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This year, we commemorate the 80 years of the "Retirada", the mass exodus of Spanish Republicans to France in 1939. They are 475 000 to have crossed the border in a few weeks, to escape the advance of the troops of General Franco after the fall of Barcelona on January 26, 1939. Catalonia was then the last refuge of the Spanish Loyalist army. This Saturday a big march is organized in Argelès, a town in the south-west of France, where the refugees had been parked.
When, on January 26, 1939, Barcelona fell into the hands of Franco's troops, the Catalan population, the thousands of republicans who had found refuge in Catalonia, driven back by the pro-Franco advance and the defeated republican army, headed for the French border. to escape fighting, bombing and repression. Spaniards arriving in the middle of winter, exhausted by years of war and hardship.
Worried to see "hordes of reds" sweep south of the country, the radical government of Edouard Daladier finally open the border on January 28, 1939, initially only civilians refugees. Armed men must wait until February 5, and are disarmed after crossing the border.
The testimony of Maria Braqué
Maria Baqué was a child at the time. At 87 years old today, she is one of the last witnesses of this exodus. In 1939, Maria Baqué was seven years old when she left Spain with her mother. " While passing by the mountain, with a smuggler who made us give all the money, approximately, that my mother could save, I walked all the night to arrive in France ".
Maria's father, who was in France six months earlier, is picking them up at the border. The family must then take a boat to Argentina.
► to (re) read : Winnipeg Odyssey: A Memorable Adventure in Latin America
But in September 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War canceled their project. " I had to go to the concentration camp in Argelès," Maria continues . They locked up the camps with barbed wire, so we were prisoners. Our barracks were in a kind of wood covered with tarpaulin, so as not to get wet ... "
As for the sleeping ...
" It was a fence that went along the barracks. If you had the chance to have a bench, you put it on. Otherwise, you sleep on the fence. My mother, who could not sleep on the fence, well she was sleeping on the sand . Maria Baqué was not released from the camps until 1944. A past that she had for several decades before telling her story to her grandson.
Argelès is remembered as the symbol of this exodus and the harsh living conditions that will be imposed on refugees, causing many deaths.
Many unidentified victims
Already, during the " exodus, there had been many, many deaths, especially in the early days since they arrived in the middle of winter," explains Maëlle Maugendre , author of a thesis on women in La Retirada. The living conditions in the transit camps, "in fields, under the snow" and then in the concentration camps, including the one in Argelès-sur-Mer, caused the deaths of " several dozen people a day ". .
Dead often unidentified, continues Maëlle Maugendre. " The goal of the French government is to identify all people who come to France, except that this is done mainly for men and not at all for women and children ". The French authorities, overwhelmed by the sudden influx of refugees, considered that women, by their very nature, were not politicized. A "huge mistake," according to the researcher.
In addition, " there are not enough gendarmes and police set up to identify. So, anyway, there are a lot of (dead people) whose names we do not have and we do not even know where (they) are (buried). There are mass graves in the cemeteries of the villages of Sardagna, but we have no precise figures on these deaths .
► to (re) listen : The paths of the Retirada
► On the camps in France : Chemins de mémoire, on the website of the Ministry of the Armed Forces