Tag Archives: history

The fourth man of California

Comrades, the doors opened, and slavery ended, breaking the heavy chains that oppressed youth. Be rebellious and never daunt before the enemy oppressor”

(The 1938 Fort San Cristóbal escape anthem written by Rogelio Diz Fuentes, Prisoner #1104, and Daniel Robado, Prisoner #1133)

Next May 22 marks the 75th anniversary of the massive escape from Fort Alfonso XII, also known as Fort San Cristóbal, which became one of the largest and most tragic prison breaks, during wartime, in contemporary Europe. However, History has not been too keen on recording this episode compared with similar events. Paul Brickhill’s autobiographical book “The Great Escape” (1950) narrates the heroic prison break of 76 allied prisoners of war from the German Stalag Luft III camp (Żagán, Poland) in March 1944. Fifty escapees were caught and murdered by the Gestapo, and only 3 succeeded by reaching Sweden and Spain, which were neutral territories during World War II. The story was immortalized by the memorable film “The Great Escape” (1963). On the other hand, in the case of the escape from Fort San Cristóbal, 795 people broke free, 206 were murdered, and, coincidentally, only 3 succeeded by crossing the French border. Contrarily, only silence, fear, and brutal repression resulted from this prison break.

Fuerte San Cristóbal / EzkabaAerial view of Fort San Cristóbal-Ezkaba. Image source: Iñaki Sagredo ©.

Located at the top of San Cristóbal or Ezkaba Mountain, a few miles away from Iruña (Nafarroa), the fort was built as a military compound between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Obsolete for its original purpose, the fort was turned into an improvised political prison from the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War until 1945.

Although it is difficult to know the exact number of inmates at the time of the escape, it is estimated that there were approximately 2,487 prisoners from different areas of Spain. Many of them were affiliated to or sympathizers of leftist and nationalist political parties and trade unions as well as soldiers and militiamen, loyal to the Republic and the Basque government. The harsh living conditions within the fort walls, hunger, sickness and the sadistic behavior of some wardens fuelled the prison break with the clear political goal of continuing the fight against the rebel troops. A planned mutiny led by Leopoldo Picó Pérez (Prisoner #319) and Baltasar Rabanillo Rodríguez (Prisoner #1012)—communist militants from Bilbao and Valladolid, respectively—resulted in freeing one-third of the total prison population. Many were ill-prepared for the escape, without provisions and proper clothing.

During the following days, nearly 28% of the escapees were brutally murdered by Francisco Franco’s army in the nearby fields and mountains, while the rest of the men were soon captured enduring forty days of isolation and inhuman treatment. Thirteen so-called leaders, including Baltasar, were sentenced to death. Leopoldo was also intercepted and brought to prison. He was shot without trial. Another 46 captured fugitives died in the fort between 1938 and 1943 due to sickness and sordid cruelty.

Only 3 men—Valentín Lorenzo Bajo, José Marinero Sanz, and Jovino Fernández González—as it was documented later on, succeeded in getting to the French border, 30 miles away from the fort.

However, the story did not end here. In 1998, a man visiting from California had a series of casual encounters with six different people in an area from where he recalled escaping to France after fleeing away from Fort San Cristóbal sixty years earlier. The man told them that he was born in Azagra (Nafarroa) in 1918, being imprisoned in the Ezkaba fort from where he broke free in 1938. He finally managed to cross the border, finding refuge in Martin Urrels’ farmhouse in Banka. There, he learnt about Martin’s two brothers, Michel and Jean, who lived in the Cedarville area, California, working as sheepherders. Michel and Jean had immigrated into the United States in 1910 and in 1914, respectively. From France he left to Mexico, crossing the border to California, where he worked for the Urrels brothers for a few years. The man went to explained how he enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, being deployed to Europe as part of a tank battalion. After the war, he got involved in the trucking business that his sons inherited.

This was the story as remembered by some of the people who met the strange visitor. In his 80s the man from California decided to reencounter the past through revisiting his memories. Though his identity is still a mystery, the story should corroborate the existence of a fourth escapee. This could mean that the Ezkaba escape was the most successful prison break in contemporary Europe.

