No one could have written his story. A spy, a gigolo, a con man, a charlatan who was the monarch of Andorra in 1934, for little more than a week. If thousands of documents didn't exist to prove it, Boris Skossyreff's life would seem like a delirious fiction, a spy novel written under the influence of morphine during the height of modernism. For twelve days in the summer of 1934, a Russian-born con man with ties to the Nazi regime proclaimed himself King of Andorra and placed the small Pyrenean principality at the center of international attention.

The French writer, mathematician, and journalist Hervé Le Tellier (Paris, 1957) was searching for a "birthplace," a place where he could invent roots, in Montjòus, near Dieulofet, in what is now the French region of Auvergne-Roine-Alps, and stumbled upon a name on the wall: André Chaix, a member of the French Maquis against the Nazis. Through the search for the short life of this young Frenchman, the author reflects on the rise of Nazism, but also paints a rather unsettling portrait of our society. The name on the wall (Edicions 62/Seix Barral), translated into Catalan by Jordi Boixadós, the editor and literary critic, winner of the Goncourt Prize 2020 with The anomaly (Editions 62)It speaks of solidarity and resistance, but also of how easily we can become fascists.

It is estimated that between 1943 and 1945 more than 80,000 people crossed the Pyrenees fleeing Nazism. The people of the border villages who risked their lives to help these refugees are the focus of the Border, the drama that Judith Colell It premieres this Friday in cinemas. With a very solid cast led by Miki Esparbé, Maria Rodríguez Soto, Asier Etxeandia and Bruna Cusí, the film represents, in a way, Colell's return to Catalan cinema afterElisa K (2010).

Josef Mengele (Günzburg, Germany, 1911 – Bertioga, Brazil, 1979) was one of the most sadistic criminals of the Nazi regime, known above all for his experiments on children at Auschwitz. After Hitler's defeat, he managed to evade justice. He fled to Argentina, where he was welcomed with open arms. There, he first posed as Helmut Gregor, worked as a carpenter, and entered Nazi circles, where he met Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a Luftwaffe pilot. This friendship proved invaluable, as Rudel created the Kameradenwerk network, which sheltered many Nazis in Latin America. From Argentina, Mengele went to Paraguay and from there to Brazil. In Brazil, he received the most help from Liselotte Bossert, an Austrian-born primary school teacher. The Brazilian journalist Betina Anton, a former student of Bossert's, later sought her out and asked her questions about the Nazi criminal. It was the beginning of an investigation that led him to discover how the network that hid Mengele operated, even after his death. He discusses this in the book. Hunt Mengele. Like a net, it gave refuge to the angel of deathTranslated by Sebastià Bennasar and published in Catalan by Manifiesto and in Spanish by Plataforma.

"People sentenced to death used to take advantage of the last hours to say goodbye to their loved ones," says Floriane Azoulay, director of the Arolsen Archives"Our mandate today is to find the recipients of the letters and their families, to fulfill the last wishes of those unjustly condemned at Stadelheim [the large public prison in Munich, where the Nazis executed a thousand people] and to redress this historical wrong. This can be of enormous significance for the families," he adds.

It is quite difficult to put a figure on Nazi plunder. The V&A Museum in London preserves the only known copy of the inventory that Goebbels drew up of the art seized by the Nazi regime from public institutions in Germany, mainly during the years 1937 and 1938. The report of the Reich Minister of Propaganda includes more than 16,000 works, but if the list is extended to include data from other countries and those held in other countries Center for Art Law, with the Nazi‑Looted Art Restitution Project, or the Claims Conference, in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the figure exceeds 650,000 works of art that were either stolen or bought at a very low price under pressure.

The oldest Holocaust survivor, Rose Girone, died in New York on Monday at the age of 113. Girone was living in Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland, in 1937 when the Nazis took her husband to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She was eight months pregnant at the time. As she explained in later interviews, she heard one officer say to another: "Let's take the wife too," but the other replied: "She's pregnant, let's leave her alone."