Beyond exile suffering and death in French internment camps (1939-1940)

fea­ture his­tor­i­cal mem­ory

On Jan­u­ary 28, 1939, the French au­thor­i­ties au­tho­rised entry into the coun­try for chil­dren, women and those wounded in the Span­ish Civil War, open­ing the first refugee camp on the beach of Argelès a few days later. Eighty-two years on, re­search by a team of his­to­ri­ans com­pris­ing Jordi Oliva, Martí Picas and Noemí Ri­u­dor has led to the com­pi­la­tion of a list of 1,685 peo­ple who died in the camps be­tween 1939 and 1940, a key con­tri­bu­tion to re­search on that pe­riod of Cata­lan his­tory.

The gen­e­sis of this re­search can be found in work that has been car­ried out to re­vise the list of deaths caused by the Civil War (1936-1939) in the Berguedà re­gion. This work was done by Martí Picas and Roser Valverde and pub­lished in the local mag­a­zine L’Erol on the oc­ca­sion of the 80th an­niver­sary of the end of the con­flict.

In turn, this re­view of the human cost of the Civil War and post-war pe­riod in Berguedà must be placed in the con­text of a much more am­bi­tious pro­ject of re­gional re­views that have been car­ried out under the di­rec­tion of the Cen­tre for Con­tem­po­rary His­tory of Cat­alo­nia since 2006. The work is now con­tin­u­ing with the su­per­vi­sion and sup­port of the Cata­lan in­sti­tute Memo­r­ial Democràtic.

In order to un­der­stand what is be­hind this de­sire to re­cover the mem­ory of the vic­tims, we must re­turn to a his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal tra­di­tion fo­cused on count­ing the human cost of war, which arose in Cat­alo­nia in the late 1970s through the work of writer Montser­rat Roig and his­to­ri­ans Josep M. Solé i Sabaté and Joan Vil­lar­roya, as well as local schol­ars. Also, and very es­pe­cially, it is worth not­ing the re­search on the human cost of the Civil War in Cat­alo­nia that the Cen­tre for Con­tem­po­rary His­tory of Cat­alo­nia (CHCC) has pro­moted since its cre­ation, more than 30 years ago, at a time when very few peo­ple paid it any at­ten­tion and it was even mocked in cer­tain aca­d­e­mic cir­cles: “Josep Benet counts the dead,” they said.

The re­searchers con­sulted var­i­ous sources to carry out their work, in­clud­ing the list pub­lished by the Span­ish Min­istry of For­eign Af­fairs in the Of­fi­cial State Gazette (BOE) from March 12, 1940 and an­other list of “Spaniards who died abroad” drawn up at the re­quest of the then Mayor of Per­pig­nan, Román Oyarzun Oyarzun.

The list ba­si­cally in­cludes deaths in in­tern­ment camps and French health cen­tres in towns in the re­gion of the Midi-Pyrénées and Langue­doc-Rous­sil­lon be­tween Jan­u­ary 1939 and Jan­u­ary 1940, in­di­cat­ing the vic­tim’s name and two sur­names, age, ori­gin and/or place of res­i­dence, and the place and the date of death, and in some cases also the date of birth. In ad­di­tion to the afore­men­tioned sources, the three re­searchers also con­sulted other local pub­li­ca­tions ad­dress­ing the sub­ject pub­lished by the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment, as well as names on the mon­u­ments to the vic­tims in Argelès, Sant Cebrià de Rosselló and Portven­dres.