Back in 1938, Diario de Navarra, a local newspaper, published a distorting note on the tragic event, while describing the escapees as “murderers, robbers, and thieves who had abused the human regime of Franco’s Spain.” The escape was another clear example of the official amnesia imposed by Franco during his four-decade dictatorial regime. However, it became part of the collective memory of many who never forgot May 22, 1938. In 2000, the Association Txinparta was set up to recover the historical memory of the Fort of San Cristóbal prisoners between 1934 and 1945. Similarly, in November 2002, the Association of the Family Members of the Executed, Murdered and Missing People in Navarre in 1936 was also established to honor the memory of more than 3,300 people who were murdered in Nafarroa during the Spanish Civil War. In 2006, Iñaki Alforja directed the documentary “Ezkaba, the great escape from Franco’s jails”.

If you have any information on the Fort San Cristóbal escape and, particularly, on the identity of the fourth man please contact us by sending a message. We would love to hear from you!

Many thanks to Fermín Ezkieta for sharing his excellent and extensive work on the history of the escapees from Ezkaba.

Creative_Commons


True or false…Sodom and Gomorrah, the Trojan War, and the Basclenses

“Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire”

(John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1950)

When does history become legend and myth? What is real and factual and what is imagined and fictional in History? If History as the discipline to analyze the past means time—chronological and historical time—and memory is essentially the mechanism to remember or not-forget it, then what role do written and oral memory play in our understanding of history?

What happens when the transfer of our knowledge and collective memory get lost and buried in the mists of time, waiting to be awaked? How can we make sense of our history when some of the oldest vestiges of our common past are considered unreliable and non-scientific sources by Western academic standards?

With the development of History as a modern academic discipline during the 19th century in Western Europe, it was generally agreed that the events and stories narrated, for instance, in the Bible, in the Ancient Greek literature, and in many of the Medieval chronicles never had happened. These are, for example, the stories of the biblical “cities of the plain,” which included Sodom and Gomorrah, the Homeric’s city of Troy in Ancient Greece, and Monmouth’s story about the population of Ireland by the “Basclenses”—the ancient Basques, according to author Julio César Santoyo. That is to say, Sodom and Gomorrah, Troy and its famous Trojan War and the romantic story between Paris and Helen had never existed, and obviously Ireland’s current inhabitants had nothing to do with the Basclenses, whoever they might be. These historical sources were defined as literary, epic, and mythical manuscripts that described supposedly factual events that had taken place several hundred years before recording them. Consequently, these documents and other many similar ones were thought to be untruthful and unreliable sources of history.

However, some historians and archaeologists believed that there might be some truth to these myths and legends, though they did not faithfully represent actual events. There was also some degree of attraction of finding something it was thought to be lost forever or discovering some scientific evidence that could question some historical unadulterated truth it was thought to be unchallengeable. In this regard, in the 1870s Heinrich Schliemann, following Homer’s geographical descriptions, discovered some ruins that were identified with Homer’s Troy (2,500 BC) in the northwest of Anatolia (Turkey). The mythological city where a war took place between the Trojans and the Achaeans as described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (900-800 BC) had actually existed.

The Hebrew Bible (200 BC) mentions how Yahweh punished and destroyed by fire and brimstone the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their unrepentant sins. In the 1960s, the Early Bronze Age (3,200-1,950 BC) sites Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira, located nearby the Dead Sea in Jordan, were identified as the possible places for Sodom and Gomorrah, respectively. Although there is no scientific consensus on the cities’ real location, most historians do not question their existence. According to geologists their destruction could have been most likely caused by an earthquake as the settlements were suddenly abandoned.

The History of the Kings of Britain (ca 1136) is a compilation of various earlier books, being the oldest from the 6th century, and which were expanded by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It recounts the history of Britain from its foundation by Trojan War exile Brutus, and it includes a detailed chronology of legendary kings of Britain. In the Chapter XII of the Book III, Monmouth recounts the story between the King Gurguit Barbtruc and Partholoim (or Partholón) and his people settlement (2,000 BC) in today´s Ireland:

“When Gurguit Barbtruc was returning home via the Orkney Islands after his victory, he came upon thirty ships full of men and women. Gurguit asked what they were doing there. Their leader, whose name was Partholoim, went up to Gurguit, did obeisance to him and asked for his pardon and peace. Partholoim then described how he had been expelled from certain regions in Spain and how he was now cruising in those waters in search of a land where he might settle. When Gurguit Barbtruc learned that these men came from Spain and were called Basclenses, and when he understood just what they wanted of him, he ordered his representatives to go with them to the island of Ireland, which at that time was a completely uninhabited desert. He granted the island to them. They have increased and multiplied there and they still hold the island today.”

