"Pablo Neruda helped us": Living memory of those who fled from Franco by sea

On the ship Winnipeg, the children were the only privileged ones. The ship set sail in August 1939 from France bound for Valparaíso (Chile) with more than 2,200 exiled republicans supported by the poet Pablo Neruda. It was a cargo ship that was only intended for a hundred passengers. The exiles slept in the belly of the ship and had to work to keep the ship running. The Winnipeg was also the playground for Lola Patau, a five-year-old girl who now, at 92 years old, tells the story of her parents, who fled the Francoist repression after the Spanish Civil War. Patau narrates the years of exile with a smile. Chile became "a home”, she says, while holding a folder full of old press clippings and yellowed photographs.

Her father worked for the Barcelona Provincial Council. When the war broke out they left for Toulouse, where part of the family lived. There they separated. There were rumors that a ship would set sail with refugees, so her father traveled to Paris to secure passage for his wife and daughter, Lola. “We learned that Pablo Neruda, cultural attaché for Chile, was looking for people to be able to take them to a wonderful country –explains Patau–. We went there in a very good time. A completely democratic time in Chile. Because there were even people who had a portrait of Franco in their home, who had also welcomed us. At that moment we were all Spanish”. They were all exiles.

Roser Bru was 16 years old when she was sent to take care of the children on the ship, such as Lola Patau. It was her second exile from Barcelona. Her father, Lluís Bru, a deputy for the Republican Left, fled to France for the first time after publishing articles against the dictator Primo de Rivera. Once the Second Spanish Republic was established, the Bru family returned home. “They were very happy moments, I don’t want to say utopian, but hopeful,” explains Amalà Saint-Pierre Bru, Roser’s granddaughter. “At thirteen, she began studying painting, but shortly after, the war started. She never spoke to me about the war, it was traumatic.” Her exile began when she crossed the Pyrenees in February 1939 and ended six months later, when she arrived at the port of Valparaíso. Her memories of that time are scarce. She would explain the constant sound of the ocean hitting the hull of the Winnipeg while she slept on the lower deck of the ship. Or the “beautiful” night view of Valparaíso. “When she arrived at dawn, she saw thousands of lights suspended before her. She thought they were like fireflies hanging over the sea. They were the houses built on the hills of Valparaíso,” recalls Saint-Pierre.

“These are not political memories. They are emotional memories, typical of a sensitive adolescent.” They are fragments that reveal more of the artist than the exile. However, she did not escape violence after boarding the ship. “The war continued inside the Winnipeg,” explains Saint-Pierre. Rivalries, factions, and enmities were perpetuated on the ship. “In a way, the different groups continued to fragment on one side—Basques, Catalans, Galicians—but also on the other—between anarchists, republicans, and communists.”

“On the Winnipeg, we children played all day, ate well, had a nursery, and had teachers who were also exiles. The others worked; both my father and my mother worked. At the same time, we were like a big family,” explains Patau. The Winnipeg was a few meters from Chilean jurisdictional waters when the Second World War broke out and the French authorities demanded the return of the ship, without success. The vessel docked in Valparaíso, received by a large crowd of protesters with signs saying “Out, out, we don't want reds!”. A group of journalists waited for any of the crew to say the first words, but no one wanted to do so. Finally, it was a Galician fisherman, unaccustomed to speaking in public, who did so reluctantly. “Long live Chile!”. This cry was his only words. Joy greeted the exiles. Those who still held their signs up lowered them in shame.

500,000 exiles, 20,000 by sea

The Winnipeg was not the only ship that transported exiles. The Sinaia, the Ipanema and the Mexique transferred nearly five thousand exiles to Mexico in 1939; the latter, the Mexique, had already carried 456 Republican children in 1937 from Bordeaux to Veracruz, thinking that the war would last a few months. Towards Argentina, on the Massilia, which set sail from La Pallice on October 19, 1939, and arrived in Buenos Aires on November 5, half of its passengers were Spanish Republicans, among them a large group of intellectuals. In total, destinations such as Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, North Africa, and the USSR welcomed the exiles of the Francoist repression. The Spanish correspondent Constantino del Esla was one of the passengers of the Massilia because his name appeared on the Francoist lists.

“There is no doubt that the sinking of the Massilia was a success for the Germans, just as it is for the French that the ship emerges undefeated from the adventure. It was proven that the sea does not belong to everyone, that it also has owners,” narrates the Leonese journalist just at the moment it set sail for Buenos Aires. The vessel of Republican refugees and displaced Jews departed from the French coast with a constant threat. “Hundreds of eyes begin to fix on the water, to scan the horizon without rest. They did not wish to see the danger: a German submarine.”

The journalist was a correspondent for the Argentine newspaper La Nación during the Spanish Civil War and wrote eleven notes on the journey of the Massilia, the only testimony that is preserved of the trip. The vessel transported 384 exiles, among them the young journalist from the Republican front who, for fear of reprisals, hid behind the tributary of the Douro as a pseudonym. “His name was García Martínez. He adopted the name of the river because he liked the meaning of its waters, which constantly renew themselves, which always advance and never retreat,” explains his son Horacio García, who describes his father as a demigod of oratory.

