangrenous during the retreat. Famished and exhausted, chilled by the Tramontane wind which blows down from the mountains, with no change of clothing and only sewage-polluted sea-water to wash in, the prisoners caught typhus, malaria, scabies, scurvy and lice.
Late in the spring of 1939, Francisco Garcia was moved up the coast to the St Cyprien camp, where his fiancee found him. "She was young and beautiful," he says wistfullyes. "She had long black hair and very white skin. I was covered with lice, and I was afraid she would catch them from me. Her aunt wanted us to get married in the camp, but I was too ashamed. Her name was Maria Garcia Mendes. I don't know what happened to her."
Argeles remained the point of passage for all Spanish refugees entering France. Women, children and men over the age of 55 were sent north on trains, to be lodged in schools and convents. By late spring, Argeles was so over-crowded that the second camp was opened at St Cyprien. That one filled too, and a third was established at Barcares. Eventually, there were nine camps and prisons to hold the hundreds of thousands of men who had fought to defend a democratically-elected government against Franco's coup.
When the Spanish Civil W@ar started in 1936, the Republicans believed that the leftwing Popular Front in power in France would help them. But France too was riven by conflict between left and right, and French leaders were terrified that war would spread to their country. So, France proposed a nonintervention pact, a cowardly fiction which enabled Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to continue helping Franco. The Republicans' bitterness at this betrayal, and at their shameful treatment in the Roussillon concentration camps, is immense. "There are French names that the Spanish have carved forever in their hearts," the Spanish anarchist, Miguel Gimenez Igualada, wrote in a 1944 poem entitled Dolo. "French names that parents will teach their children how to spell . . . to keep alive and fresh the memory of pain . . . to forever protest against indifference and the lack of solidarity." The names are those of the French concentration camps and prisons where the Spanish were incarcerated: Argeles-sur-Mer, Barcares, Gurs, Bram, Vernet, the medieval fortress at Collioure, Rivesaltes, les Milles, SaintCyprien.
Spanish nationalist propaganda portrayed the refugees as depraved and disease-ridden, and, so, in a document displayed this month at Argeles, the Prefect of France's Pyrenees-Orientales department decreed that the meagre parcels they carried with them be burned or buried. The myth - and distrust of emigrants - are so persistent that Argeles town hall recently received an anonymous letter claiming that the refugees were not mistreated, and that in any case, they had to be isolated because they carried venereal diseases.
In his history of the Spanish Civil War, British academic Paul Preston quotes Gustav Regler, a German who fought on the Republican side with the International Brigades. "The French tapped disdainfully on the haversacks and demanded that they should be opened," Regler wrote. "The Spanish did not understand. Until the last moment they persisted in the tragic error of believing in international solidarity . . . Under the eyes of the Prefect and the generals, the men of the Garde Mobile took away the bags and bundles containing personal belongings and emptied their contents into a ditch filled with chloride of lime. I have never seen eyes of such anger and helplessness as those of the Spaniards."
The Republicans' suffering was compounded by their political feuds, which they carried into exile with them. Pierre Fuentes, the 43-year-old son of a Spanish Republican and the assistant to the mayor of Argeles, was the chief organiser of last week's commemoration. He managed to bring old communists, socialists, anarchists and Trotskyists together to plan events. "Representatives from Barcelona came and asked us how we did it," he says. "In Spain, they still refuse to talk to one another."
Their voices breaking with emotion, Spanish Republicans and their children at last vented their anger and sense of betrayal. At a slide show in the Jean Jaures cinema, grey-haired men and women hummed old Republican songs along with the sound track. Afterwards, a woman in the audience stood up. "I was 10 years old in the camp at Argeles," she said. "I want to thank the town for holding this commemoration, but I'm sorry it hasn't been done on a national level."
The internment of the Spanish Republicans is hardly acknowledged in France, and not a single major French newspaper covered the 60th anniversary ceremonies. The Paris government sent the communist minister of transport and the junior minister for war veterans to Argeles for a day, but no president or prime minister ever mentioned the disgraceful episode.
Other members of the audience recalled that despite their ill treatment by the French, 60,000 Spanish Republicans joined the French army when the Second World War started seven months after their exodus. Again they were betrayed, for Marshal Philippe Petain's collaborationist Vichy government made an agreement with the Nazis under which Spanish Republicans were handed over to the Gestapo. Thus 20,000 Spaniards were deported to Nazi death camps.
Many Spaniards who continued fighting joined the Leclerc divison, which liberated Paris in August 1944. The first tanks to enter the capital were crewed by Spaniards and bore the names Madrid, Guadalajara and Guernica. Again they were betrayed: "Leclerc told the Spaniards who signed up, `with the same arms we will go to liberate Spain,' " the son of an Argeles camp survivor told me.
While the commemoration was being organised, a debate raged over the term "concentration camps". In French government documents of the period, the words were widely used to refer to Argeles and the other camps, and in February 1939 the French interior minister, Albert Sarraut, told a press conference that the Argeles camp was "not a penitentiary but a concentration camp." Survivors wanted the words to appear on the plaque unveiled on Argeles beach on September 4th , but the mostly Jewish Association of Former Deportees objected on the grounds that it would be confused with the much worse Nazi camps that followed.
"We had nothing to gain by insisting that it was a concentration camp," Fuentes says. "All the old men here today know it was. There's no point making enemies of the deportees."
Terrible as it is, the Spanish Republicans' story is arguably one of the few 20th century tragedies with a happy ending. Most of the survivors settled in France after the war. Their contribution to the Resistance was never recognised. "The French wanted the credit for themselves," explained Odette Bernad, the French widow of a Spanish Republican, "and General de Gaulle distrusted them because they were leftists."
As communists and anarchists, many were harassed by the French administration, but they nonetheless became French citizens. Since Franco's death in 1976, they are free to visit their homeland, which is at last a democracy and a member of the European Union.
Arthur "Kery" Escoriguel was 20-years-old when he left Spain with the Republican Army. This Spaniard of Irish descent was an interpreter at Argeles camp. "It kept my mind off my own problems," he says. "Every day there were dramas. I will never forget the Catalan sailor who swam out to sea saying he was going to find his wife and little girl in Barcelona. He drowned himself."
Less than a year after the Spanish Retirada, Escoriguel retreated with the French army from north of Paris to the Dordogne. He was imprisoned by the Germans and sent to Nuremburg, where he believes that as a Catalan - considered "southern Aryans" by the Nazis - he was part of racial experiments. "They measured my nose and ears and put me under anaesthesia. When I came to, there were sutures on my arm. In 1986, I received a large sum of money from the German government."
Yet Escoriguel is surprisingly forgiving: "There were Germans in the International Brigades. You can't judge a whole nation for what the Nazis did." As for the French, he says: "Franco was more guilty than the French. I can't hold a grudge against them - they gave me a scholarship after the war."
Escoriguel married a Frenchwoman, became a computer technician and went to art school at night. "After I'd sold 400 paintings, I resigned from my job." Now 80, he has completed 3,400 paintings, including a fresco in the Perpignan train station recalling Salvador Dali's comment that it is "the centre of the universe".
The old Republicans can still burst into tears when asked about their treatment. But Francisco Garcia, Martial Mayans, Antonio Velasco, Kery Escoriguel and others I met in Argeles nonetheless convey a rare optimism and courage, genuine joy in living. They lost everything they had, everyone they loved, yet went on to found happy marriages and families.
"Life didn't stop with the Retirada," Escoriguel explains. "It was one page in our history. If you believe in life, if you believe in man, you keep going."