Could the Basclenses be identified with today’s Basques? Do the Irish and the Basque share a common origin? Despite the fact that the historicity of many of the events described in historical sources including The History of the Kings of Britain are still subject to heated debate, the passage of time has also given scientists the opportunity to develop new tools to unearth the past.

Genographic Project_Basque MapThe Genographic Project Basque Map: “Basque genetic uniqueness predates the arrival of agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula some 7,000 years ago” (Map source: The Genographic Project, National Geography, March 2012)

Here, for instance, is The Genographic Project, which was launched in 2005. The project aims at carrying out research on Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA with the goal of tracing genes to reconstruct past human mobility in order to understand how our ancestors populated the planet. Back in 2010, Brendan Loftus’ research team have sequenced the first entire genome of an Irish person. By comparing common similarities between the Irish and the Basques, the genetic evidence shows that The Irish and Basques share by far the highest incidence of the [Y-DNA] R1b gene in Europe, which has a frequency of over 90% in Basque country and almost 100% along parts of Ireland’s western seaboard.” In other words, “both, the Irish and the British are Basques.” According to scientist Stephen Oppenheimer, the ancestors of current Basques had settled in this part of northwestern Europe at the end of the last Ice Age (15,000-7,500 BC) by just walking at the time when the sea levels were low. Evidence also suggests that there is a genetic continuity between contemporary Basques and the population that lived in the same region at least for the last 8,000 years.

Could these findings corroborate Monmouth’s story about the Basclenses migrating from Iberia to ancient Ireland? What do you think?

Creative_Commons

Blog Recap: Volume I, 2011

In the context of understanding the many processes that take part in the creation and development of the Basque identity (or Basque identities) this blog has attempted to understand and explain it from different perspectives. This has taken us to comprehend identity as a true glocal and multidimensional phenomenon. The Basque Country and its diaspora (or diasporas) are envisioned as a spatial and time continuum at the crossroads of tradition and modernity.

Like a puzzle, Basque Identity 2.0 has put together different stories to draw an image of past and present aspects of our culture and traditions, while arguing about the meaning of authenticity, the reproduction of our identity, and the preservation of our common homeland and diaspora history (“The Basque global time,” April post). In this regard, I explored the implication of Basque cuisine in Barcelona, Catalonia as an “appropriation” of the “Basqueness trademark” or “Euskadi made in” label (“Euskal Barcelona,” February post), the endurance of Basque traditional dance in San Francisco, California (“Zazpiak Bat,” June post), and the redefined symbol of Basque music as a representation of our identity globally (“i-bai musika,” December post).

Most of these stories echoed the voices of many Basques around the globe, which sometimes are intertwined with my own life story as reflected, for instance, in the January (“Extraño”—“Singular”), July (“Cartografía de emociones”—“Cartography of emotions”), September and October posts. In a sense, I described the diaspora as a psychological and emotional community, which is increasingly connected to the homeland as an attempt to break up all geographical and temporal barriers (“Connected,” March post).

During the past year, I have tried to bring attention to our exiles as exemplified by the breathtaking story of “La Travesía del Montserrat” (“The Crossing,” August post) as well as our returnees, whom somehow have become “the forgotten Basques” of our contemporary history. In “Entre culturas” (“Between cultures,” May post) I talked about the returnees’ positive role that may play as “cultural brokers” between the society at large and the new migrants in the Basque Country.

Finally, in the aftermath of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 (“¿Dónde estabas el 11 de Septiembre?—“Where were you on September 11th?” September post), ETA declared the end of the violent episode in its history (“Trust,” October post), while the Basque government called upon the Basque institutional diaspora to promote a peaceful image abroad (“2003, 2011,” November post). This post became the most commented and visited in the history of the blog, which tells us about the significance of homeland politics in the Basque diaspora. However, the diaspora is far from being a homogeneous and united entity. It is as ideologically plural as the Basque society itself, whose collective and historical memory plays a crucial role for its survival.

Thank you all for being there. I would love to hear from you. Happy New Year!

Eskerrik asko eta Urte berri on!

(NOTE: Please feel free to use Google automatic translation service…and good luck with it).

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