During his exile, he was invited to give talks to share his experiences during the war. At one of these meetings, he met the woman who would become his wife, a native of the Basque Country and also an exile. They had two children, Horacio and María Isabel. When Horacio turned twenty, he became interested in his stories and began attending his father's meetings. There, he met the survivor. The hero. "My father calculated that they had five minutes between bombardments to cross the Cibeles, in Madrid, and run to the telegraph office to send the chronicle." They went through a lot of hunger and lived through many scares. "For God's sake, he was almost executed! They almost killed him because he didn't have the password to go out at night after the curfew," exclaims Horacio.

Nostalgia permeated his speech; he was constantly talking about his memories. "He lived with the helplessness of wanting to return to Spain and the fear of doing so," his son acknowledges. He died when Horacio was 24 years old, a week before the young man graduated in medicine. "My father died in 1968. He didn't live to see a Spain without Franco. He never returned."

Returning home

“At home they were very Catalanist, Catalan was the secret language of the family,” details Saint-Pierre. An artist like her grandmother, Saint-Pierre directed and starred in a play between 2019 and 2025 about Bru’s experience through the family archive, her photographs, her letters, and, above all, her paintings. Upon arriving in Valparaíso, Bru continued her pictorial studies and became one of the most recognized Chilean painters of the 20th century. She died in 2024. “She saw democracy return to Spain, but she never wanted to return there to live. Spain no longer belonged to her.” Bru never painted anything she did not consider her own. “There are no paintings about the war in Spain. There is no bombing of Barcelona, just as the Winnipeg does not appear in her work. I suppose that all of it is part of the trauma and that she did not want it to be part of her life. And painting it implied precisely that,” confesses Saint-Pierre.

In 1958, twenty years after arriving in Chile, Bru was able to return to Spain. However, as the daughter of a Catalan politician, she appeared on the Francoist lists and was not allowed to leave. “The government of Chile, through the rector of the University of Chile, interceded. She was the most important artist in Chile!”, asserts her granddaughter. After the incident, Bru was able to return to Valparaíso and traveled regularly to Catalonia during the following fifty years. However, her studio, her art, her family, and her life were in Chile.

More than five thousand artistic pieces can be found in public buildings, exhibitions, and Chilean museums, as well as in the living rooms of family and friends. “She was very generous.” Her influence reached the level of a national icon, participating in the decoration of the UNCTAD III building, the 3rd United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which was held in Santiago de Chile in 1972, during the government of Salvador Allende. It is a tapestry two meters high, made up of four pieces representing the collective, a piece that was lost during Pinochet's coup d'état and the looting of the building, which ended up becoming the seat of government during the dictatorship. The artist became a symbol of resistance against the dictator, years in which she criticized the disappearances. Paradoxically, the dark years of authoritarianism did belong to her; the Chilean people belonged to her. “She did not want to go into exile a third time, she was not afraid of reprisals,” asserts Saint-Pierre. “My grandmother was too important a figure for the Chilean people.”

One of Bru's pieces ended up in the hands of Lola Patau, the girl she had looked after on the Winnipeg. It is a lithograph with a photograph of the ship, a face looking at the horizon with a text paying tribute to the fifty years since the ship's arrival in Valparaíso. Patau has the print hanging in the entrance, the first image you see when you arrive at her house. A corner of her living room is full of books, pamphlets, clippings, and folders with photographs and old documents dedicated to her years in exile. Although she did not consider it as such. Chile, for Patau, is part of her life.

In 1952, the school of journalism had just been created, and the optimism of a profession that clamored in the name of freedom and democracy excited Patau. “Journalism was indeed my strength, my vocation,” she explains, while showing a press clipping. She was the first woman to become a journalist in Chile.

Three years later, her parents and she returned to Spain. “The embassy in Chile told us that they would only give us a one-way passport, that they would not take responsibility for the return,” explains Patau. None of them appeared on the dictatorship's lists. They traveled to Catalonia to be with Patau's grandmother for her last three months of life. Her mother used to miss the Catalan lands. “We had all our family in Barcelona; in Chile, the three of us were alone. We had many friends. Friends who were family, but friends, after all.”

In the sixties, Patau returned to Barcelona on a scholarship to work at RTVE in Miramar. But she ended up leaving it for her family. Her father fell ill and the best doctors were “at home,” in Barcelona, so they returned there permanently. Patau got married, had children, and set aside her profession to take care of her family. She does not regret it. “In my heart, I am still a journalist. And Chilean, more Chilean than porotos!”

At eighty-two years old, Horacio has traveled to Spain this year to retrace his father's journey. “I remember you,” he thinks every time he visits the Esla River or walks through Cibeles, now without bombings. His father was “a brilliant journalist,” who, as the former director of La Nación Claudio Escribano reiterates to him, made the newspaper's line shift. Horacio would like his father to be remembered as a war portraitist, as a son of exile. “I am afraid that someone will take his history and deform it. There is still a lot of passion between the friends and enemies of Franco. I do not want them to disfigure history. He was an equidistant, fair, and progressive man.” Constantino, like Roser and Lola, was a fragment of the memories of exile on the high seas, a sentiment that persists in surviving. “I wanted to detach myself from the land, and now I feel its call deep inside. It is an agonizing cry, which twists, and drips slowly onto the ship's rail, facing the sea, born from the combination of images and facts left behind, far away, on dry land,” concludes Esla, in the name of all those exiled by the sea.