Fire, Wind, and War in Portbou

Photo: Emporda Info

Wildfires terrify me. Unfortunately I have always lived in places prone to them. First there was southern California, then northern California, and now Catalonia. These are places that are relatively dry and that get hot in the summer. California gets the hot Santa Ana desert wind usually for a week or two in September. But the tramuntana blows on and off throughout the summer and the rest of the year. That makes summer fire season especially dangerous.

Tramontane is a classical name for a northern wind. The word comes from the Latin for beyond or across the mountains and it referred to the Alps. The word is also used to refer to someone who comes from beyond the mountains or anyone who is foreign or strange. More or less the same word is used throughout the Mediterranean. In Croatia it is called tramontana, in France it is tramontane, and in Catalonia it is tramuntana. There is a saying in Catalan culture (especially in the Empordà) that refers to a person as touched by tramuntana (tocat per la tramuntana) when they behave oddly or seemly lost their marbles. Salvador Dalí was often referred to as someone tocat per la tramuntana in his native Empordà.

I moved to Figueres, in the Empordà, in June 2012. Two weeks later in July, there was a huge fire that started in La Jonquera, the last inland town along the major highway before the French border and not far north of here. I could smell it before I knew there was a wildfire. I had my windows closed even before the authorities told us to, making it very hot at home. I was making plans in my head for how to evacuate with my two cats, but in the end it wasn’t necessary.

Yesterday in the late afternoon a fire started near Portbou, the last village on the coast before you cross the border into France. So far it has burned over 575 hectares and caused the highway and railroad to be closed. This means that people who live or are vacationing in either Portbou or neighboring Colera and Llança haven’t been able to enter or leave since yesterday evening. They also have no electricity, water or phone. Those who have been evacuated from their homes or camping sites are being lodged at the civic center, attended to by the Catalan government and the Red Cross. Over 200 Catalan and French firefighters are fighting the fire, but helicopters and airplanes that would drop water can’t fly when the wind blows at over 70 miles an hour, so containment has been difficult.

Portbou is a small village with a big history. Now it serves as a summer holiday spot, but historically it was important during two wars.

During the Spanish Civil War between 200,000 and half a million Spaniards (the number depends on your source) fled Spain within weeks of Franco’s troops taking Barcelona in late January 1939. Called La Retirada (The Retreat), many of them crossed the Pyrenees at Portbou.

Photo: Robert Capra

On 26 September 1940, during World War II and the German occupation of France, Walter Benjamin, a Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, committed suicide by morphine overdose in Portbou. Benjamin had been living in France since 1933 and was fleeing the Nazis who the Vichy authorities were cooperating with. Having been helped by the virtually unknown American rescue worker Varian Fry, he had arrived in Portbou by climbing the mountains to cross the border with great difficulty, burdened by a briefcase containing his precious writings that he refused to leave behind. But Franco had suddenly cancelled all transfer visas so once in Spain, the Spanish police detained him and the small group he was traveling with. They were to be sent back to France the next day. Benjamin killed himself that night rather than go back and be handed over to the Nazis. The next day the procedure changed again and his two traveling companions were allowed to pass through Spain into Portugal from where they could sail. The manuscript that Benjamin had been carrying at such cost was never found. There is now a memorial to Walter Benjamin at Portbou by the Israeli artist Dani Karavanhe that sits on a clifftop by the Portbou municipal cemetery.

Photo: Vikipeida

The Forgotten Soldiers

In his day, Robert Capa was said to be the best war photographer in the world. His first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen. His first war work was during the Spanish Civil War where he spent some of his time traveling with Ernest Hemingway, who was working as a journalist, and who later wrote the book For Whom the Bell Tolls about that experience.

Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary on October 22, 1913. He fled Hungary at the age of 18 when he was accused of being a communist, and he later fled Berlin when the Nazis came to power.

I recently went to the Memorial Museum of Exile in La Jonquera to see the Robert Capa exposition titled 18 March 1939, The Forgotten Army at the Camp of Argelers. This refers to the soldiers in exile who had been fighting for the Spanish republic against the Franco insurrectionists who had overthrown the elected government. One of the French internment camps was in Argelers, a small beach-side community in the south of France, just 37 kilometers (23 miles) from the Spanish-French border. Some of these men stayed in this and other French detention camps for a year or more. Some were sent to be killed in German camps, and some left or escaped and joined the French resistance.

A mother visits her son

Prisoners made their own shelters

Prisoners cooked their own food

Musicians from the Barcelona Philharmonic

Farewell to the volunteers of the International Brigades
Barcelona, October 28, 1938
Photographs by Robert Capa

Capa was the only civilian photographer who landed with the troops on Omaha Beach on D-Day. General Eisenhower awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1947 for his work photographing World War II and that same year he founded Magnum Photos in Paris. He died at age 40 on May 25, 1954 when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.

Figueres During the Spanish Civil War

Figueres was one of the cities most bombed during the Spanish Civil War.  This was especially true near the end of the war, in late 1938 and early 1939, when thousands of Spaniards passed through it on their way out of Spain and into exile.  Added to those on the refugee route, there was the special target of Castell Ferran, a large military fort on the hill above the town (still standing) where the governments of the Spanish Republic and of the Generalitat of Catalunya had set up temporary headquarters.

Spain had thrown out its monarchy, elected a government, and became a republic when General Franco started an uprising.  His allies were Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Fascist Portugal.  Both the Germans and Italians helped with the bombing of Figueres.  But the free world did not rally behind democratically-elected Republican Spain.  France, England, the United States, Canada, all the great western powers were neutral and quiet and even went so far as to ensure that no material aid could reach the legitimate Republican government.  The Spanish Republic did receive some aid from the Soviet Union and from Mexico.  Most notably the Spanish Republic received thousands of private citizens from the United States, France, England, and all over the world who came to volunteer in the International Brigades.

Currently on display in Figueres, in the Museu de l’Empordà is an exhibit entitled “Silencis: Figueres Sota Les Bombes, 1938-1939” (Silences: Figueres Under The Bombs).  It consists of a video, of testimonies, and of photographs of some of the older people who live here now and who lived here then and who were witnesses to the bombing. It is titled Silences because many of them say that their parents never talked about those days.  Nevertheless, they have never forgotten.

"When I returned to Figueres, my spirit fell to my feet.
I didn't know anyone.  It was all soldiers and Arabs.
The streets were dirty; the houses fallen to the ground.
I didn't find my friends.  It affected me a lot."

Franco's allies were Nazis and fascists, but a good deal of his manpower came from Morocco: 136,000 Moroccan fighters fought with Franco's troops, thus the reference above to the Arabs.

"My friend died decapitated.
She was wearing a new dress and her mother told her not to get it dirty.
When the bombs fell, everyone lay on the ground except her."

"When the sirens sounded we went to the entrance,
under the arches of the stairway.  My grandfather never came down.
He said "What the fuck!  If one has to go down, they can
just as well crush me here as below."

This lady is holding the Catalan
and Spanish Republic flags.

Spaniards also died in German camps, mostly at Mauthausen.
They were sent by Franco to his friend Hitler.

Photo credits:  All portraits by Jordi Puig