“Little research has been done on death in the French camps”

Very lit­tle re­search has been done on death in the French camps and what has been done is only a par­tial job with both local pri­mary and sec­ondary sources, at least as far as we know. There is talk, for ex­am­ple, of more than 160 deaths in Argelès due to ill-treated ill­nesses and wounds; it is also thought that 10 peo­ple died in the Bram camp the day after ar­riv­ing; be­tween Feb­ru­ary 26 and March 4, 20 more peo­ple died at the Hos­pi­tal de Sant Lluís in Per­pig­nan, etc. In gen­eral, as is also the case in our coun­try, death reg­is­ters don’t cover all deaths in camps or hos­pi­tals. We don’t know whether this was to do with the sta­tus of the refugee, their being aban­doned by the au­thor­i­ties at home, the local au­thor­i­ties being over­whelmed or ne­glect­ful, or the in­dif­fer­ence of third-party coun­tries. In re­cent years, a lit­tle more progress has been made, but the re­sult of re­search on the study of mor­tal­ity in the camps re­mains in­suf­fi­cient. We hope that this con­tri­bu­tion will help shed a lit­tle more light on our knowl­edge of exile and the over­all human cost of it.

In global fig­ures, in the whole ge­o­graph­i­cal and tem­po­ral scope of exile, there were more of course. Fo­cus­ing just on the pe­riod we have stud­ied, how­ever, from Jan­u­ary 1939 to Jan­u­ary 1940, and ge­o­graph­i­cally in the camps of what are today the de­part­ments of Langue­doc-Rous­sil­lon and Midi-Pyrénées, we be­lieve that the num­ber of fa­tal­i­ties is very ac­cu­rate. The fact that the age group be­tween 0 and 4 years rep­re­sents about 9% re­flects a more than ev­i­dent re­al­ity, that there was a very high in­fant mor­tal­ity, but the fact that this ap­pears on the list shows a clear de­sire to pro­duce an ex­haus­tive count. Lit­tle Hortènsia Cortina Vidal’s ap­pear­ance on the list made us re­alise this. On the other hand, we’re aware that we don’t have all of them, and we no­ticed this be­cause of the ab­sence of Roser Guàrdia Gabarrós.

If we ac­cept the fig­ures given by the French Min­istry of For­eign Af­fairs, the Valière Re­port and the his­to­ri­og­ra­phy on exile as cor­rect, and es­pe­cially those pro­vided by Javier Rubio, the total num­ber of ex­iles in the first months of 1939 would be about 440,000, in­clud­ing civil­ians (women, el­derly and chil­dren), the dis­abled and wounded (with­out spec­i­fy­ing whether civil­ians or mil­i­tary), and able-bod­ied civil­ians and mil­i­tary. Of these, around 300,000 would have been repa­tri­ated be­tween Feb­ru­ary and De­cem­ber 1939. Ap­ply­ing the cal­cu­la­tion to the total num­ber that would have gone into exile, it could be around 4 per 1,000. If we apply this to those who stayed in France after repa­tri­a­tions, this fig­ure would rise to 12 per 1,000.

A lack of fore­sight, the tight­en­ing of legal and ad­min­is­tra­tive mea­sures by the French state, im­pro­vised spaces, in­se­cu­rity and un­cer­tain­ties of all kinds, from the recog­ni­tion of tem­po­rary asy­lum in­stead of po­lit­i­cal refugee sta­tus to the Fran­coist au­thor­i­ties’ un­scrupu­lous use of the refugees in their talks with the French state, the re­stric­tions on refugees’ ac­cess to the labour mar­ket, dif­fi­cul­ties in fam­ily re­uni­fi­ca­tion, makeshift camps built by the in­mates them­selves as they were ar­riv­ing and with­out any ini­tial san­i­tary in­fra­struc­ture, forced repa­tri­a­tions, non-ex­is­tent hy­giene, dis­eases due to food de­fi­cien­cies and non-potable brack­ish water.

The sources, and es­pe­cially the one from Javier Rubio, show that more than a third of those in exile were from Cat­alo­nia. In rel­a­tive fig­ures, it would be 36.5% of the total. This is fol­lowed by Aragon (18%), Va­len­cia (14.1%), An­dalu­sia (10.5%) and the rest of the Penin­sula (20.9 %). The Cata­lan con­tin­gent is there­fore in­dis­putably the largest by far. It should also be borne in mind that a very large part of the non-Cata­lan refugees who passed to the other side of the Pyre­nees came from a first refuge, often trav­el­ling through var­i­ous towns in Cat­alo­nia, as evac­uees from war zones at the be­gin­ning of the Civil War. Of the total num­ber of vic­tims on the list, we know the ori­gin and/or res­i­dence in 35% of cases. At such a low per­cent­age it’s dif­fi­cult to draw con­clu­sions, be­cause per­haps we have a bi­ased view, but if we look at solely the in­for­ma­tion of ori­gin, and tak­ing into ac­count the few cases for which we have this in­for­ma­tion, we see that most are Cata­lan, with Barcelona and Tar­rag­ona being promi­nent among these. By county, we see that, Barcelonès is ob­vi­ously the one with the high­est pres­ence and be­hind that the Rib­era d’Ebre. In fact, Ebre has quite a high pres­ence. If we take into ac­count the coun­ties of Ter­res de l’Ebre (Baix Ebre, Montsià, Terra Alta and Rib­era d’Ebre), there are more total vic­tims than Barcelonès. This is the case with one of the two old­est vic­tims, Fran­cisco Galindo Sendra, 86 years old and a res­i­dent of Gines­tar (Rib­era d’Ebre).

Dur­ing the first days of exile, mor­tal­ity tended to be very high. The dif­fi­cul­ties of the jour­ney, ex­haus­tion, the lack of food, the cold... all were cir­cum­stances that ob­vi­ously af­fected every­one, but to a greater ex­tent the more vul­ner­a­ble. In the case of those who had fought, there were also poorly-healed wounds that were not treated in time. As for in­fants, mor­tal­ity was es­pe­cially high in the case of new-borns and ba­bies. It is es­pe­cially sig­nif­i­cant that we counted 64 deaths of ba­bies under the age of 1, which rep­re­sents 5.5% of the total num­ber of vic­tims whose age we know. If we broaden our focus and look at the 0-4 age group, the per­cent­age climbs to around 9%. It’s worth not­ing that the age group with the high­est mor­tal­ity was in the range of 20 to 24 years old, which rep­re­sents 16% of the total. This would be the seg­ment of younger and in­ex­pe­ri­enced fight­ers. Lastly, we should also men­tion that we also iden­ti­fied a large seg­ment of peo­ple aged be­tween 60 and 86 (some 85 peo­ple), who, as grand­par­ents, com­plete the fam­ily group pro­file.