"They actually ask very little of our dead."
Piero Calamandrei
On the occasion of the official events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps, all the news stories this Monday highlighted that, for the first time, a head of state of the Kingdom of Spain was finally visiting the Mauthausen camp. Where 7,000 Republicans perished under the perpetual infamy of Nazism. That the first time was in May 2025 almost explains everything, and almost nothing more needs to be added. And yet, the headline isn't accurate either. The newspaper archives don't exactly say the same thing. First and a half times, first time around, first and only once, if anything. Because it should be added that in February 1978, Juan Carlos I went, and then didn't go at the same time. On tiptoe. During an official visit to Austria, he preferred to send a minimal delegation to the camp, outside of any official agenda, while he visited the powerful steel industry in Linz and went to the Vienna Opera. Minister Marcelino Oreja also avoided any visit. The discreet, smaller delegation consisted of two people, a chief of protocol and a member of the Royal Household Secretariat, who left flowers that read:"The King of Spain in the Spaniards who died outside their homeland". How could I say nothing – they died away from home and that was it.
Historical rigor and democratic memory would refute that tape from beginning to end. Because, in any case, they should have at least clarified that they were talking about "Spaniards who died outside their homeland because Spain itself ordered them to be sent there." One could also add, without margin of error and with Cartesian precision, that they were sent there, to the heights of horrors and the pit of all dehumanizations, by the same dictatorship that appointed that king as king. As Montserrat Roig always remembered, it was thebrother-in-lawSerrano Suñer, who ordered the final shot of Republican deportation to the death camps. When the Nazi regime asked him what to do with all those people, he replied:"There are no Spaniards outside of Spain"They were "stateless reds."Rotspanierin the necrophilic vocabulary of the Third Reich. Corrandes of exile in 1962, the first monument to Catalan and Spanish republicans has always been a stateless work made by all the peoples of the bull's hide: it was financed by popular subscription and stands on land ceded to the zone granted to the French state. After all, during this Sunday's royal visit, a polite "Long live the Republic" was heard—inevitably and from the depths of the memory tunnel. has ended up filling the void and reconnecting everything. And I believe this is the first time there's been a procession full of republican flags surrounding a king, with no trace of police presence. Mauthausen will be this too.Mortuorum leaves siscant living.
A sad ballad of additions and subtractions, it also subtracts, of course, that between 1978 and 2025, 47 years have already passed, in which the Royal Household has never considered attending any official commemoration at Mauthausen. They hadn't been able to before—scheduling problems over five decades, you see. I don't know if there's any place in the world that accumulates 7,000 fellow citizens murdered for political reasons and concentrates so much pain and horror emerging from Europe itself. But the truth is that the amnesia—at least, apathy; more accurately, forgetfulness than planning—doesn't affect only the Bourbon royalty. The suspense in democratic memory goes back a long way. The first head of government to attend was José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, in 2005. Pedro Sánchez hasn't been yet. And it wasn't until 2019—40 years after the arrival of the so-called democracy—that May 5th was designated as the official day of deportation. In fact, until then, the Republican dead of Mauthausen—4,427—weren't even registered as deceased. They went nowhere for 74 years—for 3,858 weeks, for 27,000 nights. Now, in a hurry and after decades of slowness, everything is in a hurry, and we urgently ask ourselves so many whys and wherefores of how it is possible for the far right to be rampant as it is, for a portion of young people to underestimate living under a dictatorship, and for hatred to flood the networks. Fifty years of oblivion and amnesia, of silence and leniency, of impunity and gags, seem to me to be one of the most solid reasons.
At this point in the global mess, I suppose every gesture counts—but it would count more if it didn't seem like an empty gesture or if we didn't know that the royal agenda also depends on the government in power. Whatever it is, which I don't know, Felipe VI wrote in the guestbook on Sunday: "[...] In a special way, let us remember the thousands of Spanish Republicans who fought against Nazism and for freedom.Completely contradicted, the issue is so crucial that beyond striving for prolonged silence or delving into every contradiction, I would be capable of saying that it's never too late if the cause is so worthy—the most worthy I know. The president of the Amical de Mauthausen, the good Juan Calvo, has explained it much better: "Coming here is a recognition that the victims of deportation were here, but what's missing is an institutional declaration by the State—I don't know if it corresponds to the Royal Household or the government—of the responsibility of the Spanish state, which bears the responsibility of the Spanish state, that they disappeared. The State must apologize and assume responsibility for the complicity that existed between the Franco government, the Pétain government, and the Nazi regime."
Until this happens, last Saturday, three people from Santa Pau and six people from Olot returned home. This time through the Stolpersteine, the stones that commemorate the places where the victims of Nazism were born and lived. Just a week ago, the show premiered on 3Cat. the documentary, born from social initiative,From Silence: The Garrochinos in the Nazi CampsIn Santa Pau, the mayor wondered why a peasant from Santa Pau ended up in Mauthausen—that is, she asked herself all the questions she needed to start over. In Olot, the mayor resorted to a drastic statistic: if we had observed a minute of silence for each victim of the Second World War since May 1945, we would still have to remain silent for another 30 years. With the silence of respect, not of forgetting. That's why what's important isn't that the monarchy speaks out for the deportees for the first time in the 25th year of the 21st century, but rather the legacy and the seed of those who gave their all for us, and the tireless work of the memorial organizations that have never faltered in making amends to those who, for decades, received silence as their only official response. Some have arrived 50 years later. For the undersigned, this is the news. Like the Europe Day I commemorate, that of the other Europe, it is also May 9th for me. But not because of the Schumann Declaration of 1950, but because it is the actual date of the capitulation of Nazism amidst ashes that will always smoke, From where we were able to be reborn, and from where thousands of people have been building, as survivor Joaquim Amat-Piniella called for, the International of Pain. That is, from the infinite hope of Neverland.
